Neither was Dr. Sbaitso - it was really just a simple Eliza-style program. The fun part was the text-to-speech.

Oh, and don't forget The Big Bang Theory. Classic.

WHEATON!!!!!

I'm not sure that's a reasonable question. A more reasonable question is, does it replace the features in Outlook that you actually use?

I have had to use Outlook for email in most organisations I've worked for (and out of the Office suite it is the only one I actually use regularly); admittedly I'm a developer and am therefore not a typical Office user, however I probably only used 50% of its functionality - basic email (with formatting), meeting requests, some very basic scheduling and task management. Not every user's usage of Outlook is going to be that simplistic but I would bet that one of the applications above would meet all of the needs of many users.

On the other hand, one massive hole that is still not really filled (although it is still being actively worked on) is Exchange connectivity, and I would imagine this would be a showstopper for adoption in many offices.

It'll definitely open documents that Office can't; however as for OOo Writer being able to save changes to documents in docx format without corrupting them, that's another story - at least anecdotally in my case. I got bitten just the other night - when I reopened a docx file I had previously edited I discovered that an entire table I had filled with text had vanished, much to my chagrin. As I had a requirement to fill in the document I had no choice but to find a Windows machine and use Word to edit it.

Now, maybe I wasn't using the absolute latest and greatest version of OOo (3.2, Go-OO version - actually, Writer 3.2.0-7ubuntu4.1 to be exact), and it did warn me initially about saving in a non-native format, but still, I was very frustrated by the loss. I hope this is the sort of thing they are working on.

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Why_not_use_sqlite.3F

In most situations you'd be right. However, Microsoft has a monopoly and that changes everything. In the current market as an OEM (of PCs at least) you pretty much *are* forced to buy from them or remain a small-time player.

Also, don't miss the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall (actually part of the Imperial War Museum).

Agreed, the n800 doesn't look like it will fit in your pocket but it fits in my jeans pocket just fine.

I think however that at some point you have to stand back and look at why you are trying to create a standard. The answer *ought* to be "for the good of the consumer, by way of creating a well-known benchmark, and therefore by extension the good of the industry". The second important realisation is that you achieve the most broad adoption of that standard (surely an important thing, if you are really serious about establishing the standard) by making it as easily available and implementable as you can. Imposing extra barriers such as fees and/or patents does the opposite.

Now, I'm willing to accept that standards organisations (or perhaps, their individual member organisations) don't necessarily think this way. I think they should, though.

Are you sure this is true? Last I checked, a fair bit of the software supplied with the Maemo OS was not open source. Not to mention that a number of high profile third-party Maemo applications aren't open source either.

I have an N800, and they're great devices, but finding this out after I bought it was a great disappointment.

You do realise that *loads* of drivers currently in the Linux kernel were written by developers working under NDAs from manufacturers, right?

OK, so let's deconstruct this point by point. I've left one or two points out where I have no specific comments.

Bold predictions indeed. True, I think proprietary software will remain, particularly in the vertical market; however a certain segment of software will become commoditised (arguably some of it already has been) and therefore users will expect it to be free or priced lower than cost.

Couldn't agree more here. ALSA has improved audio in a few areas but in all other aspects, from a user perspective it has only made things more difficult. Someone else commented recently on Slashdot regarding the BSD approach to this problem, it sounds like they have done a lot better by staying with/improving OSS. I really wish someone would stand up and take charge of improving Linux's core audio infrastructure instead of putting band-aids like PulseAudio on top.

I'm not sure this is really as bad as is made out. In between major releases, Qt and Gtk both take backwards compatibility very seriously. Qt at least is a commercial product, they have a commitment to maintain compatibility.

Too general to respond to - can hardly be true for all machines.

I thought that was the point of Cairo... ? Not my area of expertise though.

No explanation of how this is relevant to an end user.

Honestly I don't think the average user is really going to care where a configuration tool stores its settings as long as it works; only a power user or developer would. Of course it would be nice if people would use the same tools. However, although it's taken quite some time to work in all situations, NetworkManager has vastly improved network configuration ease of use and has been adopted by many distributions.

True, but arguably as far as the packaging alone is concerned, if you target RPM and deb you're going to cover most of the distributions that actually matter to end users.

It's actually pretty rare that you need to compile from source these days; you'd only need to do it for brand new or esoteric software packages. The click on a package approach seems to work fine in Fedora and Ubuntu.

Same could be said for different Windows versions. OK, sure, it's a bit different and more of an issue with Linux, but surely as a commercial developer you just pick the platforms you are prepared to support and with everything else the customer is on their own? Then, you can reduce the problem to being more or less the same as with other operating systems. Commercial ISVs reduce support costs by restricting options like this all the time.

Examples please...

OK, there will be examples, but let's have them so we know what is being referred to.

There are in fact home and work users who don't use these software packages or would be fine with an open alternative, so I think the unqualified assertion is invalid.

OK now that's just patently false. "Very limited availability of commercial games or equivalents thereof" I could accept. I think "very incomplete" is a little over the top as well - quite a lot of the popular commercial Windows games will work well in Wine and have been doing so for some time now.

Nothing's perfect, but this situation is improving and has been doing so for quite some time.

This is a problem. Not sure what the solution is since some manufacturers, notably Lexmark in past years, have been difficult about supporting Linux. Others such as HP are very cooperative and ought to be rewarded by continued custom.

I believe this has improved by leaps and bounds recently.

No idea if this is true or not, but surely most people watch these on dedicated players these days? It's not going to be a deal-breaker for most people in my opinion.

True, and in many cases a result of a patent system that has clearly gone wrong *especially in the US*. Arguably though distributions ought to be working on this using legal if not technical measures - some parties have, eg. Fluendo.

You simply can't expect every single hardware combination to be tested. Not even Microsoft can accomplish this for Windows. Anecdotally, machines here at my workplace have had regressions on both Vista and the new Windows 7 Betas. Granted, more testing can never be a bad thing.

Now we're venturing into mud-slinging - this is attempting to cast wild aspersions on the quality of open source software whilst lazily avoiding pointing out anything specific. Let's have a discussion based on the critical bugs that stop people from using the software, not the sum total of the bug trackers of all software packages, no doubt containing many duplicate and invalid bug reports (since bug system maintenance is a menial and often thankless task - I know, I've done it). It's not as if we as the general public can look into the bug trackers of most proprietary software companies.

Possibly true, lets have some examples so we know what is being referred to. Again, without specifics I'm not sure how this as a general criticism is relevant to end users.

Red Hat have had tools for configuring many of these for years, can't speak to their current level of functionality though.

Agreed. Major improvements needed here, no doubt about it. 9.1 largely repeats the same complaint.

This is going to be highly dependent on system configuration. Anecdotally I can offer that my laptop, despite being 3+ years old and running a lot of atypical system services such as Apache etc. as well as KDE 4 and a lot of applications, can shut down in about the same time as my Windows XP machine at work of similar or more recent vintage.

Almost all I have used do. Counter-examples?

No argument there.

Any more protection than competing OSes without any third-party software? Also, both GNOME and KDE have GUI sudo equivalents that work and in some cases activate automatically when a privileged operation is requested.

True; much of this is the price of the fast pace of development. I'd hope to see this improving in future. Note that if you mostly stick to distribution packages (not too hard these days) then you won't suffer from this at all however.

Can't speak to the accuracy of this; unfortunate if true, but the same response applies from above.

Can you possibly be any more general? Good lord. New software has bugs. Wow. What a statement.

Explain.

Repeat of earlier point.

Why doesn't Samba count? Because the protocol was invented by Microsoft? (it wasn't, by the way). Novell and Red Hat are both offering other directory services components, can't speak to their level of usefulness though I'd hope they would be reasonably good.

A few good points, but honestly I was expecting a much more professional report than this. The term "PITA" should never appear in anything like this that you expect people to take seriously.

Which is a moot point since we're talking about ARM, on which Windows XP will not run.

Simply pay the commercial operators a fixed fee negotiated based on the capacity of their prison. This effectively means they make less profit the more prisoners they have to incarcerate. Of course, you'd have to get them to agree to those terms, and if you assume some level of corruption will always occur then it might result in larger prisons being built than necessary. It would lessen the likelihood of people being sent to jail unnecessarily as a result of corruption, however.

They weren't the only ones. nationalrail.co.uk refused to deal with January 1 yesterday, complaining that it was in the past.