Re: Linux on Laptop?
From: Dances With Crows (danSPANceswitTRAPhcrows_at_gmail.com)
Date: 02/02/05
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Date: 2 Feb 2005 01:26:31 GMT
On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 02:41:23 +0530, Dr Balwinder Singh Dheeman staggered
into the Black Sun and said:
> People want to believe they get what they pay for. Whether it's a new
> car or a TV set [...] you get quality if you pay a bigger price. It is
> not so in the world of software.
[ puts on "Devil's Advocate" hat ]
> the best C++ compiler including all other best development tools in
> existence (GNU C++) is free
gcc and g++ are Free and they're capable of generating binaries for all
kinds of different architectures and OSes. They do not always produce
the best assembly code for the job at hand. Benchmarks[0] show Intel's
proprietary Linux C compiler (icc) outperforming gcc on many code
samples.
> the best mail transport agent (sendmail) is free
sendmail is the reference implementation of SMTP, but it's accumulated a
lot of cruft over the years. It does *everything*--but lots of mail
admins find it easier to get to grips with Postfix, Exim, and/or q***l.
All those are Free too[1] :-)
> the best scanner back-end/front-end software (SANE) is free
There are a lot of "consumer level" scanners that SANE doesn't support
at all. When Joe User buys a Foobar 300 scanner for $49.99 at Wal-Mart,
and it doesn't work with SANE, he'll use 'DozeXP, just because there are
manufacturer-supplied 'DozeXP kernel modules included with the scanner.
I know, this is the manufacturers' fault, but the users will blame SANE
(or blame Linux) for not working with their stuff.
> the best relational database management systems/severs (MySQL and
> Mimer-SQL) are free, the best object relational database server
> (PostgreSQL) is free,
...the Oracle people are now pointing and laughing. Postgres is a good
database, but it still can't beat Oracle in terms of benchmarks[0] and
features.
A number of useful subsets of software have no really useful Free
implementations. There's no good Free OCR software yet AFAICT. There
is a project called GnuOCR on Freshmeat, but it's far behind proprietary
packages that were released in 2001. A few months ago, it got over half
the characters in a relatively clean image wrong, while the TypeReader
and Omnipage engines that were several years old got under 10% of the
characters wrong. (GnuOCR doesn't really have an interface yet,
either...)
> Any takers please?
Don't let your love of Free stuff blind you to its deficiencies. Only
by knowing where the bad parts are can we find them and fix them. As
usual, All Software Sucks, it's just that the Free stuff sucks less in a
large number of problem domains. HTH,
[0] Three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
[1] Some folks say that q***l is not truly Free. *shrug*.
-- Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong http://www.brainbench.com / Hire me! -----------------------------/ http://crow202.dyndns.org/~mhgraham/resume
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