[SlugLUG] Linux Is Not A Desktop Solution

[Peter Belew]

Hear, hear, Rick!

On 5/1/06, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
>
> 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.



Most interesting. Looks like Novell is really jumping into this very
seriously.

> 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.



A friend's dad is developing a very nice photo-viewing site, but it
fails strongly on non-IE browsers because of some incompatibilities
in jscript with ecmascript in handling mouse click inputs ... even
in the Windows port of the non-IE browsers.

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.



Yeah; I've witnessed that over and over.

Sigh ...

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