mintCast 132: More Libre In Your Office

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Hosts:: James, Rob, Scott, HarrisonLive Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): mintcast.orgSubscribe: [iTunes] [Zune] [RSS MP3] [RSS OGG]

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Credits: Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast’s bumpers were provided by Oscar.


14 Replies to “mintCast 132: More Libre In Your Office”

  1. Karl Langham

    Thank you for a friendly, relaxed, relevant podcast about Linux in general, and more specifically Mint. Your podcast was the first podcast I started listening to, and is still one of my favourites. The quality of your show is comparable to the commercial Linux podcasts. Thanks again for your efforts.

    Regards – Karl

  2. james

    certainly, advertising should take a back seat to freedom
    we choose to pay for freedom every day, in many ways
    we do not choose to pay for advertising
    in some way, we fight against advertising and they fight against freedom; at the extremes
    the matrix is upon us

  3. Easling

    I don’t mind the advertisements if & when I go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble as to what other people who bought what I’m buying are buying. That’s their website – they can do as they please and in fact, I find that a convenience at times. But MY computer is MY computer. I don’t and WON’T condone advertisements arbitrarily popping up on MY computer or MY computer’s software tools. That’s an invasion of privacy. I also treat such software as a viruses – back in my ex-M$ Windoze days, there were several freeware/shareware programs that used pop-ups until you paid for their software. I’d immediately uninstall such software (unless I was going to buy it).

    I don’t mind revenue generating when I’m surfing the Internet and click on a website where I might buy something from that site where that site shares a portion of the sales price (think of it as a commission) to Conical, or Mint (I use Mint 9), or whomever as long as none of my personal info or location or computer’s info, or which browser I’m using, etc, is passed along.

    My home is my home, my computer is my computer. Would you enjoy someone coming into your home and start advertising products to you while you were trying to eat dinner, or trying to go to sleep, or trying to take a shower? I doubt it. This type of revenue stream generation on Conical’s part is nothing less – it’s an illegal invasion of privacy.

    I noticed, because of all of the damnedable ads, how unpleasurable my websurfing experience had become. So I went out of my way to use browser ad-ons to block all them. Now that I can pick & choose when and what I want, my websurfing experience has returned to the pre-commercialization of the Internet days’ level. I use Adblock Plus, Flashblock, Ghostery, and NoScript to help stop all of the offensable, invasion of privacy materials; kind of reminds me of all of the garbage mail that came to my mail box. Rarely ever got a real letter, except for bills that is. 99% of the time I just got damn advertisements. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have some way to block all of those ads? And what about all of those phone marketeers who call just as you’re trying to sit down to dinner because they know that that’s the time you’re most likely going to be home and not busy?

    I don’t want to be lambasted in the face with some ad that may be related to the subject matter of a document I’m looking for on MY computer or even on the internet as far as that goes. What I’m doing on MY computer is NONE of their damn business.

    Do you like it when you’re walking gown the street, maybe going into a diner for lunch when some guy comes up to you and says, “Hey. I see you’re going to have a bite to eat. Ya know, I haven’t had a bite to eat in days. How about helpin’ a brother? Lend me a buck”? Or you’re awalking along the street and some kid says, “Hey. Your shoes are dirty. How about I shine them for you? Only a buck.” Or, you’re driving down the street and come to a stop light only to have some guy jump out and ask, “You need your windows washed?” or “Would you like to buy a paper?”

    None of those are any less invasive as would be when I’m searching MY computer in Nautalus or Nemo or whatever program for a document and having some damn ad pop up because some jerk someplace thinks I might like what he or she has to offer.

    It’s a complete load of BS.

    • Sid32

      Turn it off then. After you are done with that, please let us know your plan to generate revenue for Ubuntu to make money and provide us a free os?

  4. James J

    I really enjoy listening to you fellas every week and appreciate the time you put into this show.
    Also, there’s lots of OSS news out there, I like hearing about it here. Thanks, please keep it going.

  5. merelyjim

    Unlike most, I didn’t really use spreadsheets until I got my first copy of Star Office with a purchase of Radhat Linux, in a box, sold in a STORE!

    I learned that if something was complex, export to PDF, but simple stuff could be saved in Excel format and shared without much problem.

    For those out there concerned about the Java requirements involved with Libre or Open Office, or just want something simple, try Abiword (word processing) and Gnumeric (spreadsheets).

    Inkscape has become my ace in the hole for anything graphically oriented, like making a sign or a poster. SVG formats require little space and you can do a lot more with them than you’d think at first glance.

    All of these applications can be found at Portable Apps [www.portableapps.com]. Great for those of us living in a Windows world, but thinking Linux.

    Great podcast, as always, guys.
    Thanks for putting it out there.

  6. Thom

    In reference to the comment from Tim: Personally, I feel that you all relate information about Mint better than any other podcast, so your name is justified. Tim (and possibly John here) want more specific information to help them personally, which is NOT what the podcast is about. I have since given up using Mint and moved on to other distros, but still listen for the ENTERTAINMENT value, not the strict guidelines you 3 set down about information pertinent to THIS ONE PARTICULAR version of the Linux OS.

  7. Easling

    I WAS a Word user from back in the good old DOS days. That’s when I think Word was at it’s prime. But when they went to WinDoZe, they changed many things with the UI, including keystrokes. What I could once do from the keyboard in DOS I was no longer able to do in the WinDoZe version.

    I no longer use WinDoZe but even when I did, I used Star Office & later went to OpenOffice because I got tired of all the backward incompatibility between M$’s Office versions.

    I laughed when I heard the problems with compatibilities between WinDoZe Office and OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

    I go way back in computers (1981). I can remember not only the PC wars, but also the office suites incompatibilities/wars. Think Frameworks, Symphony, Word, WordStar, MultiMate, PeachTree, VisiWord, Borland’s Quattro Pro (the BEST spread sheet pre-Excel ATT), VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, MultiPlan, SuperCalc, Advantage, and many, many more. Not one of those programs were compatibile with another, save if you save your document to an RTF (word processing only). Remember, this is pre Adobe, pre & post WYSIWYG. This was the good ol’ DOS days and just at the beginnings of WinDoZe – think version 2.1! (I preferred Quarterdeck’s DesqView over WinDoZe in those days. It managed memory a hell of a lot better. On a 386 with 1MB memory – that’s right, 1MB not 1GB – I could run 5 copies of WinDoze 3.1 side by side and still run several other DOS progs At The Same Time. But I digress).

    In those days of the ultimate incompatibilities, I had a piece of self standing software that could convert between ANY version of ANY software with ease. NO problems. It was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Everyone came to me for help with document formats that they got from whomever from wherever that they had to review and modify & send back.

    I was in seventh heaven.

    That was until they sold out to M$. That’s right. M$ bought them out & took all of that companies converters and used the ones they wanted to support in Word so as to make Word ubiquitous. King of the hill of text editors/WYSIWYG word processors.

    M$ did that as long as it suited them – read, until they got everybody on board with Word & then they dropped the converters.

    That’s back in the days when Word had a complete from strat to finish, built-in, for free, tutorial. That is until they decided to shcrge everyone for it seperately. Again I digress.

    Micro$oft is just like the Chinese, they do exactly as they dang well please with total disregard and abandon. They don’t & won’t play by anybody’s rules. In fact, they go out of the way to change the rules to suite themselves. Look at Java. Look at C & C++. Look at Pascal. Look at basic. Look at dbase & Fox Pro. Look at the Open Document Standards. The list goes on and on.

    I don’t, thank goodness, have those issues. As Rob said, if I HAVE to let someone running WinDoZe view one of my docs, I export to pdf. If, because I may have to show a presentation that I’ve created in OpenOffice in an office that uses WinDoZe, I boot from my Mint 9 Flashdisk & run OpenOffice (I even dispise using M$’s GUI). If I need to let a WinDoZe user edit any of my docs, I save to an RTF or in Win 97/2000 format when I need to preserve any special formating RTF can’t.

    In an ideal world, we would do away with M$ & its products and its 800-lb gorillia mentality & instead, whole heartedly embrace open source & open standards.

  8. Brian36 in Dorset UK

    Mincast Modus Operandi – Mint-based, yes, but I rather like the excursions around the digital world. On subjects to be discussed, I often play with older, slower machines and LXDE helps. As Mint no longer supports LXDE, any thoughts on alternatives? On the subject of Office, I use LibreOffice and importing and exporting can be a problem as most of my contacts use docx. I export as PDF, which works a treat. RTF doesn’t always work as they don’t always how to deal with it, in which case I have copied and pasted the text into an email as it’s surprising how many folk can’t open an attachment with the correct application.
    I listen to Mintcast and Tuxradar – inestimable! Thanks guys!

  9. a_regular_listener

    Re mintcast not be about Linux Mint I would like to leave my opinion.

    Not being Linux Mint centric podcast is a plus, in my view. With that approach I believe you can reach a broader audience (as myself, as my primary distro is not mint, although have it installed in one of my boxes).

    Great job guys.

  10. Sid32

    Hey, the amazon lens in only going to be in Unity and you can turn it off. Plus its not ads like what you see on websites, its more like an extra search engine on your machine. If you search for toasters you will see pics of the top rated toasters. It won’t over ride the list of the software installed on your machine.

    I like this idea, besides helping the Ubunutu guys keep the OS free, it gets the info you want on your screen faster. When I want to buy a new monitor, I search the dash for monitors and get the top rated monitors on my screen and I have a place to start. This is easier then opening browser, searching for top rated monitors, clicking on amazon and go from there.

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