I find it surprising that someone doesn't see this as an opportunity. Many of the respondents in this thread have indicated they use Macs now at home. Those that don't seem to do so more out of a political/religious dislike for the company rather than an actual preference for the functionality of Windows over OSX in all areas but gaming. To me, though, a solid financial management tool really stands out as a missing piece of Mac software. That and a Visio-type tool, which someone mentioned further up the thread, seem to be open doors for someone to come in and make a good product and profit.

Readers of Slashdot use WYSIWYG word processors? I thought we gave only grief and ridicule to anyone who wasn't still using ed to write TeX for all of their office documents. The idea of using various too-brightly colored squares to interface with text does strike me a ludicrous, but then I've been criticized before for using LaTeX (a real geek wouldn't rely on someone else's macros, but would have rolled their own).

Maybe in Twitter, but just casually glancing around a bit I see /. user numbers in the >1.7 mil range. When you get that many people signed up to read your tweets, then come back and talk smack.

BTW, nice score on the press creds, Taco. Have a great time. Hope the weather clears and they get that thing off the ground.

I don't completely discount them, as there are some (Firefox and Chrome, for example) that surpass their non-FOSS counterparts. Of course I'm being generous in considering browsers "productivity" tools, but they can be in a work environment where the applications are heavily web-based. Sadly, none of the FOSS attempts at spreadsheets has been able to truly match Excel, and even non-FOSS competitors (Numbers, which I have made honest attempts to switch to) fall short. In many office environments, spreadsheets are too much of a core component to overlook, and seemingly minor issues of missing functionality, when encountered regularly in a "why won't this do what I know the other program will" kind of way adds up quickly to equal major user dissatisfaction.

I very much agree. While I've been impressed with the strides made by Ubuntu, it still lacks a lot of the intuitive usability you get from OS X or even Windows. Its hard for many /.'ers to set aside their experienced view, put themselves in the mindset of a person with limited computer experience, and really understand how baffling a new OS can be if not built for an intuitive user experience.

While many in this thread have scoffed at the idea of drivers remaining an issue, and perhaps they are for printing, I have had several generations of great scanners now that never did and never will work with Linux. It is very frustrating in an office environment to have the need to do something trivial, like scan a document, and be told that it isn't possible because the correct drivers don't exist. Could you please wait a few months for someone in your IT department to try their hand at coding a driver and then try to scan again? Maybe they could have simply gone out and purchased the right scanner hardware. I'm guessing there are some pieces of software out there for Linux that make document capturing easy to use, but I've never seen them because I've never managed to get that far before the need to get the job done overcame my stubbornness for doing it in Linux.

The .xslx point was a good one. There are many times where a document in a Microsoft format "can" be opened in a FOSS tool, but in which the formatting is off by enough to make it a big mess. Calls for going back to MS only takes an one upper management type getting badly embarrassed in an important meeting when the fancy PowerPoint presentation he made at home in Microsoft chokes and dies in the FOSS software that his IT shop told him was compatible.

Umm, that would be the "SitOrSquat: Bathroom Finder" app [http://www.sitorsquat.com/sitorsquat/mobile/index], sponsored by Charmin.

How is Microsoft's response here not them trying desperately to spin their way past the latest Pwn2Own results from CanSecWest? Safari, Firefox and IE8 all went down pretty quickly. Chrome wasn't even attempted. Nobody there had a way to take it down. Money was left on the table.
( http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2010/02/15/pwn2own-2010 )

Microsoft's response?

First claim that Windows 7 isn't really meant to prevent you from hacking into it.
( http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174309/Microsoft_defends_Windows_7_security_after_Pwn2Own_hacks )

Then try to convince people Chrome is somehow worse.

Seem's like that makes your choice to either accept that a company like Google knows what information you're looking for [turn off the option, heck even use a different browser. I'm sure they can figure it out anyway.] or letting random anyhacker access ALL the data on your system.

I'll take option A thanks.

You deserve a mod point, not that I have one handy.

You do not know what you are talking about.

While that might be "a" way to change the password, the MobileTerminal program provides a convenient shell from which passwd works just fine. It is strongly recommended that the root and the "mobile" accounts' passwords are changed from their default. Instructions for doing so abound even with screen shots for people who can't be bothered to read. While there is the "hassle" of having to install MobileTerminal, I'm not sure this is really too much trouble for someone that has gone to the effort to jailbreak in the first place.

That being said, Saurik should be able to make the installation process for OpenSSH ask the user to change the passwords. It also should not be enabled by default, or turn itself back on after it is turned off (in my experience the OpenSSH program has a tendency to do both).

Shut up, Steve, and go back to figuring out how to get people to think that Windows 7 is as cool as Binging things on their Zune.

It might make an interesting study to compare the success of kids with "late" birthdays who started on-time/early versus those who had to wait an extra year.

I thought I'd heard of a similar study where kids with winter birth dates excelled at sports because they tended to miss cut-off dates for teams, and therefore were older, larger, faster, and more mature than the kids they were teamed with each year. This leads to them getting more time handling the ball as they grow up.