In all honesty, I do hear you - it would've been great if they could've done a clean break. Unfortunately, there are far too many programs that rely on IE's integration with the operating system (try using Steam on WINE using the default Gecko engine, for example) or that rely on IE6's original broken behavior (have a bunch of these at work).
When you make a mess as big as the one MS made with Trident, you can't just clean it up overnight, no matter how badly you wish they would.
Yep - they ran with a code base they were already familiar with, had hundreds (thousands?) of programmers trained in, had been pumping tons of money into, had numerous system hooks tied into, needed to keep backwards compatible with older, more broken versions, and had full rights to instead of switching to the same rendering engine as most of their competition. Senseless!
Bugs have been around forever. Q/A has been troublesome since the beginning - heck, many of the problems outlined in the Unix Hater's Handbook were the direct result of poor Q/A throughout the... erm... Unixverse. Bloated code? That's been around as long as there's been code - heck, INTERCAL was explicitly designed to produce it! People with no background in IT making decisions and overruling experience? That's also been happening for ages.
That said, I'll give you credit on one thing - yeah, your code was tight, purposeful and optimized for speed or size, at least as far as the machine was concerned. You didn't have a choice. Instead of focusing on maintainability or ease of understanding, programmers had to bend to the machine's thinking instead of the other way around since there just wasn't enough machine to tolerate human weakness. Eventually, though, computers became powerful enough where programming could stop focusing on getting every last clock cycle's worth by any means necessary and more on solving programming problems quickly and easily. Put another way, the programmer's time finally became more valuable than the machine's time. Once that happened, the rules changed - something which those some of those people with "no background in IT" figured out years ago (I hear it's because they had a background in some dark discipline called "accounting") and which a lot of IT people still can't wrap their minds around.
Ah - the "If you want to outrun a bear, the key is not to outrun the bear - it's to outrun the person behind you" principle. That sort of wisdom ranks up there with, "Women are like square roots - if they're under 16, you should do them in your head."
Absolutely true. Don't believe it? Check out the list of operating systems officially supported by HP for their servers. It's not like Dell or any of the other major server players are any different on that front. Oh, and yes, you're reading that list right - Debian and Ubuntu Server are both fully supported.
I've been fiddling with Drupal, Wordpress, and even Alfresco (*shudder*) for a while now and, honestly, the only CMS that I can say is easy to use or even remotely intuitive is Wordpress. Drupal isn't too bad once you wrap your head around how it works, and it's certainly far more flexible than Wordpress ever will be. That said, Drupal is a big, big beast, and if you're not willing or able to spend the time learning its various nooks and crannies, you'll get lost in a hurry. In many respects, it's a lot like *nix - there's a lot of little parts you can bolt on that, if you know what you're doing, can do some really amazing things. If you don't know what you're doing, though, you'll go down in flames.
As for Joomla, I eval'd it for a bit - it seemed that Drupal had better free module and theme support, or, at least, it was a heck of a lot easier to find modules for what I was looking for. Once I found Drupal's Devel module, I decided to stick with it - it helped out immensely.
Keep in mind that the Mac version of Office is little like the PC version. Sure, you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and something that vaguely resembles Outlook (Entourage - yes, Mac gets real Outlook in the next version). You don't get Access, Project, InfoPath, Groove, Visio, Publisher, or any of the other random bits of Office, though. Put another way, you get just enough to make sure you don't throw some OpenOffice derivative on your Macs - nothing more. Now that Apple is coming out with an Exchange client (i.e. integrating Exchange support into Mail.app), suddenly Microsoft is a little more interested in creating a Mac-native version of Outlook; until then, they hadn't cared in years. That's a Microsoft problem, not a Linux/Apple problem.
As for Codeweaver's business practices... well, I can't vouch for or against them. I've tried running Crossover Office before and all it gave me was the parts of Office that I could "fake" using OpenOffice - namely, Word and Excel. Access didn't work and that's what I really needed at the time, so I just left it alone. Considering how tightly MS integrated Access into Windows' built-in data processing systems, that's not terribly surprising.
That said, I'm with you. Until somebody comes out with an office productivity suite that matches most use cases for most businesses that's cross-platform, we're going to be stuck with Windows (at least on the client side) for a long, long time. The good news is we're getting close - OpenOffice, among others, is good enough on the word processor/spreadsheet front. Honestly, if Base was a little more polished, I think it would meet the needs of most smallish (less than 50 employees) companies easily enough.
For better or worse, you have to use the tools that work for you. In your case, you have a hard requirement - you need MS Project 2003 to work on whatever system you're using. Obviously, if you have a hard requirement that you have to use a Windows-native application, you should probably use the operating system that best supports it, which would be Windows, and that's okay.
The point of WINE is to help your migration path to Linux. If you have an app that only runs under Windows and you need some time to wean yourself off of it, WINE is great for that. If you have a non-critical Windows-only app that you'd like to run from time to time (say, certain games), WINE is great for that. If you have a business-critical Windows app that absolutely needs to run and there's no way you're migrating out of it, just run Windows. Computers are tools and you should configure yours to do what you need it to do - don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
Oh wow... yeah, as cheesy as Space: Above and Beyond and Battlestar Galactica got at times, at least it didn't go full teenage drama retard. That said, some of the actresses were rather fetching. If I was an alien stranded in a remote desert town in New Mexico, I'd spark some lightning with a couple of them before the blond one kicked up some serious mind control against my friends (as well as myself) in a pathetic bid to convince me to go home with her so she could be a galactic queen or whatever.
When you're doing remote work, a single tech can service multiple off-site customers simultaneously - usually, these are billed via monthly flat rate managed services contracts. When you're doing field work, though, you can't exactly work on someone else's machine remotely while working on the on-site customer's machines; among other reasons, on-site customers tend to take a dim view of field techs that attempt to "multitask" on their dime. So, even with travel time, it is frequently more profitable to do remote work, which is why so many IT consulting companies are pushing it now.
Yes! Stop stealing the product of the labor of the exploited worker bee, you bourgeoisie capitalist scum sucking pig! Six legs good, two legs bad! Viva la abeja revolucion! Power to the beeple!
He might live in Nevada or some similar state - I've dealt with a number of jobs out here that had some interesting ideas on what appropriate ETO was. My personal favorite was the job that gave me one week a year and insisted that I don't take it "all at once" since it would mean they'd actually have to shuffle scheduling around to cover for me. You don't even want to know what the health plan looked like.
Needless to say, I got out of there ASAP. It was my first tech job, though, so I didn't complain much at the time. In hindsight, I really should have.
MS Office doesn't have built-in Works support, but you can download a beerfree plugin from MS' download page.
I'll have to try Go-oo out; my attempts at importing Works docs using OO.org 3 didn't go anywhere, so I didn't really dig around much further than that.
Slashdot Mirror
In all honesty, I do hear you - it would've been great if they could've done a clean break. Unfortunately, there are far too many programs that rely on IE's integration with the operating system (try using Steam on WINE using the default Gecko engine, for example) or that rely on IE6's original broken behavior (have a bunch of these at work).
When you make a mess as big as the one MS made with Trident, you can't just clean it up overnight, no matter how badly you wish they would.
Yep - they ran with a code base they were already familiar with, had hundreds (thousands?) of programmers trained in, had been pumping tons of money into, had numerous system hooks tied into, needed to keep backwards compatible with older, more broken versions, and had full rights to instead of switching to the same rendering engine as most of their competition. Senseless!
No, you're thinking of the KEBERT XELA fork. I hear it's run out of Canada and asks you lots of questions.
Ah yes, "They Don't Make Them Like They Used To."
Bugs have been around forever. Q/A has been troublesome since the beginning - heck, many of the problems outlined in the Unix Hater's Handbook were the direct result of poor Q/A throughout the... erm... Unixverse. Bloated code? That's been around as long as there's been code - heck, INTERCAL was explicitly designed to produce it! People with no background in IT making decisions and overruling experience? That's also been happening for ages.
That said, I'll give you credit on one thing - yeah, your code was tight, purposeful and optimized for speed or size, at least as far as the machine was concerned. You didn't have a choice. Instead of focusing on maintainability or ease of understanding, programmers had to bend to the machine's thinking instead of the other way around since there just wasn't enough machine to tolerate human weakness. Eventually, though, computers became powerful enough where programming could stop focusing on getting every last clock cycle's worth by any means necessary and more on solving programming problems quickly and easily. Put another way, the programmer's time finally became more valuable than the machine's time. Once that happened, the rules changed - something which those some of those people with "no background in IT" figured out years ago (I hear it's because they had a background in some dark discipline called "accounting") and which a lot of IT people still can't wrap their minds around.
Sure it does. It's on page 2.24.
What you do with your square roots is entirely your business. ;-)
My security plan is turtles all the way down!
Yeah, but you have to outrun the bear long enough to get to the car. It's the classic chicken-or-the-bear problem.
Brown bears run at speeds approaching 40 miles per hour. No human has run faster than 25. You're not outrunning the bear. Not alone, anyway. ;-)
Ah - the "If you want to outrun a bear, the key is not to outrun the bear - it's to outrun the person behind you" principle. That sort of wisdom ranks up there with, "Women are like square roots - if they're under 16, you should do them in your head."
Take that however you will.
Absolutely true. Don't believe it? Check out the list of operating systems officially supported by HP for their servers. It's not like Dell or any of the other major server players are any different on that front. Oh, and yes, you're reading that list right - Debian and Ubuntu Server are both fully supported.
Projectile dysfunction disorder. Basically, does it stay up? If so, it's a rocket test. If it doesn't, it's a missile test.
Stay thristy, my freind.
I've been fiddling with Drupal, Wordpress, and even Alfresco (*shudder*) for a while now and, honestly, the only CMS that I can say is easy to use or even remotely intuitive is Wordpress. Drupal isn't too bad once you wrap your head around how it works, and it's certainly far more flexible than Wordpress ever will be. That said, Drupal is a big, big beast, and if you're not willing or able to spend the time learning its various nooks and crannies, you'll get lost in a hurry. In many respects, it's a lot like *nix - there's a lot of little parts you can bolt on that, if you know what you're doing, can do some really amazing things. If you don't know what you're doing, though, you'll go down in flames.
As for Joomla, I eval'd it for a bit - it seemed that Drupal had better free module and theme support, or, at least, it was a heck of a lot easier to find modules for what I was looking for. Once I found Drupal's Devel module, I decided to stick with it - it helped out immensely.
Keep in mind that the Mac version of Office is little like the PC version. Sure, you get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and something that vaguely resembles Outlook (Entourage - yes, Mac gets real Outlook in the next version). You don't get Access, Project, InfoPath, Groove, Visio, Publisher, or any of the other random bits of Office, though. Put another way, you get just enough to make sure you don't throw some OpenOffice derivative on your Macs - nothing more. Now that Apple is coming out with an Exchange client (i.e. integrating Exchange support into Mail.app), suddenly Microsoft is a little more interested in creating a Mac-native version of Outlook; until then, they hadn't cared in years. That's a Microsoft problem, not a Linux/Apple problem.
As for Codeweaver's business practices... well, I can't vouch for or against them. I've tried running Crossover Office before and all it gave me was the parts of Office that I could "fake" using OpenOffice - namely, Word and Excel. Access didn't work and that's what I really needed at the time, so I just left it alone. Considering how tightly MS integrated Access into Windows' built-in data processing systems, that's not terribly surprising.
That said, I'm with you. Until somebody comes out with an office productivity suite that matches most use cases for most businesses that's cross-platform, we're going to be stuck with Windows (at least on the client side) for a long, long time. The good news is we're getting close - OpenOffice, among others, is good enough on the word processor/spreadsheet front. Honestly, if Base was a little more polished, I think it would meet the needs of most smallish (less than 50 employees) companies easily enough.
For better or worse, you have to use the tools that work for you. In your case, you have a hard requirement - you need MS Project 2003 to work on whatever system you're using. Obviously, if you have a hard requirement that you have to use a Windows-native application, you should probably use the operating system that best supports it, which would be Windows, and that's okay.
The point of WINE is to help your migration path to Linux. If you have an app that only runs under Windows and you need some time to wean yourself off of it, WINE is great for that. If you have a non-critical Windows-only app that you'd like to run from time to time (say, certain games), WINE is great for that. If you have a business-critical Windows app that absolutely needs to run and there's no way you're migrating out of it, just run Windows. Computers are tools and you should configure yours to do what you need it to do - don't let anyone convince you otherwise.
Or I could just go to the Southern Hemisphere, where it's winter in August.
Bob the Printer...
CAN WE PRINT IT?
Bob the Printer...
YES WE CAN!
I'm just waiting for MS to get cute and call their next version of Explorer "Dora".
Oh wow... yeah, as cheesy as Space: Above and Beyond and Battlestar Galactica got at times, at least it didn't go full teenage drama retard. That said, some of the actresses were rather fetching. If I was an alien stranded in a remote desert town in New Mexico, I'd spark some lightning with a couple of them before the blond one kicked up some serious mind control against my friends (as well as myself) in a pathetic bid to convince me to go home with her so she could be a galactic queen or whatever.
I... am a Cylon.
(I knew it! *BLAM* *BLAM* *thud*)
When you're doing remote work, a single tech can service multiple off-site customers simultaneously - usually, these are billed via monthly flat rate managed services contracts. When you're doing field work, though, you can't exactly work on someone else's machine remotely while working on the on-site customer's machines; among other reasons, on-site customers tend to take a dim view of field techs that attempt to "multitask" on their dime. So, even with travel time, it is frequently more profitable to do remote work, which is why so many IT consulting companies are pushing it now.
So, if honey is bee vomit, and if sugar water ferments, does this mean that drunk bees produce mead?
People, we are through the looking glass!
Yes! Stop stealing the product of the labor of the exploited worker bee, you bourgeoisie capitalist scum sucking pig! Six legs good, two legs bad! Viva la abeja revolucion! Power to the beeple!
He might live in Nevada or some similar state - I've dealt with a number of jobs out here that had some interesting ideas on what appropriate ETO was. My personal favorite was the job that gave me one week a year and insisted that I don't take it "all at once" since it would mean they'd actually have to shuffle scheduling around to cover for me. You don't even want to know what the health plan looked like.
Needless to say, I got out of there ASAP. It was my first tech job, though, so I didn't complain much at the time. In hindsight, I really should have.
MS Office doesn't have built-in Works support, but you can download a beerfree plugin from MS' download page.
I'll have to try Go-oo out; my attempts at importing Works docs using OO.org 3 didn't go anywhere, so I didn't really dig around much further than that.