Posts by Oliver 10

Old PCs: When it's time to die

FOSS is like the Fountain of Youth

No need to trash the machines, For transaction workers, and I am one for the most part:

Win98 era machine ----> DSL Linux or Puppy is very complete and capable

Win2000 era Machine ----> Lubuntu, Debian

WinXP (up to about 2004) ----> Lubuntu, Debian

WinXP/Vista/7 (2005 on) ----> Ubuntu

Also Linux is easy to make into hybrid thin clients on old machine for any big iron tasks using any of several protocals. OK so there is multiple distro's to maintain (its not a monoculture, BUT no licening hassles, no software audits, malware prevention and remediation goes WAY down....)

Botnet with 60GB of stolen data cracked wide open

These articles do a great disservice....

These articles do a great disservice.... when the reporter fails to dig a little further. A VERY important detail to expose to the reader here is what OS and browsers are prone to Zues (and the vast majority of botnot infections for that matter) and which ARE NOT. Like this commenter as well I have moved to a different OS (in my case GNU/Linux), in part because of the massive malware epidemic out there. Yes, running an alternative OS does not make you immune, but it is like having a vaccine that cuts that risk of infection by 98-99%. This type of information needs to be exposed to the reader to allow for informed choice.

Dell warns on spyware infected server motherboards

Probably made by the lowest bidder om hardware....

which of course is probably in China. So why not have the state slip in some interesting goodies into the BIOS.

Was Microsoft's Office 2010 worth killing Clippy?

Open Office kicks the pants off the MSOffice

Open Office kicks the pants off the MSOffice, having used both I have been delighted by the ability of OO to write 200 page technical reports on, something MSOffice (2000 and 1997 versions) more often than not cached and corrupted my report files....crap. Another bonus OO maintains a wonderful stability of formats across the versions, ODF compliance makes it a delight for document archival....also I have used Google Docs for lightweight work and its is really good for collaboration, it show great promise, much better than Sharepoint.

MS hopes biz punters will guzzle Office 2010

OpenOffice is pretty darn good

OO is pretty good...I'd give it a serious look-see

Bonus

User learning curve:

MSOffice2003 ---> OO v2.X or 3.X = EASY

MSOffice2003 ---> MSOffice2007 = CONFUSING AS H*LL

ODF's doomed mission to break into Microsoft Office

No need to respond

As soon as organizations slowly use some ODF compliant offices (OO, Staroffice, NeoOffice, GOffice,...) they'll see the very valid utility of a persistent format that allows documents a decade old to be recalled without crazy gyrations. They (FOSS advocates) won't need to complain as the market forces will realize this a is "killer" feature of truly ODF compliant software.

OpenOffice 3.2 is on tap

The dang ribbon

That danged ribbon is what drove me to OO in the first place. At work I have a choice of OO v2.4 or MS Office 2007. I HAD v2003 until about 18months ago when they upgraded my machine but disallowed downgrades....so I checked out OO v2.4, decided it had less of a learning curve and haven't looked back. Nice side bonus: I can write 100 page reports with graphs, pics and the like and keeping the last 5 copies of changes is probably just paranoia carried over from having MS Word crash on my in really bad ways, corrupting the documents....have YET to have OO bone me up in the same way. Sure its "not pretty" but I'll take the function over the from any day. Nice job by Sun...

Windows 7 - Microsoft minus the martyrdom

Now have used 7

The wife ordered a new laptop that came with 7. It has enough UI changes to be confusing. Also the horsepower of the machine it comes on and it does feel kinda slow. At the same time she had ordered a refurbished machine that is roughly half the CPU power and half the RAM with XP SP3 and it feels positively snappy (although the intended user, the teenager son states he wants Ubuntu on it....), with I had stopped learning new windows with XP and that will remain so. There is less of a learning curve going to GNU/Linux (most mainline distro's) from XP than to 7. Most of the machines we have are now running either Ubuntu or Puppy these dayss...

Why can't Google be more like Microsoft?

Two missles at two different casgh cows

First off Google is successfully (but quietly) monetizing its efforts in other others...the recent contract to support LA's county government with SaaS/cloud using its docs is but the latest. It gives away a lot as loss leaders, not the least of which was search (with advertising as the revenue) but its mail and now its docs are successfully generating revenue.

As to Android it's a missile that will threaten one of Apple's three major cash cows, the iPhone (the others being the Mac and the iPod-iTunes ecosystem). I myself have refused an iPhone due to it closed culture and locked-up architecture, while i just might find myself willing to get a Droid being a bazaar-like system. Meanwhile, the ChromeOS is aimed right at the underbelly of both of Microsoft's cash cows (Office and Windows), but mainly at the low-end market. I could really see the ChromeOS going crazy with the college crowd (and eating into the iMac/iBook market too). One thing is I hope Google does address some local processing/storgae capability for when the 3G/wireless LAN is down. A real paradigm shift and a risk....but I think it may well pay off bigtime...

Steve Ballmer's Windows 7 dance party

HoHum

This was barely worth reporting, I can't wait for net Thursday though when Karmic Koala hits the streets...!

Students get deep Windows 7 price break

Ho Hmm

Forget discounts, after using Ubuntu, CentOS and Puppy for some years now and enjoying the win-back of time from not having to do proactive firewalling/virus scanning/malware much less recovery from clickjacking, registry corruption, and reinstalls from registry rot; I would expect MS to PAY ME to use their POS Operating System...

Microsoft gets personal on Windows 7 "show stopper" bug

Gotta Love that Open Source

In the open source world this would be a non-issue, it would be an open call to hacks to who can get the best patch up the fastest to plug a memory leak........one more reason to run with the Penguin

OpenOffice bug/feature stirs 'horde of angry chimps'

Open Office is VERY GOOD

"People seem to judge OpenOffice by its compatibility with MS Office" I a way yes...Our worksite went from MS Office 2003 to 2007 about a year ago. I gave The Ribbon and the buggy slow support of .doc and .xls for about 3-4 months before I really get fed up. Unfortunately the help desk didn't allow downgrades back to Office 2003, not did they allow Open Office on the WinXP machines. Fortunately where I work you can be issued the old recycled hardware installed with CentOS (GNU/Linux) for "research purposes" , well I submitted as I will run some heavies of FEA and Matlab, and got it with Open Office. Have been writing technical papers, a dissertation, and bulletins on this. Open Office is excellent in its own right, symbolic linking, macro programming, LaTex extensibility, Calc BASIC,...it goes on. What is funny is I have this paranoid habit of keeping older versions of the document as I had some BAD experiences with MS Office bombing out and corrupting large reports and spreadsheets, with OO this seems silly as it has been so robust. Kudos to Sun on this one.....

Retailers prepped for Windows 7 family pack

Still a total Ripoff

$149.00 clams is still a ripoff when you can get superior quality software in most of the major GNU/Linux Distros, use Ubuntu 8.06 at home CentOS5 at work. As far as OpenOffice goes I am writing a doctoral dissertation in Writer, MS Office 2007 from 2003 was too much of a change so if I am forced to relearn a suite I might as well get open to ODF (OASIS). The dissertation is heavily technical, lots of equations, figures, charts and its handling it well. Cross Referencing is great, auto-numbering, outlining, bibliography import from the database....I am sold, OO is getting better in leaps and bounds. BTW using v2.4 (haven't even seen v3.0 yet). In fact given the stability and "it just works" bliss of GNU/Linux, I'd REQUIRE M$ to PAY ME that amount to just run their crap with all of the Patch Tuesdays, malware, BSOD, incompatibilities and other headaches.

Microsoft's Windows 7 price gamble opens door to Linux

Actually Open Source Leverages talent and energy really quite effectively

"It's such a disappointment. As a fiscal conservative, I believe the failure of open source to innovate is for the same reason the Soviet union failed to innovate and was forced to copy Western technology. It is a failure to provide creative people with freedom, property rights and an ability to profit from their ideas. It's not just top programmers who avoid this collectivized business model, but artists and other talent"

As some one using closed and open source OSes for years, I find that actual innovation more often than not seems to crop in the open source world, albeit in an often unpolished and non-intuitive fashion, and then commercial OSes and apps pick it up from there polishing it up and cleaning up the user interface issues.

HTML code and the original client and server side browsers, open source project out of CERN

Packetized Networking pretty much developed in universities as open source projects

Active directory is a clone of network file system - out of open standards UNIX

want to most powerful symbolic math engines, look at Maxima which is open source

The list goes on from there, in short the Right Wing monetization of talent pays the bills but only goes so far, open source leverages often more powerful motivators like "bragging rights", public recognition of craftsmanship, and pride of ownership (not many closed source codes have the author/programmer's name attached to it for bug reports, help, feedback).