I'm going back to using coconuts for communication.

Take a look at Red hat's CygWin. http://www.redhat.com/services...

+1 Insightful. People buy things that work for them. There may be a limitation that makes a product bad for *you* but that doesn't mean it's bad for everyone. This applies to all products. Yes, you try to purchase things that are made by "good" companies, but at the end of the day few people make their buying decisions on anything other than whether it fulfills their needs.

So make a VM? That way you can clone the VM periodically as a backup, and infections won't spread to the host. KVM performance is very decent nowadays.

Some of us just use VMs on top of OSX. Yes there's another layer but a MBP is well worth the investment and you're not stuck struggling with getting whatever-vendor-was-cheapest-today 's hardware to work. Or, if you detest Macs, try a Lenovo or HP Business line. Any of these results in less drama, more time to work.

And before someone comments on "Macs are so expensive", if you're productive with it and you command a reasonable salary then it's not expensive at all. It's worth your sanity to go with good hardware.

We've had numerous issues with 2007 / 2013 for things such as conditional formatting. Office XP vs 2007 was ugly also. It's becoming necessary to roll out the same version of Office to all users.

Sure you could install it, but either you couldn't print or the prints didn't match. We had to upgrade the remainder to make it work.

And 2013 vs 2007 is awful also... conditional formatting is problematic among other things, and the compatibility info workaround doesn't usually tell you specifically what to change or where to change it.

Strangely enough, LibreOffice / OpenOffice have better compatibility with Office files, especially with damaged files.

Looks like the article I linked is out of date ("As of October 1, 2013, MySQL 5.5 packages have been added to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 Beta, and therefore will be in the forthcoming GA release."). 5.10 was released on 2013-10-01 according to https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078#RHEL5

Thanks for pointing it out. I've commented on the article requesting it be updated.

You mean MySQL 5.0. Latest version via yum on RHEL 5 series is MySQL 5.0.95.

You can backport and install 5.5 on it I believe, but that's not exactly out of the box. This article states that official 5.5 support for RHEL5 is beta...

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/106493

Every one of these is supported by Red Hat. Call them out for other things, but do your research first. I'm upgrading MySQL from 5.1 to 5.5 and many of these are specifically in new Red Hat Collections.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Software_Collections/1/html-single/1.1_Release_Notes/index.html#sect-Installation_and_Usage-Install

How do you fit one of these things in your pocket? Looks too heavy for a lanyard.

Do you just strap it to the back of your hand or something?

Glad to help. And mostly, yes. For instance, a search of "VLOOKUP" shows 3 topics (Handling of Empty Cells, Options, and Spreadsheet Functions), and the topic "Spreadsheet Functions" does include help for VLOOKUP, yet it doesn't take you to an anchor within the topic. So you have to search within that link for the actual VLOOKUP wording (which as you'd expect is also listed under LOOKUP, also on the same page).

As a result, the topics tend to be longer than necessary for a specific keyword / function.

The OO/LO help is a separate download. Once installed it does not require online access for help to function. The link for this download is adjacent to the regular Windows download link. http://www.libreoffice.org/dow...

Yes and no. Even between Office 2007 and 2010, documents don't always look the same... we have run into this for pretty simple documents. I have no idea why it's so ridiculously complicated that even the software provider can't get it right, but I'm guessing it has more to do with trying to intentionally hurt interoperability than anything else.

Call me a cynic, but I've been around for a very very long time and I've seen a lot of poor sportsmanship in the Microsoft camp.

The funny thing is now we're intentionally using older versions of MS Office simply because everyone hasn't learned the 2007 version yet, so what's the use of overloading everyone by going to the newest version every 2-3 years? The couple of users who will benefit can have the upgrade. The rest can have an upgrade every x versions.

4.2 not 2.4... are you messing with us intentionally, just to see who is awake?