I use Word all day at work and hate it. I liked it best around 2000 and even the 1997 version was great. I think it's gotten worse over time. But someone else said it: it's not very buggy, and OOo/LibreOffice are, and that's a killer. I don't find myself using it anymore, but am greatful that its existence led to the ODF document standard, since Word formats are a hodgepodge.

I use instead Softmaker Office (www.softmaker.com), which I paid for. Runs on Linux and even FreeBSD plus Windows. Its file format compatibility is far better - I find it has very few problems importing and exporting Word files. And it's fast and lightweight and reminds of all the stuff that was good about Word 2000, like custom keyboard settings and macros and so on. They're running an offer at the moment where you can get it for free (it's publicity for them, since they're a small fish in the pond). Actually, just checked and I see the offer just ended.

Anyway, it's good software. For the heavy-duty stuff though (like my book www.dictatorshandbook.net) I insist on LaTeX and can't imagine using anything else. I wrote up a page on how I used LaTeX and Linux to manage the admin side of writing a book here: http://therandymon.com/content/view/236/98/

The parent post was "+5 informative" but also incomplete. Yes, McVeigh was able to kill many without using a gun. But we're arguing about ease of acquisition here.

To do what McVeigh did you have to be pretty smart, do some clever planning, get large quantities of materials, and basically put a lot of stuff together.

To kill a bunch of school-age children like this all you need are assault weapons and a credit card, both of which are readily available and take little smarts, planning, or money.

That's the issue at stake here. Yes, making guns harder to get doesn't solve the problem. But it sure as hell raises the bar on being a casual mass murder (plus coward: I'm so sick of these guys offing themselves so they can't be punished for what they do. I want technology that brings them back to life so we can feed them into a wood chipper, feet first, dammit). Suddenly, in an American world where' it's f*king hard to get assault weapons, if you want to go cause mayhem in a kindergarten you're going to have to spend more money and time, do a lot more planning, and so on. Some of these nutcases will surely say, "nah, not worth it." Instead, one quick phone call and a credit card number, and you've got a murder on deck.

I think monetizing is my new, most-hated word. (It used to be "premium.") Both are lame-o marketing speak. Why not just call monetizing what it is: Trying to make a profit off something. As for premium, it's intended to convey some sense of privilege or exclusivity, but it's too frequently used for utterly banal things, like "points" in some stupid marketing scheme.

I'm having a hard time getting through the rest of the article because of that word.

It's not exactly breaking my heart that companies are having a hard time figuring out how to make an even bigger profit off of a gadget that's already been sold to consumers. How about some device, that when you buy it, it turns your sister into a crackwhore in the service of the company that sold you the device? I'm being facetious, but I think some of these companies, if they could come up with such a technology, would have no trouble making this the reality. (They could then sell "premium" sister-services, some restrictions may apply, not valid in all states, yadda yadda yadda).

Former Ubuntu users to Ubuntu's community manager: "We former-users of your once-good distribution now think it sucks."

Let's see if they understand *that.*

The text groups are not dead; not by a long shot, and for some topics they're still a great first place to look (Perl questions or Lisp for example).

Go to aioe.net (org?) for a free text group provider. Albasani is another, although the owner, Alexander Bartolich sadly passed away suddenly earlier this year so it's not clear how much longer that site will be around. EndlessSeptember - or something like that - is also providing free text groups.

And the forum at www.dictatorshandbook.net is technically a news server. Connect to it with a news client (Unison, SLRN, Knode, TIN, Pine, Thunderbird) to give it a try and remember how much awesomer NNTP threads are relative to web forums or -- gack -- AJAXy Facebook-type stuff.

Agreed, this is management 101. I'm not sure the funding gap reflects a loss in relevance for the platform. I chose it specifically as a platform and its suited my needs and even met them. I've never managed a better put-together *nix system. Nice when the man pages all match the software and are up to date, and the ports system is lovely. I'm not sure I'll build another Linux server again after the good experience I had with BSD (It's dictatorshandbook.net by the way, a VPS run by rockvps.com - also highly recommended, offering FreeBSD 9 images, somewhat of a rarity).

But maybe they should just funding/supporting less side activities and focus on the code.

In the meantime I'm going to write them a check. Happy Xmas!

One nice benefit of desk phones I haven't seen posted here:

When you go home at the end of the day, the phone stays on your desk. So, no one calls you. If your cell phone *is* your workphone, they can call you on the way out the door, on the bus, while you're feeding the kids dinner, and all night.

Sometimes it's nice to know work stays in the office, and home is home. You can do that with a cell by turning it off, but I don't know many people who ever do that anymore.

I'm running Bodhi Linux on a netbook, which is Ubuntu underneath and the Englightment E17 DE on the surface. It's got a configuration that looks like it would be really sweet on a tablet, but I ain't got no tablet and I'm not comfortable rooting or wiping my Google Nexus 7. I'd probably get this just to run E17 on it. I know everybody loves Android but I don't know, there's a lot of special software I use that runs in a terminal environment and Android can't really do that for me, so there's at least a few reasons Android doesn't scratch all my itches.

This tablet with the Terminology terminal, running mutt, SLRN, links, and some other CLI stuff would be a dream. If the hardware bluetooth set up allows an external keyboard, I'd be in heaven since my aforementioned netbook is on its last legs.

To the guy who complained this is nothing new, it's new to me. I don't know of any other Linux tablets out there, and I'd get one just for the fun of seeing if E17 on tablet hardware isn't a step closer to nirvana. The Android equivalents of Linux software I most like is not quite as good.

Usenet is doing fine. It's just the suckers getting weeded out. Go check out the forum at http://dictatorshandbook.net./ On the surface it's a communications forum for commenting on bad governmnets. Underneath it is an INND server reachable via NTTP.

Usenet technology is still useful, and in an age where everyone wants you to post under your real name and link it to everything else you do, say, or buy, I'd say Usenet technology is more indispensable than ever.

Here's another vote for Lynx. It makes sites like Linuxtoday actually readable. Safari's Reader Mode does a good job of not presenting all the sidebar stuff, too. I find it very useful.

Seriously, if we stop looking at ads, will Western Civilization's already precarious economy suddenly implode and combust? Because if so, ... that would be cool.

The question is "Is this going to be the trend? To lock you into the OS updates ... "

The answer is yes. I've just learned how close I am to falling off the OSX/Apple boat. Until last week I had a 6th gen. ipod nano (the square one about 2cm on a side), but it went through the wash and was ruined. So off I go to buy a new ipod. Easy, right? No, they now come with the thunderbolt connector, so all my 30-pin accessories no longer work, and I've got several. Screw you, Apple! Oh wait, there's an adaptor. No, it costs frikking $30. Screw you, Apple! Angrily, I bought it anyway.

Then it gets worse. The new nano requires itunes 10.7 or up; I've got 10.6.7 or something. Off to update itunes, where I learn that 10.7 requires Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or greater. Fortunately, I'm running Snow Leopard, so I'm in. But I can guarantee the next version will deprecate Snow Leopard, meaning in order to buy a new ipod I'll have to upgrade my OSX, which knowing Apple won't run on my hardware (Mac mini bought in 2010), so I'll probably be required to buy a new computer too.

And at that point, I will give up. I've liked my ipods, but it's ridiculous that getting a new one also requires you to buy a new computer. Screw you, Apple! At that point I'm going to rip the whole mess to some other format and buy a cheap-ass MP3 player and give Apple the royal finger. I was listening to MP3s on Linux a decade ago, and this upgrade treadmill is getting on my nerves.

To anyone wanting to respond with a snarky "that's what you get for using Apple products," here's a pre-emptive "screw you" to you as well. I knew what I was getting into; it just took until now to get to the point where I'm pissed off. I think this is called "boiling the frog."

I like keeping things separated, and the idea of consolidating all services, databases, and resources into my smartphone scares me. As such, I'll be adding this technology to my "Do Not Want" list.

Right now, if I leave my phone at the beach or it drops from my pocket while getting out of the car, whoever finds it has nothing more than a couple of bucks worth of credit, and the dozen or so numbers in my address book. He won't even be interested in the hardware, which has no resale value.

I have interest in making my cellphone so valuable because it's linked into my credit line, etc. that people will want to kill for it.

The more I see how the 21st century is shaking out, the more I want to pay for things with cash and live in a cave in Montana with a weapons cash. And I'm only 41 - not old enough to tell you to get off my lawn yet, just old enough to see we're heading the wrong way.

In the wise words of Joe Biden, "I'm sorry, but that's a bunch of malarkey." I've got PC-BSD running on desktop hardware only a year or two old (Intel integrated video chip, if you care: it's an AOPEN PC I bought a system76.com), and every useful internet-facing server I've built since 2008 is running FreeBSD flawlessly. You are conflating desktop systems and servers, and my servers need neither KMS, suspend/hibernate, or HAL. FreeBSD has been perfect for what they do.

I'm not a developer, so couldn't tell you if people are developing for FreeBSD or not. But I find it hard to believe the issues you cite matter much at all.

Ask Hugo Chavez about the FUD factor inherent in voting machinery no one trusts. In Venezuela it was popularly thought that the machines could track who voted for whom, and that people that voted against Chavez would suffer reprisals. Whether that was true or not, the very existence of that fear kept people from voting for the opposition. This was particularly effective among populations with less education, worse access to internet, and more undecided about who they preferred. If voting for the opposition means your husband loses his job, your kid gets kicked out of the (better quality) government school, and your uncle gets taken into custody for a lengthy and scary episode of "questioning," you'll probably take the safe route and just vote for the incumbent, even if you don't like him. It's safer.

Naturally the government made no effort to dispel the rumors, so who cares if the FUD was true or not?

There's more about this story at http://www.dictatorshandbook.net/ and similar election tricks make up the bulk of Chapter 11 of the Dictator's Handbook, which Chavez, Lukshenka, Ahmadinejad, Kim, and Many Many Others have all read (and you can too).

Anyone who wonders if it's going to be a dud, needs to get over to http://www.bodhilinux.com/ immediately to check out a distro that showcases E17 beautifully (it's Ubuntu underneath). I had some issues on a 64bit desktop but it runs wonderfully on my Core Duo netbook, and it's fast.

Likes: gorgeous, responsive desktop, fast, low memory usage, and it's easy to bend it into whatever shape you like. It offers a pretty standard desktop for anybody sick of Unity/Gnome3 but you can also have some radical interfaces too, like a tiling interface that looks like it would work great on a tablet (in fact I wish I had a Linux tablet I could try it on but am scared to nuke my Google Nexus 7 trying it). The "run anything" gizmo - kind of like Alt-F2 - is fantastic; I think it works better than Gnome_Do and Krunner and even Apple's Quicksilver (which is damned good). Their Terminology terminal is pretty sweet; I increasingly spend 90% of my linux day in it.

Dislikes: it takes a bit of getting used to, and the distinction between modules, shelves, modes, and extensions has taken some time to figure out. My version of E7 (Bodhi 2.0.0) also occasionally segfaults, so there must be some remaining bugs to work out.

But this netbook came with Ubuntu/Gnome and I find Bodhi running E17 to be a huge improvement. I love it. If you want to see what E17 is like, what it does, and what it *can* do, there's no better way to start.