It's not our fault games were better on our system. Especially the sound. The ST was a ripoff. Sorry to break the news to you...

Let me guess... you're an Atari ST owner?

Still, in its glory days, games were abundant for the Amiga platform, so it must have been a profitable business for those producing them. What killed the Amiga wasn't piracy or the lack of games, but Commodore itself.

I have very fond memories of Ultima 6. It was the first RPG game I played that had a real depth. Many feature were groundbreaking for its time, such as the daily and nightly schedules for the NPCs, the non-linear storyline and enormous freedom you had in exploring the world. The plot was very well written, dealing with a powerful culture clash between two races, humans and gargoyles. The gargoyles started out as a seemingly stereotyped enemy, but actually turned out to be a very evolved and intelligent race fighting for their survival, and that you had to befriend in order to reach the common goal: peace. A stunning work of art created by Richard Garriott, Warren Spector and Dr. Cat.

Plone is quite popular and actively developed. Plone.net is a directory that lists many Internet portals and websites deployed with Plone.

Nowadays, it's pretty simple to setup a hosting environment for it using buildout, a system based on plain text templates that automatically builds and configures Plone instances for you, fetching dependencies as needed.

I forgot to add the most important part: it's free and open-source software.

Thanks for asking nicely...

Plone is a Content Management System (CMS) written in Python programming language for the Zope 2 Web Application server. Among the big names that have deployed Plone in the past are NASA, CIA, Akamai and Novell.

Pros:

• Mature
• Flexible
• Secure (with a proven track record)
• Cross platform
• Tons of third party extensions

Cons:

• Steep learning curve for developers and integrators
• Python, not PHP (so uncommon hosting requirements)
• Some say it's slow... (but have probably failed to correctly setup and optimize caching)

Every single company I've worked with will handle .doc documents and .ppt spreadsheets for legacy reasons. These proprietary formats and read and written to by the iWork and OpenOffice.org suites, which can also read .pptx and .docx files.

Again, the functionality required by 99% of the workers is more than provided by these alternatives.

Amusing article, but "distrohopping" was more of a PITA than a pleasure. For me, the real fun came after getting all my stuff working, tinkering with kernel recompiles and trying out the latest software.

If it's so damn good, why fight it?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind...

HTML5 apps have a lot of catch up to do. Have you seen any except some proof of concepts? Plus, HTML5 is untied to any specific company. The App Store has a massive advantage over HTML5 apps , so in the mobile scene it will be at most the runner-up.

Those apps are free in order to attract visitors to the App Store. They cost nothing to produce and put on display, and generate traffic to the App Store (and therefore Apple's e-commerce site). That would not happen with Flash apps, of course.

I thought Apple's grudge against Flash was all about free Flash applications competing with it's own commercial apps from the App Store. Want your lame "fart button"? Just browse to www.fartbutton.com and have a field day for *free*; it's faster than a micro-transaction and less painful, especially when you have to justify to your spouse all those micro-purchases making a macro-dent on your income.

No Flash, no cool little applications on your Phone for free... your only source for a quick fix is the App Store.

Put simply, your tablet docked to a station providing a more comfortable keyboard: there's your desktop computer. Looks cooler too.

I'm not drinking the Koolaid (I don't have an iPhone or an iPad and don't plan to buy any of them in the future), but I can see where the technology is going.

Still, writing your essay on a notebook on a train while going to the Uni seems more comfortable... at least until someone invents a foldable iPad or trains start sporting docking stations embedded in the passenger seats.

Funny, but unfair.

To get it up and running you just need to run the unified installer (also for Mac) and then point your browser to your chosen port. Administration is done with a simple and friendly GUI.

You don't need to install a LAMP stack and setup a database, so it's fast and pretty easy to get running; it's not the brutish beast you are depicting, so please don't spread FUD about a great piece of free software.

If this guy knows his way around a command-line, he might want to try installing it the "correct way" by using zc.buildout and PythonPaste, which is a bit more complicated but in no way mandatory.

Try Plone: it's cross-platform, open source and quite mature.

I recently helped implement an intranet document sharing portal for a big bank in my country and it works remarkably well. Just make sure you use iw.fss or zope blobs to store those big files. With a vanilla Plone site you get fully indexed PDF, Microsoft Word and Openoffice documents indexed right out of the box. You can access your Plone site through WebDAV and define some fine grained ACLs to set group and user permissions. Also, versioning and some great workflow functionality is there.

Ok, some may argue that Plone is actually a big and complex system, but the core functionality works straight away once it's installed and the Plone community is full of very helpful people. Worth a look.