Penn State University has LibreOffice installed on all of their lab computers. In fact, they've been using it so long some of the systems still have a version so old it's still called Star Office. But they've always got MS Office installed too. Any many professors consider anything submitted in any format other than .docx to not have been submitted at all -- I know people who have received zero credit for assignments they submitted as a .odt. That's the real problem. The kids understand this stuff, but their teachers not only don't know, they do everything they can to actively avoid having to learn!

Not that I disagree with you, but I think you miss the point.

The "someone to sue" argument is about CYA in a catastrophic event. It's the same argument as "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

If there's some massive security breach in a Microsoft product that exposes all of your customer information, that would be perceived as Microsoft's fault. You could try to sue, and probably lose, but the perception is still that it's Microsoft's fault and they're industry standard so you did nothing wrong. Same thing happens with something open source, and your company takes the blame for using "that cheap piece of garbage."

It's pointless and unrealistic, but it's not really supposed to be. Nobody expects that to happen, but they see the price of proprietary software as a kind of insurance against such events.

Perhaps someone could improve acceptance of open source by directly selling actual insurance against that kind of thing....

I've had friends receive an F on an assignment for submitting a .odt file instead of a .docx.

They need to either ban teachers from doing that, or create their own free software package. If you're going to have public education, it's unethical to then mandate students to purchase hundreds of dollars of software from a specific private company.

I use Excel every. single. day. for work. That's my entire job -- I'm in the performance testing lab, I take test results from various servers and format them into Excel sheets. And then I use Word a lot because I'm in the process of rewriting all our bash scripts and gotta document all of that.

So I've been using it every single day for two years now...but the ribbon STILL pisses me off. I mean the general concept is fine, but having menus change locations and appear and disappear depending on what I'm doing is incredibly obnoxious.

Here's an example -- how do I double-space text in a table cell? Was trying to figure this out yesterday. Normally, you'd go to format > paragraph...except when you're working with a table, the format menu vanishes. All you get is table properties, cell options, that sort of thing. But I've looked through all of those, and there's no option to control the line spacing. As far as I can tell, you simply can't do it!

Well...as others have explained, an actual desktop distro will not make you do those steps. Also, what school is having *the students* install new software?

Having said that...when I was in elementary school (not that long ago; I'm 23) we used Apple IIEs. In fourth grade every single student took typing classes. And *not a single kid* ever had a problem with 'put in the 5.25" floppy disk and type these commands at the prompt to launch the program'

Crap, slashdot ate my mock SQL...let's see if this way works:

SELECT * FROM [sheet 2] WHERE [sheet 2].[column A] IN (SELECT [column A] FROM [sheet 1])

I graduated college two years ago and I still have people currently at that school calling and asking me for help with Excel problems. *Always* Excel. Sure, it's quite simple if you're a coder or tech already, but to most people even setting up a SUM is incredibly cryptic.

Here's one from a question I got yesterday...to simplify I'll do some mock SQL of what they were going for, see if you can figure it out without Google:

SELECT * FROM WHERE . IN (SELECT FROM )

Actually a pretty simple ask -- I expected to find an option for it in the 'filter' tool, to filter one column on the contents of another, but there was nothing there. Took about an hour to walk her through getting the formulas and filtering set up to do that. Then she asked why the value in A1 on sheet 1 didn't match the value in A1 on sheet 2. I tried to start talking her through how to sort them to fix that but she gave up at that point.

This isn't a house, it's an office building.

And he didn't just walk in, the server provided the information to him.

So, he walks into an office building, asks the security guard if he can walk right up to the conference room, and the guard says 'yeah, sure, why not' so he does...and now he's being arrested for trespassing.

...which would also make it illegal to sell those "Brother HL2040 compatible" toner cartridges I always buy. I do not like your rule.

Try Radioshack, I searched 'multimeter' and found three with yellow borders and grey faceplates right on the first page of results...none of them from Fluke.

This first one in particular looks a HELL of a lot like a fluke:
http://www.radioshack.com/prod...

http://www.radioshack.com/prod...

http://www.radioshack.com/prod...

I've got a yellow RadioShack meter too.

Last I checked, Fluke didn't sell much in the $15-$20 price range, so I highly doubt it's rebranded. And I doubt they'd pay just to use a freakin' color on something that cheap.

Where the hell do *you* live?

I'm in freakin downtown Providence, RI and I have exactly two options: Cox or FiOS. Been here two years, already been screwed over by *both*.

I don't game. I can't think of a single good use for this.

But for $300? Shit I'm thinking of buying one anyway!

I'm mostly curious about the possibility of using it for some very heavily augmented reality...the tech that eventually ends up making that kind of thing mainstream will probably *look* more like Google Glass, but much of the internals and software will probably come from systems like the Rift.

100% correct.

Continue this pattern as far as possible. Eventually everybody is government and everybody is everybody else's checks and balances. An interesting pathway to the same effects as just abolishing the whole damn thing!

Right, because when I want to downgrade a single application, the sane strategy is to revert *the entire operating system and every application and all user data* rather than just that one single application?

Sure, that works fine if you update the app and decide five minutes later you don't like it...but what if you don't run into that deal-breaker bug until next month?