[thelist] cheap software spam - how do they do it?

[Max Schwanekamp]

James Conley wrote:
> Hey Shawn, seeing as writing software is so easy for you - would you
> mind knocking out an Open-Source version of the Microsoft Office Suite
> that is 100% compliant with Microsoft Office and can read/write Office
> files over your lunch hour?

Well actually OpenOffice.org 2.0 [0], while not exactly equivalent to MS 
Office, fulfills much the same role and in some cases does it better 
(e.g. export a doc to HTML, work XML, create PDFs). Plus, the 
documentation is quite good, third-party tutorials and paper books 
exist, and the user base is huge, helping it to be a very mature 
application.  I use OOo every day, exchanging .doc and .xls files with 
both MS Office and OOo users all the time.  The MS Office folks 
generally don't even know that I'm using a different program.  You might 
point out the lack of an Outlook equivalent, but Shawn (to whom you 
addressed your post) uses Evolution[1].

Not the best example of something the Open Source world lacks, IMHO.

On the other hand, going back to the original thread topic, graphic 
design tools in Open Source /do/ seem to lack somewhat, the GIMP being 
the shining exception.  But AFAIK there is no OS equivalent of 
Illustrator (or Freehand), Flash, or even of Fireworks. Adobe-Macromedia 
really have this area in their pockets. :)

<tip type="eAccelerator for PHP" author="Max Schwanekamp">
The eAccelerator extension for PHP (formerly Turck MMCache) really 
speeds things up.  It's free, easy to install and Just Works.  Aside 
from info given in the install docs, one gotcha I've found is that if 
you use the the ioncube encoder extension as a php extension (included 
via php.ini), you may need to uninstall it and have encoded scripts use 
the ioncube runtime loaders instead.  A patch supposedly exists, but 
it's not supported, and in any case the speed gain by using EA exceeds 
the slight loss by using the ioncube runtime loader.
http://eaccelerator.net/
</tip>

[0] http://www.openoffice.org/
[1] http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/evolution.html
-- 
Max Schwanekamp
http://www.neptunewebworks.com/