10:33 – We’re back at comfortable inventory levels on all our kits, so I can spend some time today placing orders for more components.
In fact, I just cut a PO for a bunch of components. In what must be a corollary of Murphy’s Law, the one line item we really, really need (we’re down to two in stock) was for 480 10 mL graduated cylinders. That, of course, is the one item the vendor is back-ordered on. Oh well, I’ll pick up a few from another vendor, enough to hold us until the back-order ships in about 30 days.
For ten years our computers been running Linux exclusively, but I’m about to bag Linux in favor of Microsoft Windows. Don’t get me wrong. I still don’t like Microsoft, but I dislike it less than I dislike Apple. And what other realistic options are there for the desktop? I’m tired of desktop Linux “upgrades” that break things that used to work. I’m tired of not being able just to plug in a mainstream scanner and have it work without hours of screwing around with manually loading drivers and editing configurations. I’m tired of entire classes of application software disappearing. Right now, for example, there is no longer a WYSIWYG HTML editor that runs on Linux Mint. And I’m tired of mainstream applications like Firefox and Libre Office that crash frequently and remove useful features with every “update”. I’m just tired.
And, no, this is not an April Fools post. I’m seriously thinking about bring up one Windows 8/8.1 desktop system just to see if I can live with it. But I think I’ll wait and give Linux one more chance. When Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu LTS releases later this month, I’ll take a look at them and see if I can live with one of them.
Why not install Windows 7 … rather than 8/8.1 ?
I’m seriously thinking about bring up one Windows 8/8.1 desktop system just to see if I can live with it.
While Windows 8.1 does fix a lot of the annoying issues with Windows 8.0, it still does not work as well as Windows 7 in my opinion. I have a system at work that runs 8.1 but my working system will continue to be Windows 7. A lot of that has to do with inertia. I just feel like formatting my system and starting from scratch. Yeh, I know you can upgrade from W7 to W8 but that always leaves some problems.
You may want to consider W7 before you commit to W8. Personally I think you will still bitch about problems. No OS is perfect and there are always irritating factors in any OS. What Windows does offer that Linux does not, as you have experienced, is much broader support for other devices. It is not always perfect as more than once I have had to remove a printer driver and reinstall for no apparent reason.
I use Apple stuff and have it really stable and like it. Run W7 in a VM for some Windows only software (Atmel Studio). I don’t like Apple’s CEO after his “climate change deniers should get out of Apple stock” at the annual shareholder meeting. What a dipshit.
Biggest problem with Apple for me: no real support from game companies. Second biggest: high prices due to high margins at Apple. Apple’s profit margin (over 20%) is insanely high for a large, mature industry. The fanbois out there need to realize that they are being screwed. And aren’t thanked afterwards.
The fanbois out there need to realize that they are being screwed.
Perhaps. For people that are on the right side of the curve it would seem that way. But for people on the left they are not.
I base my experience on visiting the local Apple store. Support is really, really good. People that are complete idiots are always helped. Such help even when the system is out of warranty. I saw no such behavior when I was in a Microsoft Store while visiting a mall in DC. The Apple store was crowded, the Microsoft store not at all.
Support, in person, is one thing that Apple provides, and provides it quite well, that other platforms do not provide. Buy a Windows laptop and you have what, Best Buy Good Squad, whose pat answer is format and reinstall.
I saw people in the Apple store with their Macbooks getting help in several different issues. Of course some of this may be because accomplishing something in OS/S is really simple or almost impossible.
I am not a Apple fanboy. But I have to admire their product, a complete package of software and hardware. The designs are really nice right down to the packaging of the product.
If only Microsoft would provide a couple of Windows logo stickers as Apple does with each product I would be happy.
“If only Microsoft would provide a couple of Windows logo stickers as Apple does with each product I would be happy.”
http://www.modsticker.com/
Ya happy now? Second best to free.
I myself am a compulsive sticker-remover.
I can’t hack the much higher prices for Apple products, and I got an iPhone only because it was free when I upgraded at my Verizon account this past year. So far it’s OK, but just, and it evidently, like our daughter’s iPad, won’t see our wireless net here. And updates while it’s hooked up to iTunes on this computer take forever.
As I said in yesterday’s posts, I’d second or third the recommendations for Windows 7 over 8 in a haht-beat. But I’d also wait for the LTS releases of the Canonical products; maybe you’ll end up with a mix of machines; some work better at certain stuff than others. Whatever works.
Not sure what I’d do currently with a going business concern like yours, that mandates reliability/uptime, security, and the necessity of successful integration with various peripherals and other software apps, some of them external, like the shipping companies, etc. Especially when you’ve already got a bunch of machines in place and up and running daily.
Low fotties here this week and so fah, sunny with blue skies. Weather liars say spring is busting out all over the Northeast. We shall see.
“No OS is perfect and there are always irritating factors in any OS.”
Amen! That’s why I always have an assortment of Windows, Linux, and Android boxen handy. When I get peeved with one, I rotate to the next one. By the time I get back around to the first, I have calmed down. Sadly, the problems don’t often cure themselves. I predict it will always be so. Today, I don’t seem to have any wisdom at all to share, but that doesn’t stop me. A little worse than most days.
I don’t give up on Linux, because there is always hope that some app dev will come along and understand what business users need. At least I have a choice now that I am retired.
I like Windows 7. It has been around long enough to get most of the showstoppers fixed and is new enough that MS will continue to support it for several more years. It has a great general search function that has always found what I was looking for whether it is a document file or a system setting.
On the application side MS Word is pretty average but Excel is the best of the spreadsheets. Rock solid, advanced solver and the great graphing capabilities. I’ve tried several others, Excel always wins.
Sigh, it is April fools day. That said, unless you have a touch screen monitor, I would install Windows 7 x64. Windows 8.x needs a little more seasoning. And please install 16 GB of ram and a SSD. That combination feels like the I/O channel of a mainframe (wide and ultra high speed).
Touch screen monitors will become a lot more prevalent over time. But the effort required to raise your arms and leave a smear mark on your screen will be so tough that few people will routinely practice it.
And good luck on finding a scanner that does not have a buggy bios. Or buggy device driver, I cannot decide. We currently use a Xerox Documate 510 scanner with a sheet feeder for our scanning. The Windows 7 x64 pc has to be rebooted after every 2 or 3 scans.
BTW, our latest customer support problem is people calling in with very strange issues with our software. Our software has the ability to bring just about any pc to its knees for long periods of time with saturated cpu, math coprocessor and i/o channel so it brings any pc problems to the user’s attention.
We ask them if they have rebooted recently and some of them admit to not rebooting in the last month or two. We ask them to reboot and the problems go away. So, Windows for the general audience has become so reliable (on the surface) that they just do not reboot anymore. Ever.
Windows 8 (or 8.1) with Classic Shell (http://www.classicshell.net) is “good enough”, in my opinion, for most uses. You’ll want to confirm peripheral and application support.
Rick in Portland
“So, Windows for the general audience has become so reliable (on the surface) that they just do not reboot anymore. Ever.”
Agree. I have a couple of old Windows 2000 installs on ancient hardware, still in use internally. Since MS stopped updates, there is no reason to restart them. I have been resuming one of them from Hibernate (suspend to disk) for well over a year.
(Not intending to start a flame war,) I wish my Linux installations were as stable. Most common failure of Mint KDE (have been using KDE for years, my fav) is resumption from Hibernate. The only consolation is that it recovers pretty gracefully after a cold start, with no apparent ill effects. I think this might be a hardware problem, but occasional tests have revealed nothing. Ordinarily, I would set up an identical system (have one) exactly the same for testing, but there never seems to be enough time. IIRC, I did have similar problems with the same system running another distro. The other identical computer has been pretty solid with a variety of Linux distros. Both of these are test systems, so this is only an annoyance.
Meanwhile, I support a couple of business Win XP systems. These have a custom tailored OS and SW load by a seemingly adept IT department. Other than three hardware failures, these have run flawlessly for as long as I have been involved, several years. Next move is to either Win 7 or 8 on new hardware, “very soon.” I hope this is smooth. Of course, forced by planned obsolescence.
All this shows that any OS is probably capable of good service in the hands of gurus. Wish I were one of those!
OS discussions remind me of similar discussions among automobile buffs. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could take all of the great features over time, none of the bad, and put all into one car or OS. Wow, just wow!
Of course, each of us gets to decide on the list of features we want in our personal car, or OS, or house, or… 😉
Hey OFD, you might like this work of fiction:
_Holding Their Own_ by Joe Nobody
http://www.amazon.com/Holding-Their-Own-Story-Survival/dp/061556965X/
First book in a series of seven books about the economic collapse of the USA in 2015.
Umm, this book was published in 2011 just as the shale oil and gas boom was really getting cranked up. The book has crude oil at $350/barrel and gasoline at $6/gallon in 2015. Not gonna happen so the major driver of economic collapse in the USA is invalid for the book.
That said, the book is a good story about the collapse and failure of the government in the USA. The writing is a little flat and I hope it gets better in subsequent books. The book is centered in Texas which makes it very interesting to me since I am a Texas resident. I have ordered two of the subsequent books.
My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.1 out of 5 stars (249 reviews)
I’m tired of entire classes of application software disappearing. Right now, for example, there is no longer a WYSIWYG HTML editor that runs on Linux Mint.
Are you serious about this? Do apps really just disappear for Linux?
One of the problems that I have found with Windows is that the x64 version does not support Dos16, Dos32 or Win16 apps anymore. I regard this as sophomoric on Microsoft’s part as they are perfectly capable of providing this capability and meeting their security needs. Luckily, the freeware market has provided a excellent tool for running Dos16 and Dos32 apps:
http://www.dosbox.com/
I do not have an easy solution for Win16 apps without running a Virtual Machine which are a little painful to setup and require a previous version of Windows x86.
Yes, I’m serious. I started out with Mozilla Composer, which was discontinued. One of the early Linux releases, Linspire, picked it up and released an updated version as N|Vu, which also was discontinued. It forked again and became KompoZer, the last stable release of which is dated August 2007. It’s not in the repositories for the Linux Mint version I’m running now, and attempting to install it from a tarball just doesn’t work. There’s another one called BlueGriffon, but I’d have to build that from source and I just don’t want to screw around with that.
For Mr. OFD:
An article from the WSJ on cracking through Tor.
won’t see our wireless net here.
Reset your network connections in your phone (settings, general, reset, Reset Network Settings). Then restart the device by holding the home and power button until the Apple logo appears. You will not lose any data. Also make sure your SSID does not have ANY special characters such as a dash (-) in the SSID. Use WPA Personal.
On the application front, Excell is indeed excellent, and Word is fine. The ribbon is brain dead for power users, and the “new” XML format is deliberately a mess designed to inhibit interoperability.
Outlook is a mess. Once running, it is generally stable, but version upgrades and multilingual issues are a disaster. The PST files are black holes that even Outlook often seems to have trouble with. And again lock in – want to do a mass export, and your choice of formats are: PST, PDF and TFT. It would be difficult to choose a more useless set of options.
I have finally convinced my wife to get rid of Office – Outlook is the last holdout.
British sniper in Afghanistan kills six Taliban with one bullet!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/10735666/British-sniper-in-Afghanistan-kills-six-Taliban-with-one-bullet.html
Way to go!
I do wonder if he in fact hit the switch on the suicide vest. Depending on what type of explosive it was, just the bullet impact may have sufficed to detonate it.
I used the DOSbox app to play Doom II and III on Windows 8, briefly, mainly because the graphics didn’t work well with the monitor settings or something and then a couple of times the desktop came back all funky and I had to reboot.
Thanks for that wireless info, Ray; jury is still out; did your routine but we have pretty crappy wireless access here, all along the lake shore, for some reason, and on top of that a big pile of scrap metal at the town garage a couple of hundred yards from our front door. Daughter got onto our neighbor’s wireless while she was here, evidently unsecured, but not ours. I’ll have to try my phone at different spots around the house and yard, I guess. The current situation is we have our cells for when we’re out somewhere or at work, and the landline at the house. Interestingly just now, I got the IMDB site but not gmail on it. And doing updates without it connected to the pooter is apparently a no-go; it churns for a minute and then does nothing, for whichever apps I try to update.
On the M$ Office apps; you can at least pick and choose the ones you want a la carte and not buy the whole Office package.
As for the Tor project; they’ve been getting funding and management help from state organizations, which is already a problem, including “law enforcement.” Then along comes that child molestation ring and more problems arise. It’s a cat-and-mouse routine, like those old Tom & Jerry cartoons; I was playing around with various scenarios here and once again, sooner or later a security fence gets busted, whether it’s a state operation or otherwise, plus, as with that case, the whole thing is subject to human error. I don’t have anything, really, that I care about securing, other than our family/household financial data; identities are long since compromised, and any attempt to change them would be fraught with difficulties we wouldn’t be interested in dealing with.
Easiest and most effective method is to simply encrypt our data and then secure it in an off-site location periodically. If we wish to encrypt email and suchlike, then the other parties involved have to similarly participate in said measures. No one we know has the slightest interest.
I suppose I could: really harden the router; dedicate a Linux machine to using a Whonix vm, run Tor in that, and offshore email. All encrypted. Or simply run the CryptoHippie package on various machines, esp. the Windows boxen. Or carry around Tails on a USB stick and just boot it wherever and whenever, using the persistence method to retain data, also encrypted. This is all great if you’re a political refugee and/or dissenter in a tough regime, or engaged in other activities that require it.
But like I say, all we have is our boring financial data, which goes back and forth between the banks and mortgage company and government anyway, and how secure is that?
If the State wants to bust little ol’ me for stuff I rant about here, in email, or on FaceCrack, then they’re really reaching for stuff to do. Far more dangerous characters out here, and within their own precincts, which is what they really ought to concentrate on, not OFD waxing dystopic about the Collapse, Armageddon and Apocalypse and how our government sucks and its leaders belong on chain gangs or against a firing squad wall.
As regards: “There’s another one called BlueGriffon, but I’d have to build that from source and I just don’t want to screw around with that.”
What, the binary download that they offer for Ubuntu doesn’t work? Out of curiosity, I just tried it under Gentoo (about as far from Ubuntu as you can get), and it started up fine, though I didn’t try actually using it.
I used to hate having to compile things from source, back when I was using “user-friendly” sorts of Linux distributions. There was all this installing of “-devel” packages that was necessary: even when a required library was already on the system, they’d tried to save space by not including the files needed to compile code to call it, and instead putting that in a separate “…-devel” package. So there was a whole process of trying to compile, finding missing dependencies, installing those, and repeating. Now that I’m using “unfriendly” distributions, it’s become much easier.
ech beat me to it; I was gonna post that sniper news here earlier; that is an amazing rifle they got.
Plus another one in development that shoots around corners, evidently.
Note to Norman; I’m still having to do that compiling and dependency stuff, and I was doing it at work with RHEL constantly. A real PITA that nevertheless kept me employed there for two years, anyway.
But finding it still cropping up for even getting the most basic crap working on various Linux distros.
No, or at least it didn’t the last time I tried it several months ago.
One trick for uncooperative Linux programs is not to try to run the program from a GUI, but instead run it from a terminal window. When a program fails to start, there’s usually some sort of error message which gets printed out in the terminal window, and in a GUI is just lost.
True, that; CLI is king! Even for Windoze sys admins now, with PowerShell, which M$ tells them they’d better learn, and PDQ, too!
I’m now building a Portable Apps stick again; this has Windows apps on it which can also run via WINE on various Linux distros. It’s a 64GB running USB 3.0 and it goes next to my Tails stick. And a couple of bootable Linux sticks. I may build a bootable Windows stick, too.
Drove around in the Saab convertible this afternoon but did not lower the top yet and I did not see those girls go by dressed in their summer clothes yet, so I didn’t have to turn my head until the darkness goes….etc.
Oh, yeah. For a month or two I had KompoZer working from a terminal window, but then it just stopped working. Presumably one of the Mint updates borked it.
Oh, yeah. For a month or two I had KompoZer working from a terminal window, but then it just stopped working. Presumably one of the Mint updates borked it.
I have very little experience with Linux other than my Droid Bionic phone. However, I am starting to get the impression that Linux has Dependency hell just about as bad as Windows had DLL hell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell
versus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell
“…Presumably one of the Mint updates borked it.”
I would not be in the least surprised; I’ve had Ubuntu and Mint “updates” bork stuff before, including internet connections. I just did the updates for the Mint 13 laptop here and had to edit out the MediBuntu repo site as a source. All else went well, except now the WINE download/install is taking forever.
And my Portable Apps stick is about halfway done and also taking forever.
This time of day the internet sucks here; just the bad old days of AO-Hell when everyone and his brother, sister and cousins logged in during the weeknight dinner hours.
And Mrs. OFD hath procured the airline tix and suchlike for our little jaunt to Mordor later this month, with more time spent at layovers at Newark’s airport than we actually spend in the air. I haven’t flown commercial air since 1994 so this should be interesting; I will be carrying none of my usual stuff, that’s for sure.
“For ten years our computers been running Linux exclusively, but I’m about to bag Linux in favor of Microsoft Windows.”
Happy 1/4.
“And, no, this is not an April Fools post.”
Yeah, right!
I think it more likely that you’ll become a devout Southern Baptist than switch to Windows and stay there.
I’m predicting that a mix will work out in the end. Windows for some stuff, Linux for other things. Mrs. OFD now has two Windows 7 laptops, one she carries with her for work and the other as backup. I have this Windows 8 machine, mainly for her use also, but also media stuff that gets streamed, and even so, there are a bunch of open-source apps on here, like LibreOffice, Gimp, Kindle, GnuCash, VLC, Python, various torrent apps, etc.
Other than that, two Linux laptops, a Linux netbook, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9, a Fedora 20 desktop and the RHEL 6.5 server. If not for her, I could get by pretty well by now with just the Linux machines.
” I’m tired of desktop Linux “upgrades” that break things that used to work. I’m tired of not being able just to plug in a mainstream scanner and have it work without hours of screwing around with manually loading drivers and editing configurations.”
Yuuup…that is exactly why I gave up on it. I realized that it was taking me into the terminal phase of the industrial revolution. Characterized by the fact that the machines were no longer working for me; I was working for them.
And then I just bought a new wireless Canon scanner, copier, printer right after the holidays and had it up and running in 10 minutes.
With Linux, the lower levels (the kernel and glibc) are rock solid: they have a strong philosophy of backward compatibility. You might have to upgrade to a newer version of glibc to run programs compiled for it, and you might have to upgrade to a newer kernel to use its newer features, but in either case newer is always better (well, with rare exceptions). The levels above that, though, are prone to change. That’s where you might need to use an older version of some particular library. That’s not a problem on a technical level since (as with newer Windows releases) mechanisms exist for different versions of the same library to coexist. On a social level, however, well, where do you get the older version from? Either your distribution offers a package for it, or it doesn’t, and commonly it doesn’t. One solution is to bundle all the libraries you use, which is what the BlueGriffon tarball I downloaded seems to do: it has its own copies of things like the SSL library. But then with stuff like that, using old versions means you don’t pick up on security fixes.
What, you don’t like working for machines? Hell, our kids and grandkids will be taking orders from robots. Soldiers and cops will be robots; soon they can dump the fake pilots running drones from underground bunkers and getting decorated for it.
Just now the microwave ordered me to remove a plate…gotta run….
Internet security is a hard topic. I have often been tempted to use Tor, just to provide more innocent traffic for people to hide under – some people genuinely do need anonymity.
On the other hand, I have pretty much come to the conclusion that Tor has become a giant honeypot – you can’t tell me that governments don’t have their fingers all over it, because they know people they want are using it. Even if governments just run enough entry and exit nodes, that suffices to completely compromise the security.
While I’m not a security expert, I suspect you are better off having a wide selection of proxies, chaining them 2 or 3 at a time, and switching which ones you are using frequently. With encryption throughout – that goes without saying. The problem is: There are surprisingly few open proxies out there – and lots of the ones that do exist have weird restrictions on the traffic they will carry.
On the updates breaking stuff front, I taught English to the IT staff in the BASF EU accounting division. The guys there told me they have 40 people in Germany working near fulltime to test MS updates before they are implemented. The guy in charge of that department told me that he recommends never updating one’s personal computer, except when Service Packs come out. He said that — at that time — NAT routers are sufficient security for normal users, and a lot of the security updates really do not amount to much, except in business environments.
One of their biggest problems was trying to figure out what MS was trying to change in the updates. For their own security, they really wanted to know the purpose of every change; often, they could not get that info out of MS and had to figure it out for themselves. They have an incredible number of seats worldwide, and you would think that such info would be more forthcoming, but apparently, MS knows they own the market and thus do not have to respond.
As far as the future of Linux — even the organizations championing it are starting to admit it may eventually disappear. It is definitely losing ground on the desktop. I have a mix here of all 3 platforms, used for different purposes. Still rely mostly on Windows. Do not see that changing anytime soon. Nevertheless, programmers I know, work in Linux or Mac, primarily for the terminal and Unix-like capabilities.
LibreOffice is not the equal of MS, IMO. I have a huge 30mb spreadsheet of every song that charted Billboard and its predecessors, back to sheet music in 1875, and it takes 2 minutes for LibreCalc to move from one cell to the next. Excel is instantaneous.
After reading what several people have had to say about Windows, here and via email, I think I’m just going to grit my teeth and use the 14.04 LTS release of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu. I’ll make it work somehow, and I’m going to turn off updates after the initial installation and just use what I have for as long as possible.
“it takes 2 minutes for LibreCalc to move from one cell to the next. Excel is instantaneous.”
I’ve had a similar problem with both Calc and Writer. Found a message board of one of the Calc devs, and he said version 4.x is something like 20% faster than the previous version. He missed the point. In another discussion, another dev said people with such large datasets should use a database instead. While this might be one approach, the users countered with examples in their industries: many use Excel, and expect a spreadsheet from colleagues. Makes it nearly impossible to use Linux in those industries. And so it goes.
I have used Excel since its very beginning, and agree with others here who said it is excellent and far above alternatives. This alone will keep a lot of people in business from adopting Linux. My needs in retirement are now much less, but it is hard to communicate with others who have Excel and do more than the very basics.
As someone who has at least a bit of experience with database design, I shudder when I think about people using a spreadsheet as a database, but I know people are gonna do what they’re gonna do.
And the “professionals” sometimes aren’t much better. I remember sitting down with a programmer for a local government body. At the time, their major databases were still on a mainframe, but they were moving a lot of them to Foxbase, including multi-user apps that did some pretty important things. This programmer was young and a rising star. She was having problems with database corruption, and thought maybe there was a problem with caching on the server. I looked at some of the code and asked her where and how she was implementing field locking or record locking. She had no idea what I was talking about. I explained in short words what happened when your code allowed multiple users to update the same field/record at the same time without locking it for write access. It was a new concept to her.
Currently using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and plan on possibly upgrading to
14.04 LTS.
I found the following review interesting …
Sticky Tahr-fy pudding: Ubuntu 14.04 slickest Linux desktop ever
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/28/ubuntu_14_01_final_beta_review/
I’m also using a Windows 7 system to get work done.
I’ve set up a number of Windows 8/8.1 systems for
family and friends. Yes, 8.1 does fix a number of
problems, but still lots of annoying “features” left
to complain about. So I’ll probably wait and see
what Windows 9 has to offer. I’m hoping that
the Micro-snots have learned a lesson here.
“… I’m just going to grit my teeth and use the 14.04 LTS release of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu.”
That makes sense, as you’ve already got ten years invested in the infrastructure and the learning of it for a running business.
Finally got WINE on the Mint laptop; it’s been a while since I fooled around with it and now there’s something called winetricks to run it.
And the Portable Apps download/install process took many, many hours.
RBT, I also have a little experience with database design, and second your comments. I regret that databases never caught on as a tool of choice for individuals in small offices. It was not for lack of good products, but that is just a historical discussion for another day.
You have a lot of experience with writing, so a good word processor is essential. My experience in the late 80s – early 90s was with long, highly formatted text docs (no graphics, but lots of interdependent outline-related sections.) I was in a small organization that had a great deal of autonomy and a good budget, so we considered some of the then proprietary UNIX workstation based solutions from the likes of Sun, DEC, and HP. PC word processors of the day did not cut it for our needs. Before we could decide on what to buy, Word for Windows improved enough to meet our needs. Eventually, the workstations and their expense and administration gave way to Windows PCs, and we never looked back. (We still had some of the workstations for engineering, but not office use, and eventually even those gave way to Windows PCs.)
I still use Word 2000 (offline, but with the latest file format converters from MS) for some desperation needs. It far outshines anything I have tried on Linux, but I am still looking. Foremost in my needs now is compatibility with Word files, especially for highly formatted large docs that now include graphics. OOo was pretty good, but has fallen from popularity. LibreOffice is good for a lot of uses, but stumbles with some of the Word-proprietary content and big files, and is sloooow. I am once again looking for an alternative to running Word (and MS Office) under Wine. I doubt I will ever find a good solution.
I probably should look into some of the alternative word processor-only apps. I once tried AbiWord, and was impressed with some of it, but it was buggy. Can’t stand that. IBM once had a suite that had some good reviews, but it seems gone. A cursory look at reviews hit Google Docs, but I need something I can run without web connectivity.
Any thoughts? Anybody?
Jim, I’d just say off the top of my head that your experience and use of Word over the years and the lack of any decent alternative that has compatibility out there kind of makes the choice for you. If I did a lot of writing on a daily basis that had that requirement, that’s what I’d use myself. As it is, I don’t do much, and can wrestle with the open source apps accordingly.
I remember that database stuff from years ago when I was working for the state up here; the matriarchy and the lawyers who ran everything where I was did absolutely everything in Excel spreadsheets, but my job involved large healthcare data sets and so I was using Access, which they then made me convert to Excel for them. When those data sets got too big for Access I evaluated SQL Server and Oracle for them and they blew me off; then a new regime rolled in with their own people, dumped me out of the loop entirely, and sent their own guys off to Oracle training in North Carolina.
They also blew me off on security and got themselves hacked. Couple of years later I informed my boss at another gig down in MA that security was a problem and that they were gonna run outta space in their server room if they kept throwing servers in there, so why not look at security, virtualization and blade servers? Blew me off, ran outta space and got hacked, and then he got fired.
A prophet hath no honor in his own country, LOL.
For me, Word and Excel peaked in Microsoft Office 2003. Word 2003 was the first version that could wrangle our 500 page user manuals without crashing on an hourly basis. The next version of Office that was that good was Office 2010 but I am not a fan of the ribbon bar.
Word 2000 was the last version I used. I abandoned it in favor of OOo because Word crashed frequently on the huge manuscript documents I was doing then. Even worse, it corrupted text unpredictably. So I switched to OOo Writer long before I switched to Linux. I’ve used OOo/Libre Office for more than a decade with no serious problems, performance or otherwise. It’s only recently that it’s started crashing on me, usually at least daily and sometimes more often. Unlike Word, when LO crashes it does at least recover the documents properly.
Odd. My experiences with crashes has been the opposite: LO produced nothing salvageable; Word 2003 has never failed to recover my docs.
This fragmentation of both the Linux OS and things like forking Ooo into LO is literally fragging Linux. The outcome is that fewer developers are willing to contribute, because now there are at least 2 major versions, and contributing to one means nothing for the other.
The Germans are committed to Open Source for several reasons, two of which are cost, and being on top of privacy and security. MS has had more than hand-slaps from Germany and the EU, and MS’ f-u attitude drives them ever more to make FOSS work. Whether that will be enough, remains to be seen. The one thing that gives me hope, is that serious programs of all types are now OS agnostic. That is a kind of life-support for Linux that, without it, would have killed Linux by now.
As far as LO 4.x — I notice no difference whatever in speed and reliability. It is the one that takes 2 minutes to switch cells in the large spreadsheet.
My observation regarding databases, is that virtually everybody can wrap their heads around spreadsheets; only a few can work in progressive ways with databases. Moreover, in my business (broadcasting), spreadsheets are an easy way to manipulate information. For instance, right now I am working with a scheduling problem where we have 4 columns of scheduled log ‘events’. In order not to repeat material in exactly the same order, I came up with an idea — the events are paired, so row 1 and 2 go together, as do 3 and 4 and so on. I want to create a new column and move even pairs one column to the left, plus invert the order of all pairs. After consulting with somebody in the Informatics department of my uni, their response was ‘use a spreadsheet’. It is the easiest way for anybody to manipulate data. And that proved correct, as even I can figure out how to accomplish that task in a spreadsheet.
In the writing arena, nothing I have ever worked with surpasses the old DOS program XyWrite, which was the text composing part of an old Unix system for newspapers and magazines called Atex. Atex ran on DEC equipment when I worked in publishing in Boston. Everybody had a golden screen serial terminal, and the whole operation ran on a VAX system as they expanded into radio and TV. This was in the early days of cable TV, when even CNN was not yet making money, and our operation ran out of funds before the revenue stream ever got established. I am sure that did not help things in Maynard, as they were busy developing stuff for TV, using us as the guinea pigs. We had email between our own privately interconnected bureaus and offices before anybody had even heard of the email concept. All DEC developed stuff. Revolutionary at the time. All to be supplanted by MS within a decade.
In spite of our complaints, there IS progress. For a couple years, I have had audio problems on my prime machine. I always surmised it was likely Firefox. When I do serious audio, I reboot and keep all other programs closed. No problems. One of the main issues was that, when scrolling anything in Firefox, audio would hiccup by stopping repeatedly for a mini-second.
But the most recent update of Firefox seems to have fixed that. Right now, I am processing some audio for a test, and have not bothered to close Firefox. That would have been catastrophic just a few weeks ago, but nary a single hiccup today.
Yes, and those of us who worked for DEC, however briefly, as in my case, have long since recognized that we were part of a revolutionary IT enterprise, which, when it was successful, was run by engineers and inventors. Email, the internal web/intranet, all kinds of neat stuff. But the late Ken Olsen couldn’t hack the idea of computers as a consumer commodity, and then the engineering management became increasingly replaced by MBA bean-counter types and barking women-on-business, briskly battering away at the old fossil regime and its dinosaurs.
And there is a very active DEC alumni group, to which I belong, and someone always brings up how great we had it. I saw the writing on the wall in Marlborough and bailed, stupidly, as it turned out, for grad school. Some of the people I worked with back then now work for HP and are doing swell. I’d run into more of them during my time at EDS, after the grad school fiascoes. But my last fling with VMS was 2007, at a family-run financial services biz in Woostuh. HP is apparently gonna finally give up on it.
Yeah, the same thing happened with HP and Compaq.
I remember DEC fondly. The first real word processor I used was WPS-8 on a VT100 and later a DECmate. I wrote code for the PDP-8/11 and VAX. I miss stuff that just worked.
Ditto. I started in IT with the DEC Rainbow and then the PDP-11, running the RSX CAD/CAM program, with microVAX running VMS 3.5. I remember WPS-8, All-In-One, and then the fugly little troll manager who was brought in, and who then set about putting WordPerfect on the machines and wanted me to copy, page by page, the WP manual on the copier after my regular shift there, about 500 pages. I went back to the temp contractor place in Waltham and got lined up with a sys admin job at DEC directly, in Marlborough.
What most people don’t know is that a lot of the code from Dave Cutler that went into VMS later went into Windows NT and it’s STILL THERE in every single Windows machine, worldwide!
What most people don’t know is that a lot of the code from Dave Cutler that went into VMS later went into Windows NT and it’s STILL THERE in every single Windows machine, worldwide!
Maybe not the same code but certainly the same concepts. VMS is written in Fortran and Assembly. Windows is written in C and a very little bit of assembly. Apparently many of the data structures are byte for byte the same.
I heartily advise the reading of “Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft”:
http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717/
It is a totally amazing book about the creation of Windows NT by Microsoft while they were on contract to write OS/2 for IBM. One of the stories that I found amazing was the nightly build machines were kept in a locked data room with no network wiring. If a programmer submitted code that “broke the build” then they were subject to public verbal lashings by Cutler and Gates. So, the programmers would crawl through the ceiling tiles into the build room, cancel the build (was several PCs), put their code in and restart the build.
My colleague across the hall at IBM lost his office keys a couple of times and crawled through the ceiling to get in via the break room; I would not attempt such a feat at my weight and length but he’s a slim athletic dude who plays in the Mens’ Senior Baseball League up here, which is some serious chit; one of the League’s pitchers is Bill “Spaceman” Lee, formerly of the Boston Red Sox; he lives here in Vermont now.
I ordered that NT book per your link; thanks. I also have several DEC books around here somewhere.
Now building a Fedora Security netbook with Santoku as a vm in it, the first install failed, possibly due to a bad iso, I dunno. Or a bad USB stick. Trying it again shortly. If need be I’ll just put Fedora on it and then get the desired security packages.
OFD, I am trying to make Linux work for all our household computing. Trying… Almost there. There will always be some things that work better in one environment, so I can accept that. I will admit I have a long history with Word, and have been pretty happy with it. Like RBT, the latest version I have used is 2000, but my experience has been better than his. Since Word for Windows 1.0 (not a prize,) Word has never failed me: never crashed, and never corrupted files. And, some of that was in a mostly-Mac environment with some pretty futzed-up Word-for-Mac files from others.
Funny how different situations give different results, all valid. There are just too many variables that make analysis difficult. RBT had trouble with Word. I have had trouble with the recent versions of LibreOffice Writer crashing. So far, all files have been recovered, but some have taken many minutes. Does not give confidence.
And, I agree with Chuck W, some of the Linux apps have been getting dramatically better. That, and the free spirit of Linux keeps me interested. Many of my complaints really don’t slow me down, but my wife, who has not yet experienced Linux, could be stopped cold. That is not a good thing.
Interesting commentary on DEC. I worked in a situation that used DEC equipment for simulations and testing. Most of my work was with the connected hardware and facilities setup by then, so little hands-on experience. Was around for PDP-11s through a VAX cluster. I had a lot of respect for DEC, both the hardware, and VMS. Always solid, if not inexpensive. My only complaint was some of the constant changes that were pushed out and required constant relearning. Progress, yes, but a pain still. Missed a lot of the early PC days because of DEC, but that was good. We had office automation (word processing) running on spare cycles of one of the machines, and it just worked day in and day out.
We eventually moved some of that DEC stuff to UNIX workstations, then Windows, but before Windows took over, I had moved on to other areas. Used early Macs and DOS/Windows as personal computers. Those were much more “personal,” but not nearly as mature as the DEC and early Sun stuff. In the early days, Sun was really impressive. I believed McNealy’s plan to sell an inexpensive Sun box for home use. It would have been more expensive (by 50%) than a DOS/Windows box, but oh the possibilities! That of course never happened. Also thought the early Windows experience would be good preparation for OS/2. Wrong, again.
I read a book about the development of NT (can’t remember the title.) I figured if it ever got enough momentum it would be what OS/2 never was. There were growing pains, but NT4 was pretty solid. The rest is history.
MS succeeded because they catered to customers’ needs. Really. In those early days, some of us thought Apple would continue to mature and take over the business world. Finally, one company had affordable hardware and software that (mostly) worked. Trouble was, Jobs didn’t seem to like the business world, except for publishing. After Jobs left, things looked somewhat better, but (probably) the internal culture was too rigid to adapt. MS continued to grow.
I compare Gates to Henry Ford. Before Ford, there were lots of cars and car companies, but they were toys of the rich. Ford’s main innovation was affordability. Similar with computers. I remember when Lotus 123 cost about $500, and many serious users bought another $500 of accessories, such as charting aids. I had the first version of Excel for the Mac. It cost about $100, and needed no add-ons. It was an instant hit in my world. Later, the Apple exclusive expired, and MS put out Excel for Windows. I bought it during the first week. The two boxes (Excel and Windows 2.1) were shrink-wrapped together. Windows installed easily on my 286, but its only other use was SmartDrive, a pretty good RAM disk. Shortly, I used Windows to task-switch with WordStar (!) and had a usable management tool.
That little vignette is just one example of Microsoft’s market savvy. They may not have been innovators, but they made affordable products that got the job done. By the time Office came out, their dominance was established. Like almost all other software companies, their products generated proprietary file formats. We took that for granted then. Now, there are alternatives, and MS should worry, although they still have a lock on the file formats in most businesses. No matter what I use to make a text or spreadsheet file, it usually has to be compatible with the dreaded MS file formats. I hope this changes. It apparently already has in some states and countries. Hooray.
And five, ten, twenty years from now this, too, will be ancient history in IT. I hesitate to mention DEC or VMS at interviews for fear of the usual age discrimination now.
The DEC Rainbow I had (and sold through the university bookstore where I worked at the time) could be kicked up a notch with a tiny hard drive, IIRC, and Jerry Pournelle had a whole article on his and how he modified it and jazzed it up, with his recommendations, in the old Byte magazine. You could also get VisiCalc for it and some other apps, and it had two floppy drives and two operating systems. I wish to hell I’d kept it.
Over three-grand at the time, with its HP Touchscreen counterpart.
http://oldcomputers.net/dec-rainbow-100.html
DEC paid for me and others to get a week’s training in these puppies so we could sell them through DEC’s relationships with universities (mine had the VAX systems running the whole shebang in the library basement and still does, along with Linux boxen, ditto at Rutgers, where I still apparently have a VAX account twenty years after leaving there). They put us up in a nice inn in Merrimack, NH, with buffet breakfasts and lunches and dinners together with them, we made out like bandits on that deal. A guy saw my ‘Nam sticker on my old Duster and thanked me for my service, last time that happened, 1984, LOL.
I went back to the bookstore and eventually ended up selling around twenty or thirty of them, plus took one home. I later used it as a dumb terminal to login to the systems at DEC in Marlborough a few years later. Gave it to a fellow grad student who is now a professor of Irish Studies at Boston College. I should email him and ask what he did with it.
My brother worked in IBM, NCR, and DEC shops until he passed on unexpectedly before PC’s really caught on. We grew so fast at Monitor TV that they did not have enough IT people to teach us all this technology that was going in. My brother gave me some phone session training, and I was off and running. I had worked with Q-Office in Chicago, but the DEC office stuff was different.
One thing that has been totally forgotten in all this is the knock-down drag-out fight between IBM and MS. Once the best of friends, Gates and MS throttled IBM until it damned near died. All of that was uncovered in the MS government trial — in which, if you remember, MS was found guilty, but never penalized. At the time of the trial, there was a really good running account in story-like fashion by some guy who wrote as well as the best the WSJ ever put out. It is a riveting story about how they came to blows. IBM really had financed MS’ early days. Cannot remember what set them off against each other, but OS/2 was a major part of that.
IBM was another Apple. In fact, I’m not sure Steve Jobs did not take his game plan from IBM. IBM had very little competition in office machines, and IMO, they raped their customers as badly or worse than Apple does. My dad had one of the first Mag Card typewriter machines in his office and the thing was constantly breaking down. There was no warranty. After my dad repeatedly got caught with stuff stored only on Mag Cards and IBM holding him up for hefty prices in getting the machine to work, he took the cards to a guy in town who converted the Mag Card content to some kind of floppy disk format, and Dad told IBM to go f* themselves. My brother set up a Unix system in Dad’s office and got that content into Q-Office.
Not sure what IBM is like today, but in the ’80’s and ’90’s they screwed people so badly by constantly changing directions and priorities, and cancelling contracts without paying, that they were burning people right and left. XyWrite was one. IBM had contracted for XyWrite to become “Signature”, THE word processing solution for IBM PC’s. I knew some of the people involved, as Atex and the XyWrite project were done in Billerica, Mass. The Signature project was completed, the manuals had even been printed, then IBM pulled out and bankrupted the guy at the top of XyWrite by not paying. IBM did this kind of stuff over and over.
IBM Consulting set up the accounting office of BASF that I worked in. One of the problems the chemical company had, was getting IBM to go home after things were up and running. They were constantly stealing rooms that had been booked for my classes, and just saying their work was FAR more important than any teaching of English that was taking place (or not). Hey, I got paid for just showing up, so no sweat off my back, but a waste of the chemical company’s money, for sure, and frustrating to me and my students. When IBM suggested we hold classes outdoors in the rain, my boss finally stepped in and some chemical company management stopped the IBM people from just appropriating conference rooms willy-nilly.
I have known several IBM employees over the years — every one of which was at some time treated really shabbily. However, they will say nothing bad about the company at all, which I always found very strange. One husband/wife couple were tossed out with no severance and nothing to live on. They had a vacation house in another state, and had to sell their Connecticut home and move to the cabin until they found other work. Still they refused to say one critical word about IBM. That is just weird and wild.
When I was there several colleagues would trash the company but it was mainly directed against their managers and higher-ups; and it would be done sotto voce, in a safe area, like a hallway with no one else nearby. And I saw what the company did to its long-time employees, too; they’d be angry but would just deal with it. In this economy people will put up with a lot of crap, evidently, and this up here with an alleged less than four percent unemployment rate. It struck me sometimes that the attitude was similar to that of zeks in the old Soviet gulag, perversely taking pride in how badly they’ve been screwed over, with other zeks looking up to them.
They’re real big on outsourcing and offshoring jobs now, but are also finding that a lot of their in-house IT support is hands-on, like the job I had before, close to 80% of it; how do you offshore that? Plus the security considerations and clearances. There were four of us doing that work in four large data centers spread over a mile of the campus up here; I have often wondered since, who the hell is doing that work now?
There were four of us doing that work in four large data centers spread over a mile of the campus up here; I have often wondered since, who the hell is doing that work now?
C-3PO and R2D2’s great great great grandparents. A roomba and an Asimo.
Either that or managers had to lower themselves to do the most basic tasks; or they dragooned the few remaining elderly die-hards who won’t go quietly with their shitty retirement “packages;” or they made a janitor a sys admin, which I actually saw done many years ago at DEC. They took away a data center responsibility from my little team and gave it to a janitor in that particular building, and even sent him to sys admin training, which they wouldn’t do for us. It was yet another affirmative action caper, which was huge at the time down there.
Here are my thoughts on which operating system to go with:
I once talked to the owner of a local wine shop. This guy is really into it and travels to Napa & Sonoma yearly and to wine country in France and others every few years. He has personal relationships with numerous winemakers and vineyard owners and despite being an Omaha-area small business, he’ll get cases of wine normally only allocated to the very elite shops. He knows his wines inside and out and can go on for hours about both the taste and science of wine. Point being: he really knows his stuff and has a genuine love of fine wine.
His advice to me on choosing, buying, and drinking wine? Buy what you like. Nothing hurts the wine industry more than wine snobbery. If you drink it and you like it, then that’s all that matters. Don’t worry what rating Robert Parker or others gave it.
That applies to most things in life. If you use Windows 8.1 and find it meets your needs with an acceptable amount of headache, then use it. If Windows 7 works better for you, then use that. If you use Mac OS X and find it works well for you, then use it. Same with whichever Linux distro you try.
I’ve listened to people endlessly bash Windows Me, Windows Vista, and Windows 8 and they all worked well for me. Never had an issue with any of them. Likewise, my primary OS is currently Mac OS X 10.9 at home and Windows 7 at work and both work really well for me. Linux was huge fun to mess with from a hobbyist perspective, but it mostly frustrated and annoyed me as a primary desktop OS.
Every OS has its haters. Just use whatever OS works well for you when taking into account what matters most to you in an OS.
Chad is correct.
“…Linux was huge fun to mess with from a hobbyist perspective, but it mostly frustrated and annoyed me as a primary desktop OS.”
Someone else I’ve known online for a while also described it as a hobbyist thing. I can see that, certainly; I’ve been OK with it as a primary desktop or laptop but I’m an IT guy, and whether my daughter or 82-year-old mom could deal with it or would know what to do with a problem is another story. Of course, with them, that’s also true of Windows, bad example. You know what I mean.
Primary desktop or enterprise-class server? More likely successful as the latter.
OFD wrote:
“…they made a janitor a sys admin, which I actually saw done many years ago at DEC.”
When my former employer outsourced to EDS in 1999 some guy got a job as a call centre security guard. Next thing we knew he was working *in* the call centre.
I left EDS in 1998 to move to Vermont and get remarried and buy a house and start a new job. I was probably replaced by a security guard or janitor. He or she would then have to do sys admin on OpenVMS, UNIX and Windows NT simultaneously and be the only admin for 300 NT users. He’d also have to monitor and maintain their very first firewall (CheckPoint) that I set up on NT, using some guy named Thompson’s book to help out.
“His advice to me on choosing, buying, and drinking wine? Buy what you like. Nothing hurts the wine industry more than wine snobbery. If you drink it and you like it, then that’s all that matters.”
I wish more people had this attitude – and more consumers realized it. As I’ve mentioned as some point or other, we run a whisky business (well, mostly my wife does). We see the same kind of snobbery, and it’s bad for whisky as well. Plus, it lets big companies empty consumers pockets. There was a guy at the bar several months ago who poured me a dram out of a bottle he had just purchased (without showing me the bottle), and asked what I thought of it.
It was fine, but nothing particularly special. A pleasant single malt, typical blend of casks, tailored to taste nice to everyone, meaning it had no specific character. Fine, but nothing special.
While I’m being stupid and telling him what I think of the whisky, my wife is making frantic semaphore signals. Turned out it was one of the new elite bottlings for which they charge outrageous prices for no discernable reason. He was incredibly proud of himself for having bought such an expensive product, assuming price=quality, and was hoping I would tell him what a wonderful purchase he had made. Ah well…
I’m not a wine snob, as I don’t really like it (except some fortified wines). Not a whisky snob either. There are a few cheap brands I won’t touch, even when mixed with cola, some brands I will drink with cola but not straight, some straight or with cola, and some only straight (too good to be mixed with cola.)
I’ll drink Jim Beam white label with cola, black label straight, Jack Daniels, Makers Mark and Wild Turkey straight. I also like Drambuie and Chivas Regal.
I once was in a discussion with a friend and another guy about Scotch. My friend had just bought a brand I frowned upon, I said I didn’t like cheap stuff, I preferred Chivas Regal when I want to get something good. The snob said “Chivas Regal *is* cheap stuff.” Ouch.
Well, I like it, and can’t imagine paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for pricey bourbon or scotch.
“I left EDS in 1998” – OFD, I started at EDS in 1998 as an HP-UX admin. 🙂 dbIntellect, actually. A little wholly owned experement in seeing what it was like in the world of start ups. Casual dress, laptops for everyone (IBM Thinkpads, then), really good phones – headsets for everybody. Then… That got shut down and I was sucked into EDS proper. What a culture shock. They’d only just stopped requiring suits and ties for men, and skirts for the women. After surviving uncountable layoffs – I’m still not sure how – I now work for HP, but as a developer now (amusingly, the UNIX systems I use now are all RHEL, recently converted from Solaris. Can’t remember when I last saw HP-UX IN USE). It saddens me that the company still buys competing companies and either outright kills them or lets the products whither and die. Anyway, I’m just reminiscing. I could tell horror stories from EDS/HP all day…. 🙂