There is no Pain in using office, it is a good program no matter how much you don't want it to be.
I have got to disagree with you there. I'll address Word 2002 specifically, since we use it most where I work. Considering how long Word has been in development, how expensive it is, and the enormous resources of the corporation that develops it, I think Word is a fairly lousy program.
Word is fine for the basics--typing up a quick letter or doing a simple table. But Google Docs is fine for that too, as is OpenOffice. There isn't much point to paying hundreds of dollars for something that other programs will do for free. So really, the reason to get Word is because of its advanced features.
And these are riddled with flaws. Take the "Track Changes" feature for example. It seems a good idea and is handy in practice. However, often when I am using it, I simply cannot edit parts of the document. I'll stick the insertion point somewhere and start typing. Nothing happens. I have to move the cursor around to another place just so I can insert text.
Footnotes. They wind up all over the place. If I insert a footnote reference on page 14, I want the text to start appearing on page 14, not on page 15. Sometimes (especially when using track changes) the text vanishes into some vortex, where it is not seen on the document at all.
Comments. There is no easy way to move them around. Can't right click on them to copy them to the clipboard.
Those are just the Word frustrations that I can think of offhand. Word frustrations pop up every day when you use it as much as I do on the job. I think word processors are used for many tasks for which they are poorly suited. I'm a geek in my spare time, so if I ran the world I would not use word processors at my job at all; instead I would use a plain-text markup system (xml, LaTeX, whatever) with good old plain text comments rather than the crappy Word feature, and with CVS instead of the quite troublesome "track changes". I don't run the world, so I'm stuck with Word, something which does basic things okay, but sucks at advanced things.
Unfortunately I doubt there is any word processor out there that is better than Word at advanced things. I doubt OOo is any better. Word processors are just used for many tasks for which they simply are not suited. But that does not change the fact that Word is an expensive program whose only distinguishing feature is that it poorly implements many advanced features.
While it may make one feel better to "stick it to the developers" by making them pay for the additional infrastructure, the truth is that they don't pay for it. The people buying the new housing or office space do.
Of course this is what the developer would like to have you believe. The reality is not that simple.
Certainly the cost of infrastructure increases the developer's expenses. But your assertion, which is that the buyer ultimately pays for this, relies on the fallacious assumption that the developer has the unilateral ability to increase prices in order to pay for the expense. This is not true in any marketplace with a modicum of competition. Sellers do not have the ability to set prices however they please.
Therefore, there is another alternative: in order to pay for the increased cost, the developer sees a reduction in profits.
The reality of course is that increased cost to business will result in both a cut to profits and an increase in prices, though it is difficult to say exactly how the increase will be apportioned to the two.
It does get tiresome to see the "increased cost to business just gets passed on to consumers" argument. This bogus argument is seen everywhere, e.g. "all costs of shoplifting get passed on to consumers" or "all taxes to business get passed on to consumers". It's a nice argument to make if you are a business, because it goads people into forgetting that corporate profits even exist.
but I haven't found anything that works well for syncing video and I can't purchase music from the store. The kicker is, I would probably purchase LOTS more music if I had a solid linux port.
Of course you can buy music. Recent versions of Amarok have Magnatune built right in. You can buy high bitrate MP3s or even FLACs. iPod won't play the FLACs, but you can easily transcode them into whatever MP3 bitrate you want.
Oh, you mean you can't buy things from the major record labels? OK, fair enough. I don't buy their stuff because they do not make it convenient for me to buy it. They want me to buy a plastic disc or get encumbered computer files. But if convenience is important to you and you don't mind jumping through the dual hoops of iTunes and DRM, then by all means just stick with OS X.
I stopped reading at "Linux threat lessens". BusinessWeek obviously doesn't get it.
The Linux threat is not going to lessen. BusinessWeek seems to think that MS can give the software away, get a monopoly, and then there will be no threat. That strategy has not worked even in the US, where people are rich enough to afford Microsoft software and where there are no political reasons to avoid Microsoft. (If I were in a foreign government, I wouldn't want to count on a US software company, just as some US government folks got skittish when Lenovo took over the ThinkPads.) People are not switching to Linux solely because of price. They are switching because it is in some ways a superior product.
Microsoft's problem is not Linux; Microsoft's problem is that it has an antiquated business model: selling shrink-wrapped commodity software at astronomical prices. Giving the software away will delay the inevitable, but the key word is "inevitable".
With the proliferation of AJAX, many websites are all-but-unusable on a machine slower than 2GHz. I see no sign of this trend reversing
Got any links? That way I can be sure to avoid these sites. I have never seen a website slow down *at all* on my 2-yr-old laptop, which has a 1.6GHz Pentium M and 512 MB of RAM, some of which goes to the video. I later bought a desktop and put 1GB of RAM in it. I now think that was a mistake (but only a $50 one) and that it would have run just fine with half the RAM. free -m always shows hundreds of megabytes of free RAM, even with two months of uptime and the alleged Firefox memory leaks. It's ridiculous to need 2GHz to view a webpage.
Wait, are you running Windows? I use Linux, though even I would be surprised if Windows is so awful that you need 2 GHz to view a webpage.
They also hate KMail, Linspire, Thunderbird, and Eudora, even though they have instructions on the Comcast website on how to set these things up to work with the Comcast email servers. They actively sit around and brood with their hatred for alternative browsers, even though their help site has instructions on how to make Firefox your default browser. They hate Firefox, Opera, Camino, and Safari, even though they say these browsers will work with their service.
Yep, they hate anything that's not from Microsoft.
* No camera. I do not want something that takes crappy photos. If I want a camera I will buy a camera. Putting a camera in a phone is about as good an idea as putting a phone in a camera.
* Few buttons. Cell phones have too many buttons.
* Simple. Too many cell phones try to be cool rather than useful.
* Simple menus. My phone has too many menu choices full of crap that I do not use, and figuring out how to do simple things like add a name to the phone list is too hard.
Cell phone makers are cramming crap into phones that is not useful for making calls.
I do remember reading something in the WSJ about Sprint developing a simple phone that they would market to older people; I don't know if this is the result. Older folks aren't the only ones who would like it though. As someone who often sits in front of computers all day I get tired of gadgets that want to make things too complicated.
How good is Python as a web language? Python is very easy to use and structured, while PHP is yucky. Does PHP have some strong points that make it particularly suitable for Web development vs. Python?
I ask because it seems to me that anyone who has an informed opinion about PHP says it has serious shortcomings. I wonder if PHP is like Windows: acknowledged to be technically inferior, but widely used because it has a huge adoption rate.
I doubt this has anything to do with GPL v3. Apple already had negotiated a deal with Easy Software Products. Read the CUPS license:
Software that is developed by any person or entity for an Apple Operating System ("Apple OS-Developed Software"), including but not limited to Apple and third party printer drivers, filters, and backends for an Apple Operating System, that is linked to the CUPS imaging library or based on any sample filters or backends provided with CUPS shall not be considered to be a derivative work or collective work based on the CUPS program and is exempt from the mandatory source code release clauses of the GNU GPL. You may therefore distribute linked combinations of the CUPS imaging library with Apple OS-Developed Software without releasing the source code of the Apple OS-Developed Software. You may also use sample filters and backends provided with CUPS to develop Apple OS-Developed Software without releasing the source code of the Apple OS-Developed Software.
Dell does get a lot of revenue from pre-loaded crapware
I see the crapware argument a lot, but I'm not sure I buy it. Once the NY Times said companies like Dell get $40 or so from crapware. That might offset the cost of the Windows license, and it's significant on the cost of a cheap machine, but it's no goldmine. Further, supporting Windows costs a lot of money. Paying people to sit on the phone is not cheap, even if they are in India. I don't think the typical Ubuntu user will demand much support from Dell. That's where the real cost savings for Dell comes in.
Presumably you save things for a reason: you might need them later. The question is, what's the probability you'll need it later? If the probability is high, put it somewhere where you know you'll be able to find it. The problem is that doing this with tons of files or email messages is very time-consuming and requires you to set up an organizational scheme.
If the probability that you'll need it later is lower, it is easier to just throw the document in a pile somewhere. Then it is there if you need it. You spend much less time filing things, but more time digging things up if you need them later.
The key is balance. Obsessively filing everything you might ever need will take lots of time initially. Throwing everything into a huge pile will take lots of time if you often need things in the big pile. You have to decide when to employ which method.
The question is not unique to computers. My mom teaches first grade. At the end of the year she takes all her documents, throws them into a garbage bag, and leaves it in the basement. She figures the probability she will need any of it is very small. If she needs something, it's there and will take a long time to find. But it makes no sense for her to sort all those things initially--which will certainly take lots of time, even if she winds up needing none of it.
Desktop search makes it easier to throw things into huge piles.
I used to initially sort everything too. Emails went into folders, as did files. I do this much less now--even though I don't use desktop search. Emails just go into gigantic folders. I can use Mutt at home or Groupwise at work to search through them when I actually need something. I find I spend much less time sorting. I spend a little more time searching, but the tradeoff is worthwhile. I do sort my computer files a bit--I know where the important ones, like passwords and checkbook ledger, are. The others I don't try to sort so much anymore.
So absolutely I see the appeal in desktop search. Less time sorting things you might not ever need is well worth it, even though you spend a little more time searching for things you do need. But no, desktop search makes no sense if you're going to obsessively sort everything and then search. Then you spend time sorting and searching!
Final note: Google is not doing anything revolutionary here. Long before Gmail one could throw emails in a huge folder and search them later. Using grep is also easy on a Unix machine. Of course the problem is that Windows is full of files that have arbitrary byte sequences that aren't amenable to grep. That's the problem with Windows I guess.
You have to edit your xorg.conf file--yes, that is not very friendly. Ubuntu's hardware recognition is not the best; in my experience SUSE does a better job with this. I can make the necessary edits in a few minutes, but I have spent lots of time reading the man page for xorg.conf--not friendly at all.
Macros: have you tried the Normal mode "q" command? It will record keystrokes, and then you use "@" to play them back. It's handy for quick and dirty things. Also, as far as code goes, you can always throw a bunch of ex commands in a file and then:source it.
In "vi" under older SunOS, even arrow keys didn't work! Who decided that h-j-k-l should be used instead of arrows !?!?
As with many bizarre bits of vi, the answer seems to be historical. Early terminals of course did not have arrow keys. The hjkl keys actually had arrows on them, so it made sense then.
Same goes for the escape key; it was where Tab is now, so it was easier to hit. (Now I find ctrl-[ easier to hit than escape.)
I have been surprised at how powerful ex is as I look through the POSIX manpage. I'd definitely recommend to anybody who wants to get inside Vim that they look at the manpages for ex and ed.
As far as having to learn Elisp goes, one thing I can think of specifically is folding. Vim has this built in. That doesn't seem to be the case with Emacs. I searched Google and the best I could come up with was a bunch of Elisp. I didn't want to paste a bunch of code without having any idea how it worked.
To be fair, Emacs can do things that Vim cannot (e.g. a built-in shell, which is handy sometimes) but there are also other Emacs problems for which the solution seems to be "use this mode and paste in this Elisp code."
In retrospect, emacs seem to be developed as really bloated thing, include all, nasty to use keyboard shortcuts (although I have replaced all of them with my custom settings).. things that you expect to get on your 10GB windows vista (RMS, pls pardon me for this insane comparison).
OTOH, vim has a taste of elegance, at least in default keyboard shortcuts
That is interesting because I see things in the opposite way.
I have been using vim pretty much since I started using Linux a few years ago. My use is limited to some elementary programming (see sig) some long XML documents, config file editing and, more recently, email in Mutt. I'd say my Vim knowledge is pretty elementary, and I am learning new things all the time.
When I first used Linux, I wanted to learn Emacs. Vi has a reputation of being mean and unfriendly. But something about Emacs just wasn't clicking with me, while the Vim tutorial was easy to follow. The commands were cryptic at first, but I soon realized how quickly I could get around a file with them, even with just rudimentary knowledge.
Every so often I take another look at Emacs. Most recently it was because shells seem to work better with Emacs key bindings (they usually have vi bindings, but I don't find they work as well at the command line.) I figured that if I was going to learn Emacs bindings, I might as well take another look at Emacs.
My most recent impression of Emacs is that the basics of the editor are much more well-designed and integrated than Vim. Vim is descended from Vi, which is descended from Ex, which comes from Ed...so there is a lot of editor history and cruft and weirdness in there. Recently I've been digging through the Ex and Ed manpages, which helps me understand Vim better. But yikes, that old line-editor history is still deeply in Vim, and it is very apt to say that the the visual part of Vim is "bolted on" to Ex.
Emacs on the other hand does not seem to have this crazy history. It seems to do many things smoothly that were later added to Vim, such as editing multiple buffers. Basic functionality like searching is easier to understand--Vim's distinction between "magic" and "nomagic", for example, took awhile for me to understand (of course, it exists in part due to compatibility with the ancient regular expressions found in Ed.)
In short, the core of Emacs seems to me to be designed, while the core of Vim seems haphazard and bolted together like a historical crazy quilt.
However, where this changes is with more advanced functionality. Features such as folding and (more recently) spell checking are built in to Vim. Emacs can do these things, sure. But you have to rely on modes. Good luck finding modes and then, if you find them, good luck documenting them. Furthermore, it often seems that doing something more advanced with Emacs requires learning Emacs Lisp, where the functionality will be built-in to Vim. I don't want to have to learn to program my editor just so I can smoothly edit a file.
So, the core of Emacs seems to me to be better designed, while when it comes to more advanced functionality, Vim wins. So Vim is harder to learn, but easier to use and grow with once you get the hang of it.
A couple of final notes. Vim's documentation is much better than Emacs. Bram has done a fantastic job by writing two manuals--the user guide, to get you started, and the reference manual to exhaustively explain everything. Emacs has only one manual. Further, Bram has documented all of Vim, including the advanced functionality. Since the advanced stuff is not built in to Emacs--it uses modes instead--good luck getting good documentation to go along with advanced Emacs usage.
Also, some people compare Emacs and vi. That is an easy contest--Emacs wins hands down. I installed nvi just to see what it would be like, and the lack of documentation alone makes it very hard to use. Thus emacs versus vi is a bogus comparison. Vim is the standard bearer now.
Just my $.02; I hope an Emacs user offers a refutation.
Or switch to another distro, which I did...I rejected it, just as you said, so why you are so cranky about it, I do not know. For that matter, why you are reading this thread, or reading a review of an open-source project such as Gentoo? By your logic the reviewer should "put up or shut up" and has no right to offer commentary on the distro. If a distro wants to say "put up or shut up," that is fine, but then it should not be surprised if people do indeed STFU but go to another distro that will listen to their concerns...
"I simply come back to it once it's done." I'm sure people said the same thing in the 1970s on UNIX time sharing machines. That's like saying "I never notice the fifteen minute commercial break on television, becaue I simply come back to it once it's done."
Portage is not bad if you don't mind waiting, but in this age of 3 GHz processors and other package managers (like apt) that do the same job in much less time, Portage is slow. And I'm not even talking about compiling. Syncing, resolving dependencies, and searching is SLOW. 3rd party tools like eix help, but other package managers like apt do the same job, without needing third-party tools to speed them up.
I agree with you and if I were running the Gentoo ship I would have pumped that time into cleaning up Portage, or dumping Portage altogether in favor of something that is capable of handling the thousands of packages that are in the tree. But this is a project run by volunteers. With Daniel Robbins gone, there isn't even a BDFL. It's not as though there is anyone to say "hey, you working on this graphical installer, we need you over here cleaning up Portage." The graphical installer developer probably just isn't interested in doing much else. Furthermore, I'm not sure Gentoo has the infrastructure to put manpower where it is needed, or that manpower always improves things--the whole "nine women can't have a baby in one month" thing.
These days in Gentoo though, it seems to me it is taking one woman way longer than nine months to have a baby, which is a real problem. The Portage tree is full of dead stuff, and key packages are way behind the curve (Python 2.5, which is about eight months old now, is still in hard mask, meaning it is not recommended for installation on any Gentoo system. Hardly cutting edge.)
But I agree, a graphical installer is the wrong direction for Gentoo. Users who want that can run Debian, or Ubuntu, or Fedora, or whatever. To run Gentoo you have to understand the way the system works, and a graphical installer is not as instructive as reading the handbook and installing it by hand. Another poster said Gentoo is about choice. I definitely agree, but I think there are other choices (e.g. easy binary packages, which Robbins pointed out the need for years ago) that Gentoo is not offering.
Dude, if we could get you to write these periodic "Why Linux hasn't taken over the desktop" articles, we'd save a lot of time. Trolls love to write articles like this one, and they never even mention your point, which is so obvious: people do not even know what Linux is, and even if they did, they wouldn't care. They want to surf a little Net and see some photos, and they couldn't care less what an operating system is. Which is fine. But it's dumb to say that people don't use Linux because it's too hard, etc. People don't know what it is!
I see what you are saying regarding corn subsidies and agree. But your conclusion does not make sense. If a lot of corn is being used for ethanol, that still drives the price of corn up, even if production of corn is subsidized. If ethanol production ceased, the price of corn would drop.
The summary does not include a link to anything telling me what this keyboard is. There's some countdown timer, and a picture of a keyboard--wow. I followed several links under the "Related Links" and burrowed two or three links deep, and I still couldn't find a description of this thing (some links were dead.) The blog does not have a description of what this keyboard is. In short this just looks like a keyboard--who cares? Ooh, pre-orders in hours--I can't wait!
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There is no Pain in using office, it is a good program no matter how much you don't want it to be.
I have got to disagree with you there. I'll address Word 2002 specifically, since we use it most where I work. Considering how long Word has been in development, how expensive it is, and the enormous resources of the corporation that develops it, I think Word is a fairly lousy program.
Word is fine for the basics--typing up a quick letter or doing a simple table. But Google Docs is fine for that too, as is OpenOffice. There isn't much point to paying hundreds of dollars for something that other programs will do for free. So really, the reason to get Word is because of its advanced features.
And these are riddled with flaws. Take the "Track Changes" feature for example. It seems a good idea and is handy in practice. However, often when I am using it, I simply cannot edit parts of the document. I'll stick the insertion point somewhere and start typing. Nothing happens. I have to move the cursor around to another place just so I can insert text.
Footnotes. They wind up all over the place. If I insert a footnote reference on page 14, I want the text to start appearing on page 14, not on page 15. Sometimes (especially when using track changes) the text vanishes into some vortex, where it is not seen on the document at all.
Comments. There is no easy way to move them around. Can't right click on them to copy them to the clipboard.
Those are just the Word frustrations that I can think of offhand. Word frustrations pop up every day when you use it as much as I do on the job. I think word processors are used for many tasks for which they are poorly suited. I'm a geek in my spare time, so if I ran the world I would not use word processors at my job at all; instead I would use a plain-text markup system (xml, LaTeX, whatever) with good old plain text comments rather than the crappy Word feature, and with CVS instead of the quite troublesome "track changes". I don't run the world, so I'm stuck with Word, something which does basic things okay, but sucks at advanced things.
Unfortunately I doubt there is any word processor out there that is better than Word at advanced things. I doubt OOo is any better. Word processors are just used for many tasks for which they simply are not suited. But that does not change the fact that Word is an expensive program whose only distinguishing feature is that it poorly implements many advanced features.
While it may make one feel better to "stick it to the developers" by making them pay for the additional infrastructure, the truth is that they don't pay for it. The people buying the new housing or office space do.
Of course this is what the developer would like to have you believe. The reality is not that simple.
Certainly the cost of infrastructure increases the developer's expenses. But your assertion, which is that the buyer ultimately pays for this, relies on the fallacious assumption that the developer has the unilateral ability to increase prices in order to pay for the expense. This is not true in any marketplace with a modicum of competition. Sellers do not have the ability to set prices however they please.
Therefore, there is another alternative: in order to pay for the increased cost, the developer sees a reduction in profits.
The reality of course is that increased cost to business will result in both a cut to profits and an increase in prices, though it is difficult to say exactly how the increase will be apportioned to the two.
It does get tiresome to see the "increased cost to business just gets passed on to consumers" argument. This bogus argument is seen everywhere, e.g. "all costs of shoplifting get passed on to consumers" or "all taxes to business get passed on to consumers". It's a nice argument to make if you are a business, because it goads people into forgetting that corporate profits even exist.
but I haven't found anything that works well for syncing video and I can't purchase music from the store. The kicker is, I would probably purchase LOTS more music if I had a solid linux port.
Of course you can buy music. Recent versions of Amarok have Magnatune built right in. You can buy high bitrate MP3s or even FLACs. iPod won't play the FLACs, but you can easily transcode them into whatever MP3 bitrate you want.
Oh, you mean you can't buy things from the major record labels? OK, fair enough. I don't buy their stuff because they do not make it convenient for me to buy it. They want me to buy a plastic disc or get encumbered computer files. But if convenience is important to you and you don't mind jumping through the dual hoops of iTunes and DRM, then by all means just stick with OS X.
I stopped reading at "Linux threat lessens". BusinessWeek obviously doesn't get it.
The Linux threat is not going to lessen. BusinessWeek seems to think that MS can give the software away, get a monopoly, and then there will be no threat. That strategy has not worked even in the US, where people are rich enough to afford Microsoft software and where there are no political reasons to avoid Microsoft. (If I were in a foreign government, I wouldn't want to count on a US software company, just as some US government folks got skittish when Lenovo took over the ThinkPads.) People are not switching to Linux solely because of price. They are switching because it is in some ways a superior product.
Microsoft's problem is not Linux; Microsoft's problem is that it has an antiquated business model: selling shrink-wrapped commodity software at astronomical prices. Giving the software away will delay the inevitable, but the key word is "inevitable".
With the proliferation of AJAX, many websites are all-but-unusable on a machine slower than 2GHz. I see no sign of this trend reversing
Got any links? That way I can be sure to avoid these sites. I have never seen a website slow down *at all* on my 2-yr-old laptop, which has a 1.6GHz Pentium M and 512 MB of RAM, some of which goes to the video. I later bought a desktop and put 1GB of RAM in it. I now think that was a mistake (but only a $50 one) and that it would have run just fine with half the RAM. free -m always shows hundreds of megabytes of free RAM, even with two months of uptime and the alleged Firefox memory leaks. It's ridiculous to need 2GHz to view a webpage.
Wait, are you running Windows? I use Linux, though even I would be surprised if Windows is so awful that you need 2 GHz to view a webpage.
They also hate KMail, Linspire, Thunderbird, and Eudora, even though they have instructions on the Comcast website on how to set these things up to work with the Comcast email servers. They actively sit around and brood with their hatred for alternative browsers, even though their help site has instructions on how to make Firefox your default browser. They hate Firefox, Opera, Camino, and Safari, even though they say these browsers will work with their service.
Yep, they hate anything that's not from Microsoft.
Jitterbug! Looks like just the ticket.
* No camera. I do not want something that takes crappy photos. If I want a camera I will buy a camera. Putting a camera in a phone is about as good an idea as putting a phone in a camera.
* Few buttons. Cell phones have too many buttons.
* Simple. Too many cell phones try to be cool rather than useful.
* Simple menus. My phone has too many menu choices full of crap that I do not use, and figuring out how to do simple things like add a name to the phone list is too hard.
Cell phone makers are cramming crap into phones that is not useful for making calls.
I do remember reading something in the WSJ about Sprint developing a simple phone that they would market to older people; I don't know if this is the result. Older folks aren't the only ones who would like it though. As someone who often sits in front of computers all day I get tired of gadgets that want to make things too complicated.
or move to another webby language, like Python.
How good is Python as a web language? Python is very easy to use and structured, while PHP is yucky. Does PHP have some strong points that make it particularly suitable for Web development vs. Python?
I ask because it seems to me that anyone who has an informed opinion about PHP says it has serious shortcomings. I wonder if PHP is like Windows: acknowledged to be technically inferior, but widely used because it has a huge adoption rate.
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/license.htm
Just because Easy Software Products released CUPS under the GPL does not mean they cannot license it to other parties (e.g. Apple) on different terms.
Dell does get a lot of revenue from pre-loaded crapware
I see the crapware argument a lot, but I'm not sure I buy it. Once the NY Times said companies like Dell get $40 or so from crapware. That might offset the cost of the Windows license, and it's significant on the cost of a cheap machine, but it's no goldmine. Further, supporting Windows costs a lot of money. Paying people to sit on the phone is not cheap, even if they are in India. I don't think the typical Ubuntu user will demand much support from Dell. That's where the real cost savings for Dell comes in.
unless it was GPL v3 content
Considering that the GPL v3 was released mere hours before the iPhone, it's impossible that the device incorporates any code licensed under GPL v3.
I really don't see the point of this story...
Exactly.
Presumably you save things for a reason: you might need them later. The question is, what's the probability you'll need it later? If the probability is high, put it somewhere where you know you'll be able to find it. The problem is that doing this with tons of files or email messages is very time-consuming and requires you to set up an organizational scheme.
If the probability that you'll need it later is lower, it is easier to just throw the document in a pile somewhere. Then it is there if you need it. You spend much less time filing things, but more time digging things up if you need them later.
The key is balance. Obsessively filing everything you might ever need will take lots of time initially. Throwing everything into a huge pile will take lots of time if you often need things in the big pile. You have to decide when to employ which method.
The question is not unique to computers. My mom teaches first grade. At the end of the year she takes all her documents, throws them into a garbage bag, and leaves it in the basement. She figures the probability she will need any of it is very small. If she needs something, it's there and will take a long time to find. But it makes no sense for her to sort all those things initially--which will certainly take lots of time, even if she winds up needing none of it.
Desktop search makes it easier to throw things into huge piles.
I used to initially sort everything too. Emails went into folders, as did files. I do this much less now--even though I don't use desktop search. Emails just go into gigantic folders. I can use Mutt at home or Groupwise at work to search through them when I actually need something. I find I spend much less time sorting. I spend a little more time searching, but the tradeoff is worthwhile. I do sort my computer files a bit--I know where the important ones, like passwords and checkbook ledger, are. The others I don't try to sort so much anymore.
So absolutely I see the appeal in desktop search. Less time sorting things you might not ever need is well worth it, even though you spend a little more time searching for things you do need. But no, desktop search makes no sense if you're going to obsessively sort everything and then search. Then you spend time sorting and searching!
Final note: Google is not doing anything revolutionary here. Long before Gmail one could throw emails in a huge folder and search them later. Using grep is also easy on a Unix machine. Of course the problem is that Windows is full of files that have arbitrary byte sequences that aren't amenable to grep. That's the problem with Windows I guess.
The guy was being sarcastic...
You have to edit your xorg.conf file--yes, that is not very friendly. Ubuntu's hardware recognition is not the best; in my experience SUSE does a better job with this. I can make the necessary edits in a few minutes, but I have spent lots of time reading the man page for xorg.conf--not friendly at all.
Macros: have you tried the Normal mode "q" command? It will record keystrokes, and then you use "@" to play them back. It's handy for quick and dirty things. Also, as far as code goes, you can always throw a bunch of ex commands in a file and then :source it.
In "vi" under older SunOS, even arrow keys didn't work! Who decided that h-j-k-l should be used instead of arrows !?!?
As with many bizarre bits of vi, the answer seems to be historical. Early terminals of course did not have arrow keys. The hjkl keys actually had arrows on them, so it made sense then.
Same goes for the escape key; it was where Tab is now, so it was easier to hit. (Now I find ctrl-[ easier to hit than escape.)
I have been surprised at how powerful ex is as I look through the POSIX manpage. I'd definitely recommend to anybody who wants to get inside Vim that they look at the manpages for ex and ed.
As far as having to learn Elisp goes, one thing I can think of specifically is folding. Vim has this built in. That doesn't seem to be the case with Emacs. I searched Google and the best I could come up with was a bunch of Elisp. I didn't want to paste a bunch of code without having any idea how it worked.
To be fair, Emacs can do things that Vim cannot (e.g. a built-in shell, which is handy sometimes) but there are also other Emacs problems for which the solution seems to be "use this mode and paste in this Elisp code."
In retrospect, emacs seem to be developed as really bloated thing, include all, nasty to use keyboard shortcuts (although I have replaced all of them with my custom settings).. things that you expect to get on your 10GB windows vista (RMS, pls pardon me for this insane comparison).
OTOH, vim has a taste of elegance, at least in default keyboard shortcuts
That is interesting because I see things in the opposite way.
I have been using vim pretty much since I started using Linux a few years ago. My use is limited to some elementary programming (see sig) some long XML documents, config file editing and, more recently, email in Mutt. I'd say my Vim knowledge is pretty elementary, and I am learning new things all the time.
When I first used Linux, I wanted to learn Emacs. Vi has a reputation of being mean and unfriendly. But something about Emacs just wasn't clicking with me, while the Vim tutorial was easy to follow. The commands were cryptic at first, but I soon realized how quickly I could get around a file with them, even with just rudimentary knowledge.
Every so often I take another look at Emacs. Most recently it was because shells seem to work better with Emacs key bindings (they usually have vi bindings, but I don't find they work as well at the command line.) I figured that if I was going to learn Emacs bindings, I might as well take another look at Emacs.
My most recent impression of Emacs is that the basics of the editor are much more well-designed and integrated than Vim. Vim is descended from Vi, which is descended from Ex, which comes from Ed...so there is a lot of editor history and cruft and weirdness in there. Recently I've been digging through the Ex and Ed manpages, which helps me understand Vim better. But yikes, that old line-editor history is still deeply in Vim, and it is very apt to say that the the visual part of Vim is "bolted on" to Ex.
Emacs on the other hand does not seem to have this crazy history. It seems to do many things smoothly that were later added to Vim, such as editing multiple buffers. Basic functionality like searching is easier to understand--Vim's distinction between "magic" and "nomagic", for example, took awhile for me to understand (of course, it exists in part due to compatibility with the ancient regular expressions found in Ed.)
In short, the core of Emacs seems to me to be designed, while the core of Vim seems haphazard and bolted together like a historical crazy quilt.
However, where this changes is with more advanced functionality. Features such as folding and (more recently) spell checking are built in to Vim. Emacs can do these things, sure. But you have to rely on modes. Good luck finding modes and then, if you find them, good luck documenting them. Furthermore, it often seems that doing something more advanced with Emacs requires learning Emacs Lisp, where the functionality will be built-in to Vim. I don't want to have to learn to program my editor just so I can smoothly edit a file.
So, the core of Emacs seems to me to be better designed, while when it comes to more advanced functionality, Vim wins. So Vim is harder to learn, but easier to use and grow with once you get the hang of it.
A couple of final notes. Vim's documentation is much better than Emacs. Bram has done a fantastic job by writing two manuals--the user guide, to get you started, and the reference manual to exhaustively explain everything. Emacs has only one manual. Further, Bram has documented all of Vim, including the advanced functionality. Since the advanced stuff is not built in to Emacs--it uses modes instead--good luck getting good documentation to go along with advanced Emacs usage.
Also, some people compare Emacs and vi. That is an easy contest--Emacs wins hands down. I installed nvi just to see what it would be like, and the lack of documentation alone makes it very hard to use. Thus emacs versus vi is a bogus comparison. Vim is the standard bearer now.
Just my $.02; I hope an Emacs user offers a refutation.
"Put up or shut up."
Or switch to another distro, which I did...I rejected it, just as you said, so why you are so cranky about it, I do not know. For that matter, why you are reading this thread, or reading a review of an open-source project such as Gentoo? By your logic the reviewer should "put up or shut up" and has no right to offer commentary on the distro. If a distro wants to say "put up or shut up," that is fine, but then it should not be surprised if people do indeed STFU but go to another distro that will listen to their concerns...
emerge --search
Dog slow.
emerge
Very slow.
"I simply come back to it once it's done." I'm sure people said the same thing in the 1970s on UNIX time sharing machines. That's like saying "I never notice the fifteen minute commercial break on television, becaue I simply come back to it once it's done."
Portage is not bad if you don't mind waiting, but in this age of 3 GHz processors and other package managers (like apt) that do the same job in much less time, Portage is slow. And I'm not even talking about compiling. Syncing, resolving dependencies, and searching is SLOW. 3rd party tools like eix help, but other package managers like apt do the same job, without needing third-party tools to speed them up.
I agree with you and if I were running the Gentoo ship I would have pumped that time into cleaning up Portage, or dumping Portage altogether in favor of something that is capable of handling the thousands of packages that are in the tree. But this is a project run by volunteers. With Daniel Robbins gone, there isn't even a BDFL. It's not as though there is anyone to say "hey, you working on this graphical installer, we need you over here cleaning up Portage." The graphical installer developer probably just isn't interested in doing much else. Furthermore, I'm not sure Gentoo has the infrastructure to put manpower where it is needed, or that manpower always improves things--the whole "nine women can't have a baby in one month" thing.
These days in Gentoo though, it seems to me it is taking one woman way longer than nine months to have a baby, which is a real problem. The Portage tree is full of dead stuff, and key packages are way behind the curve (Python 2.5, which is about eight months old now, is still in hard mask, meaning it is not recommended for installation on any Gentoo system. Hardly cutting edge.)
But I agree, a graphical installer is the wrong direction for Gentoo. Users who want that can run Debian, or Ubuntu, or Fedora, or whatever. To run Gentoo you have to understand the way the system works, and a graphical installer is not as instructive as reading the handbook and installing it by hand. Another poster said Gentoo is about choice. I definitely agree, but I think there are other choices (e.g. easy binary packages, which Robbins pointed out the need for years ago) that Gentoo is not offering.
Dude, if we could get you to write these periodic "Why Linux hasn't taken over the desktop" articles, we'd save a lot of time. Trolls love to write articles like this one, and they never even mention your point, which is so obvious: people do not even know what Linux is, and even if they did, they wouldn't care. They want to surf a little Net and see some photos, and they couldn't care less what an operating system is. Which is fine. But it's dumb to say that people don't use Linux because it's too hard, etc. People don't know what it is!
I see what you are saying regarding corn subsidies and agree. But your conclusion does not make sense. If a lot of corn is being used for ethanol, that still drives the price of corn up, even if production of corn is subsidized. If ethanol production ceased, the price of corn would drop.
The summary does not include a link to anything telling me what this keyboard is. There's some countdown timer, and a picture of a keyboard--wow. I followed several links under the "Related Links" and burrowed two or three links deep, and I still couldn't find a description of this thing (some links were dead.) The blog does not have a description of what this keyboard is. In short this just looks like a keyboard--who cares? Ooh, pre-orders in hours--I can't wait!