281–290 of 307 posts
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All this is a poor excuse for perpetuating monopoly, which should be simply illegal.
The thing that should be illegal is the kind of secret deals that MS makes with PC manufacturers; see this for example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsof...
> As for myself, I had fallen in love with the iPhone, so using a Mac on a day-to-day basis was a must. I don't understand this. Why do you need a Mac if you use an iPhone? I have not used iTunes to manage my iPhone in half a decade I think. Is there any connection left between iOS and macOS? From a user point of view?
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Honestly gnome shell is the greatest thing ever. My focus and productivity skyrocketet. I see how people who would prefer to run XP dont like it. But no reason to make it bad.
I can agree on this, the booster was super key to show all window, I've never been this fast to context switch between window.
i want to bring this to lxde someday
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Is it really compatible with Office files? It's not enough to be able to open 99% of the files properly, the main problem that makes libreoffice/openoffice unusable for me is that if I open a MS Office Word or Excel file, change a single character, and send it back, the file is likely to have other unintended changes in formatting or layout.
By your criteria I suspect nothing can be really compatible except the same version of MS Office that created the file. However, it has been compatible enough for all I have done in the last year and a half. If some file doesn't open or save correctly, a bug report can be filled here: http://wps-community.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10
It comes down to a simple test that can be easily automated - take a test file (created in MS Office), run the load-from-MS-format operation, run the save-to-MS-format operation, verify that the resulting file is identical to the source file. There might be some differences in metadata (e.g. timestamps) but the document file content should be byte-for-byte identical. If not, then the software isn't MS Office compatible yet.
It does mean that your internal in-memory document structure must be able to hold all of the information that MS Office files contain, and that the conversions between MS Office data structures and your internal data structures cannot be lossy, so your internal structure can't be so conceptually different in any aspect that you can't unambiguously convert to it and back - but that is required for interoperability, so that multiple people can do long term work on the same document with different tools.
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> as long as they aren't forced to pay the nasty Windows tax. It is much simpler just not to ship any OS to customers that want to avoid the Microsoft tax (indeed some vendors sell PCs without any installed OS - in particular for enterprise customers; I also). This has the advantage that they don't have to provide support to customers that are using the installed GNU/Linux distribution. But note that avoiding the "Mi…
> it is much simpler just not to ship any OS to customers that want to avoid the Microsoft tax Simpler yes, but it would undermine MS monopolistic control. That's why MS force manufacturers not to sell such computers. Their leverage is simple. If they would sell such, MS would raise the price of Windows for them. Most give in to blackmail. See https://web.archive.org/web/20150714080353/http://www.justic...
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Agree. Libreoffice works quite well, and although their presentation software isn't as pretty as powerpoint, I actually prefer their slideshow mode on multiple monitors. Quite sexy, in fact. There's no reason for any government office or public school system at any level to be paying for office licenses IMHO. We can communicate and teach quite well with L.O.- and donate a share of the saved budget to FOSS.
Where do you draw the line for how much you can cut costs and sacrifice a little bit of productivity or retraining? For example, I often see programmers talk about having proper tools to do their job, whether that be high quality keyboards, faster computers with more memory, or subscription IDEs like Intellij. Should government programmers be denied these things because it is possible to program quite well without th…
That would free more money so that the people who did need or could truly benefit from premium tools could get them.
I liked this essay, but I also wanted to rant for a bit about how the state of the Linux Desktop is just one particularly glaring example of a bigger problem, which is that instead of building something that works for most use cases, it seems to be popular to build things that work really well for one use case and not so well for others. Which in some cases is fine, but when we're talking about infrastructure like op…
> then I'd have to educate all my users on how to run java apps on their platform. Only if you do a bad service to your users by not packaging them correctly.
(I admit that I'm not very knowledgeable about how Java is used in 2017; there may be some cross-platform solution for distributing Java programs to people who might or might not already have the JVM installed of which I am unaware.)
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By your criteria I suspect nothing can be really compatible except the same version of MS Office that created the file. However, it has been compatible enough for all I have done in the last year and a half. If some file doesn't open or save correctly, a bug report can be filled here: http://wps-community.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10
Is that really that high bar to say that "nothing can be really compatible"? It comes down to a simple test that can be easily automated - take a test file (created in MS Office), run the load-from-MS-format operation, run the save-to-MS-format operation, verify that the resulting file is identical to the source file. There might be some differences in metadata (e.g. timestamps) but the document file content should b…
Yes. Different MS Office versions can produce different results.
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An extra point is that OEMs charge to distribute third-party software, which is usually called crapware. If you install a lot of crapware, you can reduce the cost of Windows close to zero. That's why OEMs do it even though users don't like it. If one of your users subscribes to the bundled AV software then you can make a recurring income from Windows that can be larger than the profit you made on the hardware. Offeri…
All this is a poor excuse for perpetuating monopoly, which should be simply illegal.
Microsoft won the market fair and square (against an even more evil and much larger monopolist), and Linux has been built on the market created by Microsoft's de facto standards and the economies of scale that Windows has generated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All this is a poor excuse for perpetuating monopoly, which should be simply illegal.
The thing that should be illegal is the kind of secret deals that MS makes with PC manufacturers; see this for example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsof...