Yesterday I had a request from a client for a network diagram for a system I’m designing, and normally I create such drawings as a PNG file. But this client said “no, I need it in Visio, or similar style so we can edit it”. I have avoided Microsoft Visio in the past, mainly because of its price tag: $249.99 for the basic version, and a whopping $999.99 for the premium version!
That’s a lot of moolah for a simple drawing program. But I figured it was time to bite the bullet and just buy it. So I drove to my local Staples and was going to pick up a copy. I actually had it in hand…and then some serendipity happened.
I was passing the table where they have all the laptops, and this fellow was lifting up and looking over a familiar laptop, one that I had gotten for my lovely wife on her birthday and I commented as I was walking by him “That’s a good buy, I bought one for my wife.”. To which he responded. “That’s good to hear, but do you know if it has wireless 3G?”. I started to explain that such options are usually with add-ons, such as special USB wireless dongles sold by cellular companies, but it seemed to baffle him.
So, I explained the differences between WiFi and 3G/4G services and said, “that laptop is probably already connected to WiFi right here in the store, see that Starbucks next door? They have free WiFi”. He was amazed to discover this, even more amazed when I pointed out to him that every McDonald’s in the USA has free WiFi now also, as do most hotels, and some airports.
To which he replied “Well, I suppose I don’t need to pay for 3G then do I?” That struck me, because at that moment, I realized I might not have to pay for Visio either; not because I planned on shoplifting it from the store, but because I hadn’t checked for alternatives yet.
I said, here, let me show you. And I showed him how to connect to WiFi on the laptop, then proceeded to Google “Visio replacement”.
Some hits came up. Most were dead-ends…but one wasn’t, and that’s what I want to share with you today.
Since many WUWT readers are scientists, engineers and business people, they need something like Visio on occasion to map networks, processes, flowcharts, structure trees, etc.
So I want to share “Dia”, short for “Diagram”. Its detailed, open source, and most importantly, free. It also has a community springing up that is adding shape sets for various specialty designs.
From the Dia web page:
Dia is a GTK+ based diagram creation program for GNU/Linux, Unix and Windows released under the GPL license.
Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.
It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).
We feel Dia is in a state where it can be actively used. Many features are implemented and the code is quite solid and mature. Try downloading Dia and tell us what you think of it. If you find any bugs, please report them with Gnome Bugzilla.
It seems pretty snazzy, and intuitive. I was able to doodle this up within seconds of opening the program:
So, for what I need to do, a networking flow diagram, it’s perfect, and free.
Some other examples for other venues are here.
My advice, get it. You’ve nothing to lose, everything to gain. While you are at it, if you want a simple and easy to use graphing program, may I suggest Dplot, which I also use. It’s a trial, and registration is cheap, and it has paid for itself many times over.
No this isn’t a commercial or paid plug, just stuff I thought I’d share this holiday season with thanks to the guy who needed some help understanding WiFi and 3G. It just goes to show that sometimes, good deeds are repaid.
Albert Kallal, you don’t understand the concept of Open Source Software. Check out Eric S Raymond “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. Also, plenty of people make money from “free” software on the downstream side. Python is a good example of that.
This is a good display of what I believe is wrong in the software industry. At least in my humble opinion. I believe companies like Micro$oft and Adobe tend to price themselves way out of the market. For example, M$ sells the home version of Office for $279.99. I can buy an entry level notebook computer for that. In my house, we have 5 notebook computers and a couple of desktops. It would cost me $1395+ to load just the notebooks with M$-Office. In short, not going to do it. However, if M$ were to provide that “home” version for something more reasonable, say $79 or even $59, I would be more inclined to load’em up, and spend the $375 to do it. So, because M$ has priced their products so high, they are missing out and instead of me sending them 375 of my hard earned clams, I send them zero and either make do, or download something like OpenOffice for free. Doesn’t sound like a good marketing strategy to me, but then hey, I’m no marketing analyst either, just a software engineer.
There are a whole host of GREAT free software projects out there. I recommend you ALWAYS do a little research before purchasing ANYTHING. Also, please, for those open source/freeware projects that accept tips/donations, please give and help these people along, after all, they are doing you a service by donating their time and expertise to bring you these products for FREE! They are patriots! Show them you care!
Sorta on topic.. Just saw an ad on TV for Dragon (speech software). I was appalled by the commercial touting “Climate Change” and how humans are destroying the earth (paraphrasing). What the heck is a nazi-environmentalism plug doing in a software commercial? .. That does it for me, I most certainly will never buy THEIR product.
earthdog says:
December 15, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Don’t forget gnuplot! Unless someone else already brought it up…
All my graphs are written using gnuplot.
Gnuplot is a command-line driven interactive function plotting utility for Linux, OSX, MSWin, VMS, and many other platforms. The software is copyrighted but freely distributed (i.e., you don’t have to pay for it).
If linux users have a problem with the lack of interface functionality then try installing the Windows version on your linux partition and run the program using “wine”.
http://www.gnuplot.info/
I had a similar experience when I discovered Inkscape — a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator.
Check out: http://inkscape.org/
I used this program to create an elaborate astronomy poster.
Happy Holidays,
@wrote:
Brett_McS says: December 15, 2010 at 8:56 pmAlbert Kallal, you don’t understand the concept of Open Source Software. Check out Eric S Raymond “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
—
I have a copy of Eric S. Raymond’s book. I understand the whole process very well. The question here sure you can make money by working in the food industry. However not all of us want to sell our services to the food industry and not all of us want to make our money in the software industry by selling our services. Some of want to OWN our restaurants or OWN the rights to our software. Just recent the Indian wanted Coke Cola to disclose their formula under some new food act Why give away all these things we create in the west?
I might want to keep and own how we grow those great big juicy tomatoes that our competitors don’t know how to make. Some of us want to publish our books or software.
Helping out and doing great things for your community is fine, but when governments mandate and make it an requirement that I sign away how I grow those great tomatoes or how I build those great desks or how one builds that great software then I have a big problem here. In other words, it becomes a forced decree that those people are NOT going to purchase anything from people who own things.
No ownership = socialism.
So where the problem here is governments are now stating they will not purchase things with IP rights. I mean, sure, lets not purchase our paper from anyone who owns the land, but ONLY from a socialized cabal?
Giving away your IP rights as the open source community asks means you never own your intellectual work anymore. That is really the same difference as between working in the food industry as opposed to owning an restaurant. I am MOST aware that you can make money in open source by doing work as an service as opposed to publishing or selling ones intellectual abilities. Not all of us want to work as an service, but some of us want to sell books or software. The OS community is asking us to give up our IP rights to other people and this is clear as day what they are asking.
I suppose if you don’t have any money then you will most freely advocate taking that money away from people like the folks in Cancun are doing. How great it is that people with no money ask for those who have money to give it away!
And I suppose if your don’t have any intellectual ability or something that you value in terms of intellectual property then again I am sure you advocate an system that takes way that property right from those that have this ability.
This taking away of that right is EXACTLY what the open source community is advocating. Did you ever wonder why that community seems anti west and anti business at the same time?
It is a form of socialism in that it denies the right of ownership. For those that freely give their time to society in the community is a great thing that we should all do. However there is a grand canyon of an difference when this giving becomes a demand of governments and society, then I have a HUGE problem.
It means we have less ability to reap the rewards of creative hard work. This is exactly what the folks in Cancun want in terms of taking away our money because we made the efforts to build up a society of wealth in the west. We have a system that rewards hard work and creative people and these people want to take that away.
So sure I understand for those that don’t invent or make things they will most certainly advocate a system in which those do create or invent things do not benefit from that ability. I fail to see much difference here between those that advocate taking money away from the people who have and those who advocate taking away IP rights from people and giving it to those who do not.
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
Don’t forget DraftSight if you are contemplating a 2D Cad program:
http://www.3ds.com/products/draftsight/download-draftsight/
Totally free from Dassault Systems (CATIA). Puts out .dwg files.
DesertYote says:
For SVG, use Inkscape. Its goal is to become the ultimate SVG complaint authoring system.
Thanks for the tip. A Mac version is available, so will try it out.
@Albert Kalal: You have very strange ideas. Free software is all about freedom. How you can equate it with communism is beyond me.
I don’t want to write a long rebuttal ( http://xkcd.com/386/ ). But note that free software thrives in the complete absence of any kind of state coercion. Free software and freedom go naturally together. Whereas commercial software needs the power of the state to exist – special laws like the DMCA; courts, lawyers, and heavy fines; police actions by homeland security; arrests and prosecutions and people sent to prison – in short the ideal environment for proprietary software is a police state.
Thanks for the link to DPlot, Anthony. I’ve been looking for a replacement for CricketGraph for the Mac which is still the best plotting program I’ve ever used. I’ve been creating graphs running my 1988 version of CricketGraph under BasiliskII and exporting the results from Mac emulation as rtf files; a rather tedious process. Was just about to start writing my own ActiveX control to do my data plotting in my VB programs when this post appeared about DPlot.
It is impressive! Easily and quickly plots scatter graphs of 32000 points and can be called from VB using a far simpler API than M$Graph (the worst control they’ve ever written). Also, unlike M$Graph, what comes out on the printer is the same thing that is displayed on the screen. DPlot price is a bit steep but I really like what I’ve seen thus far. Timing couldn’t have been better and fortunately I’d only spent a couple of hours on my general purpose graph control thus far.
@Albert
I do not recall being anti-west and anti-capitalist for working on a Opensource Game called Sauerbraten. It has more to do with being fun to work on, intresting to learn from it and it looks good on your resume.
But that is just a small project compared to Open Office or Blender.
@Robert: Thanks for Sauerbraten. Cool game.
@Ian H wrote:
. Free software and freedom go naturally together. Whereas commercial software needs the power of the state to exist
—
The same goes for land owners and business too?
Of course it is the State and Society that grants your rights to own a car. That state (Hopefully ) also respects the right of you and your family to own a house. Or own a business, or the right of you to own your own farm and land.
Now of course the AGW folks might want to tax the gas that comes out of YOUR cow for THEIR benefit at the expense of YOUR family. And I’m sure if you resist the government they will very well try to take your farm away. (Australia anyone?)
So course the state grants the ownership of things, it’s called the concept of private property and it took society a long time to figure this out. Now course you could Fall for the Socialist preaching that if you allow people to own land, then they can exploit their workers. Or if you grant intellectual property rights, you get the exact same false argument about a police state .
However at the end of day, it is ONLY when the state grants ownership of things to people is the ONLY means of which people can have TRUE freedom from the VERY state that grants that ownership. If you have true ownership of your own resources and property, then the government cannot tell you what to do, nor do you have to go to the government for a handout Or listen to their garbage propaganda about AGW and how they want to take away what you have and give it to somebody else by taxing your cow gas coming out of its rear.
So you’re preaching about a police state exactly applies and is the same manifested garbage that was used to teach people how land and private property is a Evil thing. Yes if you could just get rid of those big bad business owners and those big greedy landowners, and redistribute the wealth then the world would be such a wonderful place. Without that land we would not need any contract laws and perhaps even could get rid of the court system! Sorry to say, you’re preaching Karl Marx here.
Now this doesn’t mean that everybody who does community works and has a concept of sharing and caring is Communist or socialist. So I am no more stating that just because someone supports open source, it does not mean they are pushing a brand of socialism . However when the government starts to mandate that you MUST do this, then they are in in fact pushing a brand of socialism and seeking to remove the concept of private property and private rights.
It is an issue of the people vs. the state, and are you going to grant individual strong state supported Private rights. So it is without question that you want the BEST legal system and a very STRONG support of individual private rights. Without Support of private individual rights, you’re asking citizens of the society to give up their individual rights and turn them over to the state. This turning over of rights is quite much what the UN is attempting to do on a global scale. So the whole Socialist movement is much using AGW to push this type of agenda. (they want nations to give up their Sovereign rights, and that’s not much different than individuals giving up ther private property rights to their state)
Any society that does not grant strong state supported individual property rights is a society that’s going down the road toward socialism . Ownership of private property rights is probably one of the MOST important things that any society can support and endorse.
So yes, it DOES take strong State supported laws to enforce individual rights. In fact we see this philosophy realized in the Magna Carta, and also that of the constitution of the United States. The very idealism here is such that the great western societies actually recognize that you need SUCH strong laws to protect citizens from the VERY government which almost always grows as a big cancer on society and continually attempts to take away private rights .
Great societies are the ones that value and protect private rights EVEN above that of the state rights.
We are MOST Indebted and privileged to have Anthony as a host to promote and do the great works that he is done for the community in this fight Against CAGW. I can assure you in a non free society, this site would be shut down in a matter of minutes.
It is only because we have a strong state and legal system that the thuggery of the governments of the world cannot shut us down. However if we don’t fight for things like intellectual property rights, we will see a day when a site WUWT will not be legal at all.
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
FreeMind is okay, but the cat’s meow for flow-chart and mind-map making is Comapping (found at Comapping.com).
A month free trial, then 50 bucks a year. Just a wonderful program compared to FreeMind, MindManger, or any of them, really. You have to work with it for just a day to see how slick, easy, fast, stable, etc., it is.
You got me looking for graphing programs… This one is pretty amazing as a graphing calculator. I don’t think you can import coordinates for 3D maps, but for what it does, the free version is extremely cool to play with…
http://download.cnet.com/Graphing-Calculator-3D/3000-2053_4-10725117.html?tag=mncol;9
OK, downloaded, looks OK – but there’s no way to draw a circle with its centre on the grid!!!!
Also, it has some quirky ideas like e.g. “snap to grid” is part of the view menu. Snapping to the grid is no more part of the “view” than is a circle!!
Any way, I’ll give it a go as I used to use Visio all the time until it became part of the micro$oft empire!
Albert D. Kallal said:
However if we don’t fight for things like intellectual property rights, we will see a day when a site WUWT will not be legal at all.
—————————————————————————–
Huh? Bit of a non sequitur there, methinks.
Look, the reason copyright and IP is under attack everywhere is because the owners got greedy. When CDs that cost a couple of dollars to manufacture were being retailed for $30, when book copyright owners managed to con the US government into extending their rights till 70 years after the death of the author, when M$ charges hundreds of dollars for a product that isn’t worth it – you get the idea.
As a PP said, if he could buy M$ products for his family’s computers at a reasonable price, he would do so. In an age where multiple computers in a household or business are the norm, the pricing model is extortion and people know it.
The recorded music industry is on its knees because punters know they are being ripped off. Many years ago, vinyl records were enthusiastically ‘pirated’ onto cassette tapes – but people kept buying records because the product was superior in terms of sound quality, packaging etc and the price was considered reasonable. The Great CD Ripoff laid the groundwork for the industry’s demise.
The mass market will always exist for good products – most people are not nerds and can’t or won’t go digging around on the internet for obscure (albeit free) computer products if there is a cheap and satisfactory alternative in their local store.
Similarly, the owners of copyrights for print, audio and visual products are shooting themselves in the foot. It is cheaper and easier to create new product than to deal with the complex and expensive copyright and licensing arrangements that they have wrung from legislators.
In Australia we have just had a case where the local music copyright association tried to hit gyms with music royalty increases that would have increased costs sixty-fold. Fortunately, the courts threw it out. But, it is symptomatic of the problem. And I’m guessing that if it had been upheld, there is no way that gyms would have copped the extra costs. They would have found a solution which did not involve using the music in question.
@johanna
Huh? Bit of a non sequitur there, methinks.
==
I respectively see this different.
Actually, this is about freedom. Did you not wonder why OVER 150 heads of state ALL flew to Copenhagen last year?
Here is a short video by Lord Monckton explain near what the WHOLE CAGW fight is all about.
The Stoke of the Pen:
(above video of Lord M is oh so very Inspirational).
Here you stand telling me that someone should not pull oil out of the ground for $3 dollars a barrel and sell it for $80 because YOU suppose it is highway robbery and it should be stopped. Why are you now deciding what is hiway robbery for everyone? Gee, I guess you better catch the next plane and join the folks in Cancun to join the demonstrators fighting against the big bad greedy oil companies that sell their product for more than 20 times the cost? Perhaps next week you be demonstrating against the software companies?
People tend to find what they purchase WELL worth it and that is why they buy billions of dollars of that stuff. Be it Coke Cola or Word. And stating production cost is only 20 cents for a disk is really not honest on your part at all.
BTW you can purchase a home edition 3 license family pack of office 2010 with word + execl + PowerPoint for $124.
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Office-2010-Student-Version/dp/B00337D8U6/ref=sr_1_1?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1292495837&sr=1-1
In fact, even when not at sale, that above package goes for $150, and that is for 3 legal activations of word + excel + power point etc.
People find this stuff afforable and thus thus WILLING purchase billions of it.
Anyway, I am not here to debate that you think a BMW or some software or someone’s favorite wine is too expensive. I happen to think that $10 worth of gas that lets me run around town for few days is WELL worth the cost and price I pay. If people find something too expensive, they just have to find some alternatives then.
I not here to tell you what to purchase or justify throwing out property rights because you think someone is charging too much for their steak so you thus justify the view that farm ownership should be abolished.
However, I am MOST certainly telling you the connection of the open source movement and that concept of eroding property rights is a real issue.
Anyway, do please view the above video of Lord Monckton.
And yes, I was serious that in MANY counties around the world do not have the rights granted to them to enjoy something like WUWT.
The whole CAGW fight was all about freedom as Lord Monckton points out.
Freedom is worth fighting for.
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
I must say that I find Albert D. Kallal’s viewpoint rather bizarre. One of the most retrogressive moves that has occurred in recent memory is to allow software to be patented. This stifles innovation and creates monopolies on trivial algorithms which can very easily be independently arrived at by a competent programmer given a particular program. I don’t use commercial software as I usually can’t agree to the license terms and so stick to open source. My longstanding belief is that when I buy something, it is mine and I can take it apart or use it in a novel way that wasn’t intended by its maker. Commercial software licenses prohibit this so I don’t use the software. When I do use such software, someone else has agreed to the license terms which is why every computer I’ve bought has been a demo model where windoze has been pre-activated or machines I’ve built and installed Linux on.
For me software is a tool to create better software and there is a very large community of programmers who freely make the results of their work available. The authors of the programs get recognition for putting them into the public domain and I make sure to credit the author for every bit of code that I borrow in my programs. Anyone who has worked in scientific research is aware of how productive the process of publishing ones results is (except in the area of climatology where the individuals involved seem to use Micro$oft as their model).
Having source code available is essential as software companies disappear and then one is left with data files that one has to reverse engineer to extract data. In the area of electronic medical records (EMR) I would never use a closed source program as companies that provide EMR’s have a distressing habit of disappearing leaving physicians with data in a format that is non-trivial to transfer to a new EMR program. Also, I like the freedom to change a program to operate as I think it should rather than how it was originally created. This requires source code although disassemblers are quite advanced now creating flowcharts from compiled code but I no longer have the time to play with software at this level.
The worst offender in the area of proprietary code is Micro$oft who seems to make major changes purely for the sake of change so they can sell new versions of their products. I used to use M$ word for the Mac in 1988 but there is no support for those document formats in more recent versions of word. The 1988 version of word was completely adequate for the word processing that I do and the software bloat that has occurred since then is unbelievable. I’ve given up on the M$ platform once they dropped support for visual basic which is totally incompatible with VB.NET. If I’m going to program in an interpreted language, I might as well use Java.
The idea that one can charge a huge amount of money for common software is anachronistic. The cost of the hardware has dropped dramatically over the last 20 years and to get the computational capacity I have on the machine I’m writing this on would have cost over $1 million 20 years ago. Paying several hundred dollars for a word processor to run on the current run of the mill supercomputer is simply ludicrous. What sells now is custom software or novel applications. I’ll be buying the DPlot program as it’s exactly what I need now and the cost of my time to duplicate it would be far more than the purchase price. For word processing I use Open Office as I know that my documents will still be readable in 20 years time unlike old word documents which can only be opened now with Word Perfect.
Mr Kallal
I never said CDs cost 20c to manufacture, it was $2.00 (only a tenfold error on your part, no probs!)
I never tried to justify seizure of private property because things are expensive, nor would I. My comments actually illustrate what happens when markets are artificially distorted.
Let’s just say we are, er, in parallel rather than meeting in this discussion.
Dia installed fine from the Synaptic package manager. Nice software. Thanks for the tip about this. My artistic skills being what they are…. I need all the help I can get. 🙂
Bjorn Dec 15th 11:44 –
“I have used Linux exclusively for two years now.
Ubuntu is my choice, it is brilliant.”
I asked my techie son what he thought of Ubuntu and was so proud when I read his response that I’m copying it here –
“It’s a Linux distribution which is based upon Debian (which is the main Linux distribution which I use and contribute to). As a result, a very small percentage of Ubuntu is my work. It aims to build upon Debian by being more beginner-friendly – which it succeeds at doing – but at the same time it doesn’t have such tight quality control as Debian does.”
Looks like I’ll be trying Ubuntu then!
Nice post! I hadn’t heard of this software before. But I do make it a rule to always do a websearch for free software, i.e. open source alternatives, when I need something, and almost always find something that will do the job. Sure, a professional working with it every day will often want the best commercial solution and then it makes sense to invest some cash in order to be optimaly efficient and save time, but if it’s just occational use the free alternative is often good enough.
Albert, I am sorry I really have to disagree with you. Everyone has the choice of whether they use opensource or not and yes many of the paid software products are superior but I think you miss the point. You see open source technology is the backbone of the world, from running websites or allowing you to process your credit card at the gas/petrol station. I feel your angle that it’s “anti-west” and “anti-business” is totally flawed. Please look into successful projects like Magento, Drupal and WordPress, explain why IP rights are being jeopardised here? Also something as menial as Apache on linux, which to my knowledge is free and powers no doubt a lot of servers for business purposes; how is this “anti-business” when it powers a business? Open source tech is successful because a lot of it is very good, good enough to power the likes of things like Facebook.
Hi Anthony,
I am surprised that you did not mention Google SketchUp.
I used to do some work in Cadd programmes, Microstation and AutoCadd, but found the learning curve to become a really good user just too steep. However, Google SketchUp is just fantastic for those that need some drafting, flowsheet modelling, and general CADD capabilities.
I found Visio just too limited for general engineering illustrations. It may suit the software and IT departments, but try and model a big plant, process flowsheet or anything remotely complicated, and you will soon realise the limitations of the programme.