Way to go, Tim! You're on your way to open-source freedom!
Here are some things I like about FC4 vs. MS:
It's free. MS is asking 0 for the "reinstallable" version of XP. That's just too damn much, IMO. And with FC4, nobody's tracking your usage.
It's stable and well-structured. I can easily go for weeks without rebooting, even after installing something major.
It's mult-user and multi-tasking. Yeah, sure MS *says* the same for XP, but it doesn't really measure up. There are very few times something hangs so severly that I must reboot. I keep my wife logged in all the time and can instantly switch back and forth between her desktop and mine.
Viruses? What viruses?
I really hope more folks see that there are viable alternatives to MS, especially in this day and age.
You're preaching to the guy that ate the choir!!! (I know, I know it's only going to be a 0.1% of the readers that are going to get the reference ... And it's too long to explain :-( )
Shame, shame, shame on you for not mentioning Firefox!!!! (to counter the number 1 evil, from the evil empire!! :-)) And Thunderbird!!! (to replace the #2 evil)
It's been more than six years that I have not had MS Office on my machine (the last version I ever had or used was Office 97 !!!). As for IE or Outlook, I have *never* used either one of them (well, IE is unavoidable, as some applications use it directly without the user having any saying... Plus the updates... But Outlook, that one,
*never*, not a single instance under any circumstance)
Ohhh, nice!!! You did go for PostgreSQL instead of the unbelievably crappy toy that is MySQL !!! Ok, kudos... You're forgiven for omiting Firefox ;-)
Check. (actually, the latest version of Wine does run most things quite nicely -- it even runs installers to actually perform installations: it creates a directory drive_c under the .wine config dir, and creates the Program Files directory, etc. etc. Pretty impressive). But yeah, VMWare really does kick butt !
Just three months ago?? Shame, shame, sh.... Oh, wait, no, you're a PostgreSQL fan... Ok, you're forgiven for this one too :-)
(been using Linux since the days of RedHat 5.2 -- back around
1998)
But it's nice to hear the support and the feeling that I'm not alone (well, I do know that I'm not alone; you know what I'm saying :-))
Huh... Bringing the thread back on-topic, eh? Nice!!!! :-) (I mean, really, when you think about it: NICE!!)
Well, you now need to switch to Firefox for web browsing and to Thunderbord for e-mail and news...
Then, you'll soon notice that you can switch to Linux (BTW, Randy, Fedora Core 5 is out -- has been for some two or three weeks now -- haven't tried it yet ... soon) and will barely notice the difference -- well, you *will* notice the difference when you realize how long it's been since you haven't been forced to reboot or to reinstall due to viruses, etc. You'll also notice it when you receive junk e-mail from antivirus making companies and realize that you don't even need to read it!! :-)
I haven't tried any of these alternate virtual machines, but vmware is awesome. I was able to run CCS in it with a parallel port JTAG and all the drivers worked just fine. Absolutely amazing.
But the really cool thing is: all those damn reboots MS needs can now happen inside the virtual machine without a single real reboot.
Holy cow. People write _books_ using word-processors? That seems a bit like digging a canal with a trowel.
OOo is fine for a letter or fax, but I switch to LaTeX for anything that
1) is over a page long
2) has a table of contents, index, or auto-numbering of table, figures, equations, etc.
2) has any equations in it
3) needs to look like it was professionally typeset
I've never seen anything that can equal TeX's hyphenation and line-breaking, and (AFAICT) OOo doesn't even do ligatures at all. At least OOo gets points for doing an acceptible job of kerning.
I wanted to write it in LaTeX, but the editor I signed with made it clear that I would be _very_ unpopular with their production people if I did.
You can write book-length stuff in OOo (obviously), but you have to pay attention. Frankly, being able to see the equations and figures in the text as I'm writing helps my miniature brain grasp what the reader is going to see which in turn helps me do a better job presenting the material.
Right. Plus, you can do neat things with (La)TeX that you can't do with other systems. One of my favorite things, especially in engineering reports and the like that deal with Matlab, is to have Matlab spit out the LaTeX source code of the results (ala "printf" statments) and then \input it into your document. Ta-da: seamless integration, no typo's.
Here's the deal: If the Subject: line is entirely bracketed text, it will appear on any page.
Bracketed text on the Subject: line (if it comes AFTER unbracketed text) will appear on any page.
Bracketed text that comes **BEFORE** unbracketed text will be blanked on the front page for the newsgroup; it will appear on all other pages. . . Another interesting Google Groups syntax screw-up:
formatting link
you click the *show options* link, you will see that the Email: for Rubicon is enclosed in parenthesis; at the entry for the post (#20) in the left frame, no author is listed. 8-)
*+Seamonkey+*-DOM-*The suite has had a DOM Inspector for years--natively. Firefox only got it as an extension recently.
Unless something has changed very recently, those who use Firefox+Thunderbird will have a larger memory footprint than those who use the suite. (As the code for the individual apps is optimized, this should shrink and likely disappear.)
Having the HTML editor, Mozilla Composer (nee Netscape Composer), open with a click from within my browser is kinda nice too. If you use Firefox, you have to obtain & install Nvu individually.
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