[SlugLUG] Linux Is Not A Desktop Solution

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Peter Belew (abcruzww at gmail.com):

> Well yeah, the market is way too small and the UI's aren't so good
> for gaming software to be developed. Someone also mentioned
> that Windows faces competition from gaming consoles, as well.
> I personally am not into gaming, but I'm aware of some issues
> there.

A box set up for gaming, whether console or MS-Windows, is in my view
best seen as a dedicated appliance host (just like an Oracle server).
OK, so it has a proprietary, sloppily written OS -- but that fits
perfectly with the rest of its code.  ;->

> A friend I hadn't seen in 20 years emailed me a couple of days ago -
> in the ensuing exchange of emails he mentioned that he'd tried to
> use OpenOffice in his work, and there were compatibility and
> performance issues that caused him to return to MS products.
> 
> I haven't looked at StarOffice lately - it may well be better than the
> free product:
> 
>  http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index.jsp
> 
> OpenOffice has sufficed for my purposes, but there are issues for
> people who need to do VB scripting etc. - OpenOffice has its own,
> incompatible scripting language.

I happen to have seen a lengthy private demo of the next Novell Linux
release's latest beta:  One of the many things they've been working on
is adding to OO.o 2.x as much MS-Office VBA compatibility as feasible
consistent with reasonable system security (macro viruses and such).
It's really quite impressive, and I'm guardedly optimistic.

> Another annoyance that affects me is the disagreement between
> MS and web standards groups over jscript vs ecmascript/javascript
> and CSS and font size standards. 

Happily, I think Microsoft Corp. is slowly losing, on that one -- and 
it's becoming less of an issue over time.  There are still, however, a
huge number of intranet sites being developed that are utterly dependent
on MSIE for Windows.  (They don't even work properly on MSIE for Mac
OS X!)  The consulting firms and development houses in question often
have no idea they're doing this, and no clue that there's any
alternative:  They've been tricked into doing it by built-in
Microsoft-centrism in their toolsets, not to mention, well,
technological incompetence in their field.

It would help if the corporations and institutions that pay for those
intranet sites would learn some rudimentary notions of requirements
analysis, pilot projects, and acceptance testing.  Unfortunately, those
concepts tend to be given only lip service:  In the real world, some
manager gets sold by a demoware dog and pony show, stakes his job on 
a development house's future deliverable, and thus gets co-opted into 
rationalising away and ignoring its deficiencies on the vendor's behalf.