Having a VM ready for these calls which has goatse for the wallpaper would be both Funny *and* Insightful.

I would love to hear/see the reaction when they remoted into some "suckers" computer and saw *that* staring them in the face bigger than life. Even better if the "sucker" played it straight... :)

So says the Linux basher. Ironic, is it not, when your wonderful OS Overlord is the one reducing the functionality of your computer and OS just to charge you more, while you have been busily denigrating those who value/give freedom and control of systems to the end users...

...a book, whether digital or dead-tree, your name will be there along with Baen as my first choice of publishers to support via the wallet.

Hmmm, I dunno for sure, but I'll hazard a guess: a bunch of metro-sexual hippies camped out in a small park on Wall Street?

Ah well, so much for that karma... ;)

WTG Disney, with your "John Carter" movie viral marketing campaign. Impressive effort!

Point being that .docx formatting is, by nature of being proprietary, intended to be difficult (or maybe not even possible) for some other app than that provided by the manufacturer to open.

Think of it this way: Do Linux or BSD suck because they don't natively run .exe-format programs? No. Yet to deride them as OS'es because they don't, would not make any sense.

I don't begrudge you your good living, at all. I am a hearty proponent of and regular user of Linux myself, yet like you, make my money working primarily in MS environments (mostly, fixing them). My post does not take issue with that, or you; instead, it was intended to point out that using a wrench to turn a screw, isn't going to work well.

But that is not the fault of the wrench - it is simply the nature of the screw.

There's no need for users to "understand a new suite of office applications" - simply for them to make "Save as ODF" their new default. Within a year, or at most 2-3 years, I'd doubt you would be running into any other format, even in your 'legacy' documents, because in a business most things written don't have a lifespan even that long. And you would still have the capability to open those much older formats, if the need arose. WRT databases, I agree that they would be a bigger issue.

As far as then having compatibility differences with documents from other companies, that is understandable/not unreasonable to expect. Some sort of educational campaign would come in handy to make this an eventual non-issue; like along the lines of what Firefox did with a full-page ad in the NYT back in '04. I don't know by what metric you could determine how much an effect that ad had in FFox eventually shouldering aside IE, but I am fairly certain that it did help in a major way, if only to shine a very public light for a day on FFox as an alternative to the lack of concern MS evinced with updating their browser. If a campaign of education and information were to come about so that the document compatibility issue became - for a short while at least - a topic of broad discussion, perhaps the cross-x concern would be lessened. I don't see how cross-company, cross-platform, cross-app compatibility could be viewed as a "bad thing" to implement by anyone, especially not when it is as simple as changing a single default setting in your already-existing software. Yes, there will be a transitional period, but there always is, even from .doc to .docx.

Your last point is a good one, and ironically amusing. Thanks for the civil discourse. :)

Of the 3 or 4 different Linux installs I have on various computers, a $29.00 HP 1100 printer purchased this past year gets recognized and the HPLIP driver installed with little input and no problems. As easily as, if not easier than, the process goes with Windows XP, Vista, or 7. So don't diss the cheapies. :) Despite that, the points you were making in your post are more right than wrong. Every Linux-vs-MS thread, you see the MS shills and fanbois run out the same old tired dogs of "no printer support" or "video cards don't work as well" or "no Linux games", etc etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. They think this is true, because they have no personal experience. It is what they believe, however mistakenly, because it is the thing they use to defend their perceptions and rely upon to make themselves feel secure in their choice. No more, no less. Pitiable, though, IMO.

Though MM may in fact use *nix solutions as stated, I find the opening line of that post is disingenuous as worded, so I've edited it here to make it more obvious what is being said:

Bolding mine, to point out the obvious deficiencies of that argument.

User eldorel is right, even if the pro-MS crowd doesn't like to admit it.

It has been widely touted that Office 07 and 10 both have support for ODF, though from what I've read in articles I understand it to be better implemented in 10. As a true cross-platform, cross-app standard, perhaps a "professional" IT person relied upon by otherwise unknowing end users might suggest that their company begin using *that* as the way in which to author and save their documents. Doing so just might create a result better than "the dog just puked on the screen" when a document happens to be opened by someone using a different brand of the same type of application. That's the whole point of the thing, really, isn't it? So why should we not support that, for the sake of our end users? In order to promote/prop up the MS hegemony? Not a good idea, from where I sit.

Parent post made me think of this

Instead of trying to teach new users a particular distro (or 3), teach them:

1) How to download and burn/create a bootable ISO of a Linux distro (maybe use netbootin?).
2) How to boot their machine from the LiveCD/DVD/thumbdrive they've created.
3) And then encourage them to try 2 or 3 distros out to find their own best "fit".

One advantage of this is that some distros will natively support 'X' hardware that another may not.

And one distro I haven't seen yet mentioned, that I like as a lightweight, minimalist solution which a new user shouldn't find daunting: Bodhi.

Hmm. Based on your sig, I'd have thought you were "Sudomodymous". Or something like that...

If, as stated @ 0:58 in the video, they have that "serene cityscape" of Honolulu "on the Big Island" - yep, it's broken... :)

I was put under a bench warrant (IIRC, that is what it is called) directly from the judge, who then turned to the 2 lawyers standing on either side of us and told them that I would not be participating as a juror in this case nor any other for the time I was in the jurors pool. She further enjoined me from telling or discussing the order she put me under with any of the other potential jurors in the pool, possible 6 month jail term and $250 fine if I did.

My crime? I told her that I believed that as an intelligent and informed Citizen of my country, as a juror it was my Right and Duty to sit not only in judgement of the facts, but also in judgement of the law, if I felt that it was an unjust law or was being applied unfairly.

Up until that moment, I pretty much thought FIJA was a neat concept, but also a bit too "tin hatty". No more.

People need to know.

There are likely not many more than 9,000 of those types of boats in the world, much less in the Middle East. And Iran is not a rich nation. Figures mentioned put Iran as having only 1,000 small attack boats. Say 900 of that number (doubtful, to me) are the high-speed, hi-tech attack craft used by our US Navy for training...

By my own admission the numbers quoted for the boats I wrote about above were very low. Per your post we are now playing with hyperbole, so lets go ahead and put the cost per boat at a much more likely $250,000 for bare hull + engines + mechanical systems for running it. Add in a minimum of 2 trained, specialist crewmembers, ancillary objects like radios and GPS nav systems, the weapons (what's a .50 cal machine gun + ammo cost? A shoulder-fired rocket and spares?) and you are getting closer to $1,000,000 per boat, if not over that amount. Still a lot cheaper than the carrier, but at that rate, with the losses they are likely to sustain, it is going to put a strain on their naval warfare coffers very quickly. Boat and weapons on the bottom of the Straits ain't helping Iran at all, and are a cost that cannot be recouped...

Additionally, I'll say that the Iranian "swarms" would probably number far less than 100 boats per (as that would give them a potential of only 10 'swarm shots'), so 50 is more likely (and probably still on the high side). A carrier + carrier group (destroyers, escorts, fixed- and rotating-wing aircraft) would have no trouble making it so that only a very small number of that 50 attackers would be able to get through to a point where they could actually threaten a carrier to the point of sinking, even with a missile at stand-off range. Barring some extremely good circumstances happening on their part, I don't see this Iranian small-boat navy having much of a chance at sinking one of our carriers.

Keep in mind that Iran is not using these boats because they are the optimal solution for attacking a modern day carrier group; they are doing so because *it is the only way that they can*. Full stop.

It takes a certain minimum size of boat to be able to carry a machine gun in the bow, a crew of 2+, and a larger payload of explosives or missile launcher at any good rate of speed through any sizable seas. Iran is not going to be able to effectively use a 16' SeaRay or Bayliner ski boat that is only $20k, unless as a decoy. The costs of a truly capable fast attack "speedboat" would come in two major chunks: the hull cost, and the engine costs. The 'speedboats' hulls our Navy is training with cost (& I'm somewhat-knowledgeably lowball estimating here) $40k+ on the low end, and each hull has 2-3 outboard motors hanging off the rear end, at a cost of well over $15k each. Those 'speedboats' are ex$pen$ive, $100k+ each, and losing several every raid (along with weapons and personnel) would rack up a huge cost even for a nation state. Most if not all of these boats are produced by companies who would not be very friendly to Iran, and so I doubt they would ramp up production in order to provide Iran with more 'weapons' once the original stock has been decimated.