Yeah but it's no big deal. You must get 2 year old hardware nice and cheap, seeing as all the new stuff is never even taken advantage of til its about 2 years old.
Re:Gecko's home page doesn't render on NS4!
on
Galeon 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
Well actually a lot of people are finding it easier to design interfaces in HTML than it is to try adding widget after widget in a programming language. That's why a lot of projects are starting to embed small html widgets and have their interface as HTML. It's very easy to make nice designs using it. Such a program that comes to mind is Ximian's Red Carpet.
I agree with you that mozilla is bigger than it needs to be, and hopefully some smart individuals will go through and find areas where they can have huge improvements.
But I like web pages now. I like all the cool nifty features and graphics a lot of them have. People can overdo it, but most just look nice. Pages that just offer factual information often are very bare and just text, which is fine. Then pages that are more about media and stuff usually have more going on for the interface, which I think is just fine.
Opera is suppose to be very lightweight while still supporting a lot of the newer HTML/CSS/DOM stuff. You should probably check that out. And obviously you don't have a problem with non-open projects since you are talking bout using older versions of netscape.
Re:Why aren't there more rendering engines?
on
Galeon 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
Strange that galeon crashes for you. It has been rock solid for me since probably 0.12.5 (maybe earlier). I'm using 0.12.8 now and it's super stable. I'm pretty sure I haven't had galeon crash for 2 months or so. Can't even remember the last time it crashed.
I don't go to sites that use java, although I do go to sites that use flash and use to go to sites that used quicktime (I could see it using codeweaver's crossover plugin, but that stopped working for some reason).
Perhaps it's not galeon's fault and you just have a buggy system. I use Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable). It maybe be unstable but apparently they're doing something right since I never have galeon crash.
Yeah, I totally agree. I'm having no problems with the current way. And he said he installs from source and puts programs where he wants them to be, so I'm not sure why he has a gripe.
My guess is that since he is the author of the High Performance Liquid theme for kde he has been getting a lot of emails from redhat users asking why when they just configured, make, and make installed it it didn't show up in KDE's configuration options. And the reason is probably he has it installing to/usr/local/kde/
But I've seen RPM and DEBs of high performance liquid so he can just tell those users to install using them and problem solved.
I do see some advantages to having programs in their own directories though, such as being able to find a global configuration file for a program easily.
Well if we're talking about this in terms of linux becoming a desktop OS. I don't think it matters.
Every person I've ever met that uses windows and doesn't know much about computers (e.g. your ordinary desktop user). NEVER goes through the program files.
All they do is access programs from their start menu, uninstall them using the add/remove programs. And then go into my documents for their mp3/image/whatever files or sometimes just make directories on their desktop to hold them.
To say that the fact that we put all executables into/usr/bin is going to hold back the use of linux as a desktop OS is just stupid. There are things holding back linux, but that is not one of them. The users could care less, they want to manage the programs through graphical tools, and that's exactly what distros like Rehdat and Mandrake are giving them.
Windows doesn't have package management, that's why you have those problems on windows. Comparing RPM, DPKG, etc to the uninstall programs in windows just doesn't work.
RPM and DPKG know every single file that was installed, and will remove every single file that was installed. And it actually keeps a database of dependencies so it won't let you uninstall a program if another program depends on it.
In the windows world, a program has the option of having an uninstall available. But from what I can tell it's really just a cheesy hack to get uninstall features without going through the work to setup a nice package manager. It seems to just have a list of the files it supposively installed and then mark some as shared and then uninstall the programs and ask the user if they want to uninstall the shared files, with no knowledge of whether or not they're being used by other programs.
That's why we don't need subdirectories for programs. Although it probably wouldn't be a bad thing because it would help people find global config files and stuff for programs. But really, if you know how to use RPM and DPKG there isn't a need, as you can ask it what the files are that belong to a program and other things.
I was wondering the same type of thing. Is this going to be helpful to KDE in any way?
It's my understanding that the problem is with the gnu library linker, but I don't know much about compilers. Does this intel compiler have it's own library linker or does it still use the gnu one?
If it does use it's own can we expect to see dramatic speed increases if we were to compile KDE with this intel compiler?
I think you're reading more into this. I think it's more like intel released a compiler to generate better optimized x86 code for it's processors. And since transmeta does code morphing from x86 to whatever it's instruction set is, a side effect from better optimized x86 code would be faster code morphing of that better optimized code.
You make it sound like it only improves transmeta's chips and not others. I really doubt that's what's going on here.
This is actually a very good idea. From reading the text of the article that someone posted here it seems Eclipse is an organization, not a product. The purpose of it seems to be for them to make development software and have people move over to using their free software for development instead of letting companies like Microsoft and Sun try to lock developers into their platform.
This really is a great idea. If there is just an open organization who made developer software their only incentive would be to make the best possible development tools, not to keep out new technologies like Microsoft did with Java.
The fact that IBM has started this and has their muscle behind it is a very good thing. A lot of people should see this as a viable alternative when they hear IBM is behind it.
Of course I could be way off but that seemed to be what the article was trying to say.
Wow, the point just flew right over your head didn't it?
Let me try to explain this nice and slow.
Microsoft banned browsers that were non-microsoft from going to the msn.com websites. (such as mozill and opera for example) They claimed the reasoning for doing this is because the pages would render msn.com incorrectly.
Well, as I just said, mozilla renders it perfectly . Yet, Microsoft's IE browser (I have no clue what the version is but it seemed fairly up to date and thats not even the point) rendered it totally wrong. Now, did they ban that browser? No. Did they even give a warning message saying the browser should have been upgraded? No.
Obviously this has nothing to do with rendering the page correctly, it's just an attempt at killing any possible competition.
Re:Yippee!
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Heh, the funny thing about that whole situation is it renders perfectly in mozilla (I just tried it and it seemed to look perfect, I didn't notice any errors). But I tried it in IE on the mac's at my college and it rendered everything wrong, a lot of backgrounds were missing on things and stuff was in the wrong place.
So I think it's pretty obvious microsoft was full of it and was just banning browsers for not being microsoft.
Re:why is mozilla engine so slow?
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Not at all for me. The gecko rendering engine is by far the fastest I've used. Beats IE, konqueror, and opera hands down for me. In fact if I plug my laptop up to a fast connection I often don't even see the page render, it's just there.
Not sure why you're having problems.
Re:Stallman still hacks it
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm, how does he do it?
I remember reading a while back a story about Richard Stallman having repetitive stress injury so he couldn't type on a keyboard. In fact I think in the story I read they made it sound like that was the major reason he couldn't write a kernel for the GNU operating system (hey, that's what I read, not what i believe).
But anyways, does he just put up with the pain, get it fixed somehow, or uses some other way to input text instead of a keyboard?
You're right in saying GNOME is not dead. The development is very heavy in GNOME 2.0
However, every time you see a gnome component getting updated in sid isn't because there is something changed/new, it's just the debian developers fixing something with the package. Thats why the version will be 1.4.1-x
x being the package revision number.
All the GNOME developers seem to be busy developing for 2.0 and so they aren't working on 1.4 as much, if at all. Which is fine by me as long as I get to use 2.0 some time. Although, I wish a new version of Nautilus would come out as there is a lot of little quirks in it's behavior (especially placement of icons on the desktop).
Heh, well not that bad. But I remember there were packages with bugs that I figured they'd fix right away and mailed in bug reports, but never saw fixes. Then there were just programs that I felt were out of date for a newly released distro (it was new at the time). I mean if you went to the progeny site a day or two ago the latest news would have been "Progeny gives the gift of gnome 1.4" and that happened a LONG ass time ago.
But yeah, Sid is great, I love having the latest of packages and the Debian developers usually do a great job of packaging.
I'm curious about what information AMD and Intel have to back up their claims that they're catching up to Transmeta in power requirements.
I just got a toshiba laptop earlier this year with a 700mhz celeron. I love it but I rarely use it without being plugged into the wall, as from my experience it only lasts about 2-3 hours.
I remember seeing stuff saying a laptop with a transmeta chip can have a battery life of about 8 hours.
Assuming that is true, how could Intel and AMD possibly say they are catching up? I mean mine is a celeron, not even a pentium III or anything and it sucks up power like I would have never imagined. I hope Intel isn't talking about their powerstep technology, that is just a freaking joke.
Anyone with more information on power consumption among the different chips, I would think Transmeta would have tons of information about this since it's really their main selling point isn't it? I better go check their site.
I wasn't able to read the information as it was slashdotted, but I have read a couple people state that they are just killing off Progney Debian so they can focus all their work on the main debian instead of having a seperate branch.
So I was wondering, when will we see this happen, is it already happening? What I really want to know is when woody gets released as ISOs will there be the progeny graphical installation? I love their installation.
I also love Progeny Debian as it was a very very solid clean fealing distro. Only problem is after about 3 days I realized they weren't updating packages whatsoever and if I stuck with Progeny I'd be stuck with old software, so I upgraded it to sid.
What would be great, and debian developers will probably hate this idea, is if they would release ISOs (or a nice way to do a net install) of the current state of unstable with Progeny Debian's install. I would suggest that to anyone who wanted to try out linux because debian unstable is very up to date, and from my usage I've found it to be much more solid feeling than something like Mandrake, which is the distro I've been suggesting to people since it's kept so up to date, but damn it's falky, the package managing program didn't even work correctly for me so it was pretty useless.
Well, think I've wrote enough. Better just remind people what my main question was here since I sorta trailed off. Will we see Debian Woody come out with a nice graphical installation (the one from Progeny)?
Just out of curiosity, what exactly do you think the DEB package format is missing? Seems to have everything I've ever expected from it (I really like the ability to reconfigure a package).
Do you mean it should be easier to install them? If that's the case, that wouldn't be the DEB format. It'd totally be possible for a graphical program to do the installation and associate.deb files with it. So when you clicked on a deb file in konqueror/nautilus it would open that program and ask for a root password so it could install the file. Probably already is programs that do that.
Re:Q: Why should an IE user switch?
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Although Netscape 6.1 is based on the same codebase as mozilla it is not mozilla. It's somewhat unfair to answer a question of why he should use mozilla instead of IE with information on why you use IE instead of Netscape 6.1. You should give mozilla a try, I think it'll be quite a bit faster. And there is also the quicklaunch option in the newer mozilla builds which will keep mozilla loaded in memory all the time so when you launch it it comes up super quick.
And I know what you're thinking, I don't want to have mozilla taking up my memory all the time. Well apparently you don't mind with IE, cause that's exactly what IE is doing. In fact I think part of the blame on Netscape 6.1 being slow on your system is because even if you don't have IE open it's still in memory, so you're really running both browsers at the same time.
With that said, your browser choice is fine, I'm not trying to convince you to use something else. Use what works for you.
Ummm, so you think the builtin zip support in windows XP is more innovative? Well I'll tell you my opinion, no, not even close. It is just bare bones zip support.
Face it, innovation has nothing to do with it anymore. Products are not getting compared by their merits. Nearly all users will just use what is given to them, and that is not fair to all those other people out there trying to make money through software.
Seems the only way to make money in software is to come out with something totally new, but then you only have so long to live before Microsoft will come knocking at your door. For example, how much longer do you think Real is going to survive? Why should they have to compete with a free product that is being shipped with an Operating System.
WinAmp is the most popular mp3 client for Windows. Obviously their attempt at a monopoly failed there.
It'll be interesting to see how long this lasts, my bet is not for long. A friend of mine got a new computer with XP on it, guess what media playing program he uses? That's right, the one that is forced upon him in XP (Windows Media Player).
Again, WinZip is more popular.
Only because you needed it in order to unzip things in windows 95/98. I see this changing very fast too as zip is builtin to windows XP (and 2000/ME isn't it?)
Netscape's software around the 4.6 series turned into shit and I turned to IE.
I think you summed up the problem right there. How is a company expected to compete with a product that is released free of charge by a company with very very deep pockets? Especially when the company pretty much relies on it for its revenue, or at least a way to get its name out for its server products. I imagine if your boss stopped paying you your productivity level would plummet too.
This is why it's so silly for people to like Microsoft and hate open source. As I see it Microsoft is creating open source by not letting small business make money off their products. It seems the only way to compete with them now is to band together large amounts of programmers and just do it for the hell of it, if you try to make money you're going to see Microsoft crushing you sooner or later.
Ummm, most of us use spoken words to communicate with other humans. I don't seem to have problems communicating with people in areas with lots of other people. I think your logic is quite flawed.
The only thing you said that I think might actually be a problem is trying to keep things private. I imagine keeping a keyboard around for those uses would be an acceptable solution. Or just talking very quietly, like I said before, we do that when communicating with other people and it works fine. Sure it's hard but if a human brain can do it I'm sure we could figure out a way to make a computer do it, just takes time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but it's no big deal. You must get 2 year old hardware nice and cheap, seeing as all the new stuff is never even taken advantage of til its about 2 years old.
Well actually a lot of people are finding it easier to design interfaces in HTML than it is to try adding widget after widget in a programming language. That's why a lot of projects are starting to embed small html widgets and have their interface as HTML. It's very easy to make nice designs using it. Such a program that comes to mind is Ximian's Red Carpet.
I agree with you that mozilla is bigger than it needs to be, and hopefully some smart individuals will go through and find areas where they can have huge improvements.
But I like web pages now. I like all the cool nifty features and graphics a lot of them have. People can overdo it, but most just look nice. Pages that just offer factual information often are very bare and just text, which is fine. Then pages that are more about media and stuff usually have more going on for the interface, which I think is just fine.
Opera is suppose to be very lightweight while still supporting a lot of the newer HTML/CSS/DOM stuff. You should probably check that out. And obviously you don't have a problem with non-open projects since you are talking bout using older versions of netscape.
Strange that galeon crashes for you. It has been rock solid for me since probably 0.12.5 (maybe earlier). I'm using 0.12.8 now and it's super stable. I'm pretty sure I haven't had galeon crash for 2 months or so. Can't even remember the last time it crashed.
I don't go to sites that use java, although I do go to sites that use flash and use to go to sites that used quicktime (I could see it using codeweaver's crossover plugin, but that stopped working for some reason).
Perhaps it's not galeon's fault and you just have a buggy system. I use Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable). It maybe be unstable but apparently they're doing something right since I never have galeon crash.
you're an idiot. first of all removing is not the same as purging.
and those files are configuration files. Now, the reason removing is not the same as purging is because purging WILL remove those.
Ooooh, oh no, I guess he does know what he's talking about, huh?
Yeah, I totally agree. I'm having no problems with the current way. And he said he installs from source and puts programs where he wants them to be, so I'm not sure why he has a gripe.
/usr/local/kde/
My guess is that since he is the author of the High Performance Liquid theme for kde he has been getting a lot of emails from redhat users asking why when they just configured, make, and make installed it it didn't show up in KDE's configuration options. And the reason is probably he has it installing to
But I've seen RPM and DEBs of high performance liquid so he can just tell those users to install using them and problem solved.
I do see some advantages to having programs in their own directories though, such as being able to find a global configuration file for a program easily.
Well if we're talking about this in terms of linux becoming a desktop OS. I don't think it matters.
/usr/bin is going to hold back the use of linux as a desktop OS is just stupid. There are things holding back linux, but that is not one of them. The users could care less, they want to manage the programs through graphical tools, and that's exactly what distros like Rehdat and Mandrake are giving them.
Every person I've ever met that uses windows and doesn't know much about computers (e.g. your ordinary desktop user). NEVER goes through the program files.
All they do is access programs from their start menu, uninstall them using the add/remove programs. And then go into my documents for their mp3/image/whatever files or sometimes just make directories on their desktop to hold them.
To say that the fact that we put all executables into
Windows doesn't have package management, that's why you have those problems on windows. Comparing RPM, DPKG, etc to the uninstall programs in windows just doesn't work.
RPM and DPKG know every single file that was installed, and will remove every single file that was installed. And it actually keeps a database of dependencies so it won't let you uninstall a program if another program depends on it.
In the windows world, a program has the option of having an uninstall available. But from what I can tell it's really just a cheesy hack to get uninstall features without going through the work to setup a nice package manager. It seems to just have a list of the files it supposively installed and then mark some as shared and then uninstall the programs and ask the user if they want to uninstall the shared files, with no knowledge of whether or not they're being used by other programs.
That's why we don't need subdirectories for programs. Although it probably wouldn't be a bad thing because it would help people find global config files and stuff for programs. But really, if you know how to use RPM and DPKG there isn't a need, as you can ask it what the files are that belong to a program and other things.
I was wondering the same type of thing. Is this going to be helpful to KDE in any way?
It's my understanding that the problem is with the gnu library linker, but I don't know much about compilers. Does this intel compiler have it's own library linker or does it still use the gnu one?
If it does use it's own can we expect to see dramatic speed increases if we were to compile KDE with this intel compiler?
I think you're reading more into this. I think it's more like intel released a compiler to generate better optimized x86 code for it's processors. And since transmeta does code morphing from x86 to whatever it's instruction set is, a side effect from better optimized x86 code would be faster code morphing of that better optimized code.
You make it sound like it only improves transmeta's chips and not others. I really doubt that's what's going on here.
This is actually a very good idea. From reading the text of the article that someone posted here it seems Eclipse is an organization, not a product. The purpose of it seems to be for them to make development software and have people move over to using their free software for development instead of letting companies like Microsoft and Sun try to lock developers into their platform.
This really is a great idea. If there is just an open organization who made developer software their only incentive would be to make the best possible development tools, not to keep out new technologies like Microsoft did with Java.
The fact that IBM has started this and has their muscle behind it is a very good thing. A lot of people should see this as a viable alternative when they hear IBM is behind it.
Of course I could be way off but that seemed to be what the article was trying to say.
Wow, the point just flew right over your head didn't it?
Let me try to explain this nice and slow.
Microsoft banned browsers that were non-microsoft from going to the msn.com websites. (such as mozill and opera for example) They claimed the reasoning for doing this is because the pages would render msn.com incorrectly.
Well, as I just said, mozilla renders it perfectly . Yet, Microsoft's IE browser (I have no clue what the version is but it seemed fairly up to date and thats not even the point) rendered it totally wrong. Now, did they ban that browser? No. Did they even give a warning message saying the browser should have been upgraded? No.
Obviously this has nothing to do with rendering the page correctly, it's just an attempt at killing any possible competition.
Heh, the funny thing about that whole situation is it renders perfectly in mozilla (I just tried it and it seemed to look perfect, I didn't notice any errors). But I tried it in IE on the mac's at my college and it rendered everything wrong, a lot of backgrounds were missing on things and stuff was in the wrong place.
So I think it's pretty obvious microsoft was full of it and was just banning browsers for not being microsoft.
Not at all for me. The gecko rendering engine is by far the fastest I've used. Beats IE, konqueror, and opera hands down for me. In fact if I plug my laptop up to a fast connection I often don't even see the page render, it's just there.
Not sure why you're having problems.
Hmmm, how does he do it?
I remember reading a while back a story about Richard Stallman having repetitive stress injury so he couldn't type on a keyboard. In fact I think in the story I read they made it sound like that was the major reason he couldn't write a kernel for the GNU operating system (hey, that's what I read, not what i believe).
But anyways, does he just put up with the pain, get it fixed somehow, or uses some other way to input text instead of a keyboard?
You're jumping to conclusion. Quicktime can be just audio, it doesn't need to be audio and video. In this case, it is just audio, no video.
Wha? I've had Nautilus 1.0.4 forever (well more like 5 months, but that is eternity for an open source project that really needs a new release).
If there is a new version of nautilus out I'd love to know, but I don't see one.
You're right in saying GNOME is not dead. The development is very heavy in GNOME 2.0
However, every time you see a gnome component getting updated in sid isn't because there is something changed/new, it's just the debian developers fixing something with the package. Thats why the version will be 1.4.1-x
x being the package revision number.
All the GNOME developers seem to be busy developing for 2.0 and so they aren't working on 1.4 as much, if at all. Which is fine by me as long as I get to use 2.0 some time. Although, I wish a new version of Nautilus would come out as there is a lot of little quirks in it's behavior (especially placement of icons on the desktop).
Heh, well not that bad. But I remember there were packages with bugs that I figured they'd fix right away and mailed in bug reports, but never saw fixes. Then there were just programs that I felt were out of date for a newly released distro (it was new at the time). I mean if you went to the progeny site a day or two ago the latest news would have been "Progeny gives the gift of gnome 1.4" and that happened a LONG ass time ago.
But yeah, Sid is great, I love having the latest of packages and the Debian developers usually do a great job of packaging.
I'm curious about what information AMD and Intel have to back up their claims that they're catching up to Transmeta in power requirements.
I just got a toshiba laptop earlier this year with a 700mhz celeron. I love it but I rarely use it without being plugged into the wall, as from my experience it only lasts about 2-3 hours.
I remember seeing stuff saying a laptop with a transmeta chip can have a battery life of about 8 hours.
Assuming that is true, how could Intel and AMD possibly say they are catching up? I mean mine is a celeron, not even a pentium III or anything and it sucks up power like I would have never imagined. I hope Intel isn't talking about their powerstep technology, that is just a freaking joke.
Anyone with more information on power consumption among the different chips, I would think Transmeta would have tons of information about this since it's really their main selling point isn't it? I better go check their site.
I wasn't able to read the information as it was slashdotted, but I have read a couple people state that they are just killing off Progney Debian so they can focus all their work on the main debian instead of having a seperate branch.
So I was wondering, when will we see this happen, is it already happening? What I really want to know is when woody gets released as ISOs will there be the progeny graphical installation? I love their installation.
I also love Progeny Debian as it was a very very solid clean fealing distro. Only problem is after about 3 days I realized they weren't updating packages whatsoever and if I stuck with Progeny I'd be stuck with old software, so I upgraded it to sid.
What would be great, and debian developers will probably hate this idea, is if they would release ISOs (or a nice way to do a net install) of the current state of unstable with Progeny Debian's install. I would suggest that to anyone who wanted to try out linux because debian unstable is very up to date, and from my usage I've found it to be much more solid feeling than something like Mandrake, which is the distro I've been suggesting to people since it's kept so up to date, but damn it's falky, the package managing program didn't even work correctly for me so it was pretty useless.
Well, think I've wrote enough. Better just remind people what my main question was here since I sorta trailed off. Will we see Debian Woody come out with a nice graphical installation (the one from Progeny)?
Just out of curiosity, what exactly do you think the DEB package format is missing? Seems to have everything I've ever expected from it (I really like the ability to reconfigure a package).
.deb files with it. So when you clicked on a deb file in konqueror/nautilus it would open that program and ask for a root password so it could install the file. Probably already is programs that do that.
Do you mean it should be easier to install them? If that's the case, that wouldn't be the DEB format. It'd totally be possible for a graphical program to do the installation and associate
Although Netscape 6.1 is based on the same codebase as mozilla it is not mozilla. It's somewhat unfair to answer a question of why he should use mozilla instead of IE with information on why you use IE instead of Netscape 6.1. You should give mozilla a try, I think it'll be quite a bit faster. And there is also the quicklaunch option in the newer mozilla builds which will keep mozilla loaded in memory all the time so when you launch it it comes up super quick.
And I know what you're thinking, I don't want to have mozilla taking up my memory all the time. Well apparently you don't mind with IE, cause that's exactly what IE is doing. In fact I think part of the blame on Netscape 6.1 being slow on your system is because even if you don't have IE open it's still in memory, so you're really running both browsers at the same time.
With that said, your browser choice is fine, I'm not trying to convince you to use something else. Use what works for you.
Ummm, so you think the builtin zip support in windows XP is more innovative? Well I'll tell you my opinion, no, not even close. It is just bare bones zip support.
Face it, innovation has nothing to do with it anymore. Products are not getting compared by their merits. Nearly all users will just use what is given to them, and that is not fair to all those other people out there trying to make money through software.
Seems the only way to make money in software is to come out with something totally new, but then you only have so long to live before Microsoft will come knocking at your door. For example, how much longer do you think Real is going to survive? Why should they have to compete with a free product that is being shipped with an Operating System.
Sounds to me like things need to change.
WinAmp is the most popular mp3 client for Windows. Obviously their attempt at a monopoly failed there.
It'll be interesting to see how long this lasts, my bet is not for long. A friend of mine got a new computer with XP on it, guess what media playing program he uses? That's right, the one that is forced upon him in XP (Windows Media Player).
Again, WinZip is more popular.
Only because you needed it in order to unzip things in windows 95/98. I see this changing very fast too as zip is builtin to windows XP (and 2000/ME isn't it?)
Netscape's software around the 4.6 series turned into shit and I turned to IE.
I think you summed up the problem right there. How is a company expected to compete with a product that is released free of charge by a company with very very deep pockets? Especially when the company pretty much relies on it for its revenue, or at least a way to get its name out for its server products. I imagine if your boss stopped paying you your productivity level would plummet too.
This is why it's so silly for people to like Microsoft and hate open source. As I see it Microsoft is creating open source by not letting small business make money off their products. It seems the only way to compete with them now is to band together large amounts of programmers and just do it for the hell of it, if you try to make money you're going to see Microsoft crushing you sooner or later.
Ummm, most of us use spoken words to communicate with other humans. I don't seem to have problems communicating with people in areas with lots of other people. I think your logic is quite flawed.
The only thing you said that I think might actually be a problem is trying to keep things private. I imagine keeping a keyboard around for those uses would be an acceptable solution. Or just talking very quietly, like I said before, we do that when communicating with other people and it works fine. Sure it's hard but if a human brain can do it I'm sure we could figure out a way to make a computer do it, just takes time.