beware of the updates you install

Hard to get a laptop these days without Windows already included whether you use it or not. But hey if you also refuse to pay for the hardware, your problems are solved! :-)

And more thousands not installed. Just as with Windows.

Yes it is *IF* the hardware manufacturer bothers with Linux (still all too rare) or the Linux developer types get around to writing them for free. You may wait a long time (or forever) for stuff with a very small user base.

Trevor.

Hard but not impossible, however I have no use for another notebook. The fact that manufacturers include it free says something.

But hey are you suggesting I'm a thief?

Please name a consumer device (other than Apple) that you would like to use with Linux that had a driver issue. I have found Linux to be way more plug-and-play than Windows,

While we're talking about computers, operating systems, and Al...

Have you seen the commercial for the iPad Air? It appears Microsoft has finally forced Apple into defensive advertising. The ad talks about all the things you can actually /do/ on an iPad -- a machine without a useful keyboard or pointing device * -- "start a poem, finish a symphony". ** Apple has always been more about image than what you can actually do with their products.

• I've used an iPad once. Bleh. Touchscreens don't work as easily as we are led to believe. There is a learning curve. (The touchpad on my notebook, and the gestural input for my graphics tablet, are comparably not-easy.)

** That particular part of the commercial parodies a famous Irving Penn photograph.

You seem to have ignored the list I posted earlier.....

A camera? A smart-card reader? did you lsusb them to get chipset information? There are several packages in the Ubuntu world for handling RAW files.

You do need to do a little digging, which is where Linux really shines; nobody offers you a solution upon receipt of payment. It's all for the love of the medium. The open source world is dripping wet with good karma.

Right... Several UNIX platforms -- Sun, NeXT, SCO, HP (among others), and Mac. Windows was added at FM4, 1993-ish, IIRC. (I knew the guy who led the port to Windows. Good fellow, very savvy engineer. I jokingly asked him if he felt the need for a stay at a mental health spa after that effort. He nodded vigorously.)

Not sure what you were seeing. The UI was fairly consistent among the various platforms, though because of the underlying dictates of the windows UI resources sometimes things were a bit squirrely.

At least back then, they chose system resources rather than create their own so as to reflect each user's general tweaks to the UI. These days, they have a custom windowing system, which I don't like because (a) it reflects none of my general windows tweaks and (b) they don't provide much in the way of appearance tweaks in their custom system! (Re-inventing the wheel and making it square...)

In general FM dialogs could get confusing because they are very dense -- lots of stuff you can do. While a little off-putting at first, once you got used to this you appreciate having so much power close at hand.

Contrast to Interleaf (competitor of the day) when most things were 3-4 menu pulls down with few or no keyboard shortcuts, and lots of clicking through "single purpose" dialogs -- THAT was crazy-making if you wanted any speed with the UI.

Yes and no; YMMV. While the new UIs since FM9 are more "contemporary," many of us who have used FM for 20+ years don't like the new UI dictates (I still use 10 year old FM7 for most of my daily doc needs, as do many folks). As with many applications these days, some UI designers think they know best and force you into something that's far less efficient.

It's unsettling how often UI folks don't actually use the product they're working on

-- they just do what seems pretty with little understanding of the work flows.

Last fall, at Adobe's invitation, I spent 90 minutes on the phone with the new UI guy for FM pleading with him to keep certain UI needs and standards in mind. Mostly, doc professionals were sick of "cute" and just wanted the damn UI to not get in their way. I think he got the message, and I was not the only one making the same complaints. We shall see what comes along...

Frank Mobile Audio

But not, as far as I can tell, the ones generated by this particular camera. Fuji have recently changed their RAW file format.

My Zoom R24 doesn't appear to be covered.

And the Windows world is full of stuff that "just works". I like this idea, it frees me up to actually do stuff rather than fight the computer.

snips

I used VP for a couple of client projects. Can't remember if it was Corel or not.

I initially liked what I saw and was looking forward to using it -- until things started going wrong in small and large ways at every turn. Made me crazy as hell, and the usual issues with support. "Oh, yes, sorry; that is a known problem;" or, "don't know about that;" and the classic "Please reinstall" with the classic response, "I've done that 10 times, no change..."

FM was typically very stable. I loved FM3 under Sunview on my Sparc station, but it was of limited capability compared to the needs of the current day. Eventually, I was forced over to windows for a number of business reasons.

FM conquered with FM4, and the introduction of their fabulous Table Editor -- still from what I've seen the best thing out there for tables.

Combine that with FM's very powerful numbering system, their book system, long-document capabilities, and now multiple delivery paths, and it is likely still a "best buy" -- assuming you need that kind of power.

Frank Mobile Audio

This is generally true. If a device doesn't have a driver, Windows will search for one (locally or the Web). It usually comes up with the right one (or a good one).

Driver problems are usually related to the manufacturer's failure to update them. This gets customers Very Angry at having to abandon a product they like (qv, the HP see-through scanner) or having to buy a new one.

A good example is the classic Palm T3 (and related PDAs). There /were/ updated drivers, but no way to install them easily, because simply plugging the interface cradle into a USB port didn't trigger a search for the correct driver. The trick was to press the sync button on the cradle, then -- during the 60 seconds or so Windows was trying to make contact -- have the Hardware Wizard install the driver.

They were simply lousy -- poor layout, poor of choice what a particular dialog box contained, etc. Whoever designed them apparently had no experience with or understanding of DTP.

I didn't. A dialog box should contain a closely related set of functions.

Neither Ventura nor PageMaker were like that. Word isn't like that.

I'll take clarity over efficiency any day.

This is critical. No one should be allowed to design a product who does not use it.

What is "cute"?

I initially liked what I saw and was looking forward to using it -- until things started going wrong in small and large ways at every turn. Made me crazy as hell, and the usual issues with support. "Oh, yes, sorry; that is a known problem;" or, "don't know about that;" and the classic "Please reinstall" with the classic response, "I've done that 10 times, no change..."

Oddly, I never had problems -- except for figuring out column balance.

You probably had a Corel version. Corel added needed features, but also eliminated the modular document format, which is unbelievable.

That's not really a driver problem so much as an application problem, to be honest.

If you want a really awful example, though, check out the National Instruments PCI cards. National's Windows drivers pretty much work and they are well documented and the tech support people know about them. The Linux drivers... well, they sort of work. But they are so badly coded that when they don't work they don't actually say that they are not working. They'll fail to modload without giving any message, or they'll load but not find any hardware without giving any message. They only work with certain kernel versions, not with any 64-bit kernels or PAE kernels, but the manuals don't say anything about that. Nobody in tech support knows a damn thing about them, so you can pay by the minute on the tech support line to talk to someone who has no idea even what dmesg is let alone what the driver is supposed to be reporting.

Now, mind you, this is an NI issue and not a Linux issue, per se. But I do encounter this a lot with companies who claim to support Linux but don't really. (Not that a lot of the same companies also fail to support their Windows stuff as well.)

The nice thing about Linux is that you can look inside the box, so when it fails to work, you can fix it. The nice thing about Windows is that it usually just works. The problem is that when Windows systems fail to work, you're pretty much out of luck because it's just that way and your tools for real system-level debugging don't exist.

Given my choice, I'll run NetBSD. But usually I don't have a choice because the application doesn't give me one.

--scott

snips

I'm curious; do you remember a specific example?

Generally, things are related in an FM dialog; depends on how far down you want to drill. For example, most everyone knows what a "paragraph" is, but related to DTP a paragraph takes on many layers. Within the FM "paragraph designer" dialog, for example, live 6 tabs with some 50-60 parameters in total. At first glance, this might seem overwhelming. But start using it, and you appreciate the logical divisions and clarity, given the information density.

But you also have to know enough about the product to see how this parameter set relates to other things you might be doing.

Any complex app is like this; perhaps a real test is how well you can predict how something works you don't know based on other things that you already know.

Protools looked really odd to me at first, but as I got to work through it, most of it seemed fairly well thought out and I've learned to appreciate how PT deals with high information density. But my initial impression was, "who designed this piece of excrement?"

See above.

And these three products are for different groups of users. The one that's closest to FM is probably VP. PageMaker (distant weak cousin of In Design) is more for display and design work, not so much for long documents.

Each is great for what they do. For example, I would never suggest that someone writing a 2-4 page business letter fire up FM unless they really know it well. By all means, use Word. Use PM for newsletters. But for that kind of work, Word will likely break; FM will do it but you're using a complicated, big machine to swat a fly.

At the same time, I would never suggest that the doc set for a Boeing 747 be put together with Word, PM, or even Ventura. Those 80,000 (or so) pages are best handled by FM or something like it. (My personal record with FM was a 9,000 page doc set, hw and sw, in some 21 volumes, for an high-speed I/O computer. FM easily handled this. As an aside, it was simple to create a master TOC and master index.)

Again, depends on your goals and needs. And are we talking surface clarity or deep clarity? Sometimes the two are in conflict.

If a superficial level of "clarity" reduces an expert user's speed by even 10%, I'd probably not want to change the UI. At 50% or more, leave the UI alone, period. Find another product for the user who wants a "simpler" UI.

A better solution might be a configurable UI, with higher-level UI "personality" settings for expert or novice. (There is a subset of that in FM now and has been for a while, but it's not called that directly and it really only scratches the surface of the concept.)

Yup. Absolutely. But that's not the way applications development works in too many cases, unfortunately.

As one example, how about a small, drop shadowed, serifed font for dialog title bars, stippled gray on a dark gray title bar background? I know that many of the graphics folks get a tingle of excitement when they see such a thing, but for the rest of us, it's an eye-aching outrage. Worse, because it's an app-specific windowing system, you can't get to it to change it to something rational. At least within Windows there are adjustments for such things.

Or, how about "pods" and "docks" that *might* lend clarity at first, but then severely bog down the experienced user. (Fortunately, the more recent versions of FM allow you to disable such "cute clutter" and get directly to where you want to go, without "hand-holding" that becomes "hand-cuffed holding".

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you; my main abstract point is not to force one UI design on all different levels of users doing different kinds of work.

And I'm in complete agreement when the UI of a complex app is seemingly a random mess. Ugh. For the most part, though, FM is not in that camp.

Frank Mobile Audio

That's probably the case -- I don't recall seeing a "modular doc format" item. From the sound of it, perhaps this was something like FM's "book" feature". And it would be the height of stupidity were FM ever to delete the book system. Fortunately, they've only made it better.

I worked around most of the VP bugs, but the killer was the placement of tables and figures. Settings for "place here" or "float to next page" did not work. At random, those items wound up at the end of the file, many pages away, sometimes in random order. Maddening.

Frank Mobile Audio

There was no such "item". The earlier versions of Ventura kept /everything/ in separate files -- text, graphics, file locations, style sheets, etc. And all the files were plain-text readable! (Thank you, Xerox!) One of the nice things about this is that you could change the document's style just by substituting a different style sheet -- a particularly useful feature if you wanted to publish both paper and Web documents.

Unfortunately, Corel started wadding up everything into a single file. This meant you had to create completely separate documents (rather than just style sheets). And heaven help you if the file became corrupted -- you could lose everything.

It isn't. In Ventura, a book is a collection of chapters.

It sounds as if you had the first Corel edition, v5. It had disastrous bugs, including the one you describe. Corel had to issue a corrected version. Didn't they tell you?

try:

This is a dlink problem. They claim the camera is working with apple, but doesn't work on a Mac.

It's definitely NOT free, it's included in the price you pay. That they

Nope, just that you don't need a free operating system if you don't buy a computer.

Trevor.