Our Windows, which art in Redmond,
Windows Genuine Advantage be Thy name,
Thy Empire come;
Thy will be done (most of the time),
Crash in the present as you crashed in 1995.
Give us this day our daily patches,
and forgive us for downloading warez,
as we forgive the w4r3z d00ds for giving us malware.
And lead us not into downloading Ubuntu;
but deliver us more crappy software.
For thine is the idiot,
the market share and the Almighty Bill,
for ever and ever (or maybe not).
“What’s Linux?”

What makes Arch better is not the fact that the OS performs better (it does not), but the support structure surrounding it. The impeccably maintained official repositories, the fact that a blank install does not full your hard disk with bloated GUI-centric software, the great Arch Wiki, the highly active Arch forum, and the experienced users in #archlinux on Freenode, such as MrElendig and DigitalKiwi, to whom I am eternally grateful for bailing me out every time I broke my X.org configuration.

Just about everything to do with Arch speaks of a drive for efficiency and a desire to run on the “bare metal” – the optimization how-to guides on the wiki, countless forum posts, and dozens of optimized versions of programs in the AUR. It’s not the distribution that makes itself great, it’s the users – people who will submit bug reports, add software to repositories, publish small hacks, and maintain the wiki. The fact that there is so much user enthusiasm and so many developers using Arch creates an incredible culture that anyone can get wrapped up in.

My full thoughts on Arch and why it is one of the best, if not the best Linux distribution, are described here in this essay.

Click here.

You can read it here or find it through the new Essays page.

After a long movie-reviewing hiatus, I’ve finished my review of 8MM. You can read it here.

Our iPad, which art in Apple Heaven,
Prius driver be Thy name;
Thy Kingdumb come;
Thy will be done,
unitask on earth as it is in Apple Heaven.
Give us this day our daily Latte.
and forgive us our jailbreaking attempts,
as we forgive them for unitasking before us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us more shiny products.
For thine is the corporation,
the media attention and the Holy Turtleneck,
for ever and ever.
*Slurp*

Note: I’ve revised it a bit.

You can read thewizord’s original version here.

To begin, my reasons for reaching the conclusion. Note that I used this piece of crap on Windows. It’s been ported to Mac, but since I’m not a Mac user, I’m spared from using it twice for the sake of the writing of this post. Also, all Linux users are spared from this atrocity.

Here’s the shortlist, in no particular order:

• Can only import data from text files and web pages. One of its bragging points is “Excel compatibility”. In reality, you simply open Excel and copy-and-paste the data into Fathom. The question is, if you’ve opened Excel, why are you bothering to use Fathom? The only use for this would be as a cheap statistics package (which it is not) that you could use to make pretty graphs without having to pay for MS Office, but if you already need Excel to use it, there’s absolutely no reason to use Fathom.
• It uses an icon system that is obviously taken from the idea of desktop icons in Windows, but half of them cannot be deleted. They are shown whenever the file is printed off, so you have to hide them underneath graphs.
• Instead of providing you with a table with data in it that you can create graphs from, you have to paste the data into a “Collection” and then deal with multiple types of more or less identical tables that are only differentiated by what you can do with them. Why not just have a single table? It’s just taking a spreadsheet and adding a layer of needless complexity.
• Your options for manipulating the data are limited. You pretty much have to use their built-in library of functions, which include the standard functions like standard deviation, mean, median, mode… what’s that? No mode function? Oh well, it isn’t like one of the most basic things in statistics is worth including in this program.
• You cannot export graphs. Most software at least has the function to rasterize the graphs and save them as a JPEG or Bitmap or something. Does this? Hell no, the only way to get a graph out of this is to either print it off and scan it back in, or to take a screenshot and crop everything. It sounds convenient enough, but it’s just a waste of time if you’re making more than half a dozen graphs. This is obviously done to discourage people using anything other than Fathom for managing their data.
• As well, there’s no way of changing the graph labels without changing the column name, so if your column is named “Math1057″ and you want the horizontal data to be labeled “Grades (%)” with “Math 1057″ at the top, it’s too bad, since then it will change your “Math1057″ column. Also, you can’t have the parentheses or the percentage sign, since those are “illegal characters”. What is not an illegal character? Any number or letter. Anything beyond that is not allowed, including all special characters and even spaces. Why? Because their labels are the same as their column names, and they use the column names to compute things. Also, when you have to fill in the column name, instead of most spreadsheets’ system of a letter-number designation for column and row (B12, say) you have to use the column label, which means that it should be short. So you’re essentially stuck in a Catch-22.
• Want to present the graphs? Too bad. While you can create text boxes, they can only be written in a single font and font size and does not accept any special characters or formatting. It’s also non-Unicode, so have fun if you ever want to present data to someone who speaks a language that uses anything other than the strict Latin alphabet.

All of this paints the picture of a cheap piece of software aimed at students just trying to “get ‘er done”, and this is what the main appeal of it is. It shows up on a lot of websites of publishers of educational software, listed under “Grade 8 – College” (obviously American). It all looked fine until I glanced at some of the prices. Here’s one pricing table from these jackasses (prices presumed to be in USD):

• 1 User:          $129.95
• 10 Users:     $449.95
• 50 Users:     $999.95
• Unlimited:  $1499.95

On another, I saw prices as high as $2000 for an “unlimited” license. Who developed this? A company called “KCP Technologies”. I had never heard of them before, and when I Googled their name I found their website here (WARNING: Terribly designed corporate website incoming). It is unbelievably bland, from its slogan (“Discovering value”, which I have reworded as “Squeezing blood from a stone”) to its images (lots of smiling people, like every other corporate website ever).

It specializes in “High ROI from IT investments”, and various “solutions”, including RFID stuff (such as ‘My Employee’, a way for managers to track exactly where every single person who is carrying an ID card is in their building for “security” and “management” purposes, such as seeing which people are having sex in a closet or taking an extra lunch break, while being useless in terms of tracking down people who aren’t supposed to be in the building, which is what “security” means to me), a CMS, IT training videos, outsourcing (translation: they lay off all your support people for you, then give you the phone number of a call centre in India while charging a fat consulting fee), SAP (which describes anybody who would buy their software), and more crap. Basically, a combination of a useless crap that doesn’t work and Big Brother-esque ways (or “solutions”) of tracking employees by everything from their ID cards to their mobile phones. It also mentions “custom software solutions” for clients. Translation? A herd of codemonkeys.

Nowhere on their site does it mention Fathom. It turns out that they stopped developing Fathom a long time ago, and what I was using was the final product, not a beta or even their initial release. However, publishers of “educational software” everywhere are still selling licenses for this now-dead program for thousands of dollars. It’s also part of some curricula in the USA and Canada, so these publishers have netted thousands of dollars just from licensing this crap.

Other fun facts: It was developed by a total of 15 people, most of whom were “Research Coordinators” and “Project Coordinators”, and even a woman who is listed as “Project Support”. Also, the equation editor, one of the few non-broken things about it, was actually licensed from Pacific Tech and is part of NuCalc (graphing software for Macs). What also annoyed me was that the NSF actually donated money to it, probably with the intent of having it used in schools. And what do the schools get? Something that costs too much, is broken, and doesn’t actually teach kids anything about statistics. Good job, NSF.

To sum it all up: fuck you, Fathom™ Dynamic™ Statistics™ Software™ you Piece™ Of™ Crap™!

NOTE: All rights reserved, trademarked, copyrighted, time-locked in a vault, and hidden in a small cardboard box by a bunch of idiots who want to screw you out of your money.

Compared to the clean-looking, small graph of the developer’s primary computer (which can be seen here), mine was a mess. Over a dozen games that I had tried out and never removed, leftover dependencies for packages that I removed long ago… all of it totalled up to over 4300MB. Using Linux, with its small and easy-to-install software, had made me careless, even with stellar software package managers like pacman. I resolved to do something about this.

First of all, I looked at who the worst culprits were, which wasn’t too difficult – the largest package of them all jumped out at me: openoffice-base. When installed, it takes up over 370MB of disk space. The next few culprits were, surprisingly, the firefox and thunderbird packages. Those might have been understandable, but there were a few that I might never have noticed, such as k3b which, on its own, only takes up 30MB, but requires over 170MB in KDE-related dependencies. I was congratulating myself on using a lightweight WM like OpenBox before I noticed what else was taking up space – X11 itself. The xorg-server, xorg-fonts-{100,75}dpi and more were taking up far more space than I had thought they would. As well, driver sets like the madwifi drivers took up an almost shocking amount of space.

The next group wouldn’t surprise most people; things like gnash-common and flashplugin (which, hopefully, will be vanishing from my pacgraph within a few years), qt, python, smplayer, smbclient, and more. After reviewing all of the things that were eating up my disk space, I did some heavy removal. I sacrificed k3b in the interest of getting rid of all its dependencies (I’m still in search of a good disk ripper/burner if anyone wants to make recommendations), I got rid of GIMP (which I wasn’t using anyway), and I shed a great many of dependencies for previously removed software. In the end, I got myself down to a mere 2807MB.

As you can see, a great many things have changed. Some packages, however, are still around to haunt me - for now.

This is what I have done. I invite you to post links to your pacgraphs in the comments, or to add them to the Arch Linux Forums thread here.