I have a few objections to that, as nice as it is for what it's trying to be.

The first is covered by the "Is there any kind of Âpresenter screen in Impressive?" FAQ. (Or more directly, the "No, and there is currently no proper way (or plans) to implement such a thing" answer.) There's sort of a half-assed workaround that gets some of the way there, but a half-assed workaround is still half-assed.

The second is that I don't think PDF is a good delivery medium for a lot of presentations. A lot of people (especially here) will decry things like fancy effects and animations, and when used without purpose they're distracting and obnoxious. However, they can also be used very well, to clarify relationships or show how a system transitions from state-to-state and stuff like that. I get the feeling that PDF is a bit more capable here than I give it credit for, but I still think it's pretty poor in comparison to something in the PPT/Impress/Keynote genre.

Third, it's only a viewer, which leaves open the question of what you author the PDFs in. The example slides are Beamer, and as much of a fan of Latex as I am for documents*, I think it's a pretty poor fit for most presentations. Partly this goes to my previous point, but I also think that presentations are a medium that minimizes most of Latex's strengths and maximizes its weaknesses.

(* Actually this is untrue. I hate Latex. :-) But like PPT, it stands out as being by far the best of a bad lot.)

Like you say, to each their own, but I think it's not for me.

Keynote is free now with Macs and iOS devices and free online for everyone.

Are you sure about that? I tried signing into iCloud with the credentials I use for iTunes, and it said "Your Apple ID must be used to set up iCloud on an OS X or iOS device before you can use iCloud.com."

Did I go to the wrong place? Or can I set up an account even if I don't own a machine?

it's easier to type "17 25 4 12" than "17 25 4 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.

Let's try that again not making up new HTML tags: ...it's easier to type "17 [enter] 25 [enter] 4 [enter] 12" than "17 [comma] 25 [comma] 4 [comma] 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.

I would vote Excel in that contest. To me, comparing Excel to Python/matplotlib harkens a lot of the comparison of something like Python to a compiled language. The former gives you a REPL that lets you interact with your language easily, you can make changes and see them reflected without recompiling, etc. Well, Excel takes that one step further: with it, you don't have to do anything: as you change the input data, the calculated data changes immediately. With Python and matplotlib (at least as much as I've seen it), you don't have to recompile but you do have to re-run your script or take some other action besides just changing the data to get it to regraph (or else start writing your own wrapper).

Or not everything is graphing either. For instance, suppose you're picking between different mortgages and want to compare a few different scenarios. You can have cells for the interest rate, nominal loan time, points, extra prepayments, etc. and then have cells to calculate the total interest paid, actual loan time, etc. Want to see what an additional 1% does to your rate? Change 3.5% to 4.5% and... you see the effect.

Finally, I think spreadsheets often make data entry easier as well as just looking at tables easier. You can just grab and resize columns if something doesn't fit, as opposed to go and manually respace things. Entering data going down in a spreadsheet column is about as easy as it gets because you have an enter button on your 10-key: it's easier to type "17 25 4 12" than "17 25 4 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.

At least personally, when I use a spreadsheet instead of going to Python/matplotlib or something else, those are usually the reasons why.

Second, he for your analogy basically stood outside and asked for some secrets and the homeowner yelled them back at him.

That's like saying someone who breaks into a house by throwing a brick through the window merely lets go of a brick when it has a particular trajectory and the glass just got out of their way.

He wants more than fame, he wants to establish Russia as a global power, again. Problem is, his economy is mostly natural resourced exporting - which means it's pretty weak on manufacturing or services.

Snowden was probably ordering a pizza and his recorded voice was mixed and dubbed into the phone call.

In any case, everything you need to know about Putin's "Open Russia" you can tell from his control of all media.

Sure there were some incremental changes that took advantage of newer technologies, some new UI changes that I am not sure if it makes things better

This is going to sound like a shill, but I promise it's not; I've actually been really impressed with the Office UI changes post-2007. (For purposes of this discussion, let's forget about whether the ribbon itself was a good idea (I am actually pretty indifferent, to be honest) and just assume it's here to stay.) A few years back I went to work on a PowerPoint presentation in 2010 on a shared computer, than later continued work using 2007 on my own. And I definitely missed some of the changes -- where 2010 made much more accessible some operations that were more buried in 2007. And recently I was doing some collaborative work in Word 2013, and there were a couple minor but still nice changes to the way comments and track-changes were displayed in comparison to what I was used to (and have reason to believe changed since 2010).

I'm by no means a heavy Office user -- there will be weeks that go by where I almost don't open any Office programs. But at the same time, (1) they are making UI improvements and (2) I definitely don't think you can dismiss UI improvements for programs like these -- in some sense, 98% of the program is the UI for something like Word. Word's not doing any heavy computation behind the scenes that's the real thing you're interested in.

OTOH, it is my wish that no one use MS Powerpoint anymore. It is dated and ugly

There's not a lot of good choices. And by "not a lot", I mean... pretty much 0, to be honest. Keynote might be one, but I haven't really used it and my standard line is that I don't want to spend a thousand dollars on presentation software, even if it does come with a free computer. (My other standard line -- re. Hackintoshes -- is that I try to have grown out of pirating and if Apple doesn't want me to give them money for a working legit copy, then fine, I wont.) Some other options like some of the HTML presentation libraries are kind of intriguing, and I haven't had cause to play around with them -- but I'm tempted they wouldn't be worth the added hassle of using separate programs to make a bunch of images and then having those images sit around in separate files.

And as tired as PPT is, Impress is still basically shit in comparison. PowerPoint is pretty much the best of a bad lot, IMO.

Blaming the committee, group or department is a cop out. You should know that by now.

I need my own navy of laser appointed sharks, sirrah!

Nope. I didn't. Read it again.

Well, yeah, raping children and giving them drugs, it's pretty illegal, but has nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment.

At the time there were limited arms (you took about 2 minutes to reload) vs able to empty a couple clips in that same amount of time, now.

Further, rifle, cannon and naval mines were about all there were. The most literal interpretation of that 2nd amendment means I could possess nuclear weapons, bacterial weapons, chemical weapons, and were I wealthy enough, my own tanks, APCs, fighter jets, bombers, etc. In short, the 2nd amendment favors the rich because they can arm themselves to the hilt, should they wish. Not very equal, is it?

Seriously, for performance reasons this dev-team bypassed malloc of all things; do you really want to assert that they wouldn't have bypassed a bounds-checker?

How would they have bypassed the bounds-checker? About the only way would have been to say int[] all_my_programs_data = new int[1000000000] and then write an interpreter for their own language that uses that array as its data store!

Let's take the example from XKCD: "HAT (500 letters)". To read past the end of the "HAT", they would have had to manually copy that string to some communal store, like all_my_programs_data, and then read past the end. Aside from completely ignoring the language runtime and implementing your own on top, in a language with enforced bounds checking you would not have been able to read past the end of "HAT"!

I've only clicked on your reply a couple minutes ago, but aside from "change the language runtime to no longer enforce bounds checks", I literally cannot think of any other way you would bypass a language's bounds checks.

Everything else, like overruns, overreading, etc is a result of that decision.

No it isn't! It's almost entirely orthogonal!

The OpenBSD malloc that they bypassed makes exploits of already compromised programs harder; that's why Theo refers to "exploit mitigation". If OpenSSL didn't have the overread to begin with, the fact that they replaced malloc would be a questionable decision but wouldn't have led to any exploit. And even with a hardened allocator (or most hardened allocators, anyway), the exploit is still there, it's just much harder to get anywhere near as much confidential information.

That's the only way that they aren't orthogonal: the two mistakes reinforce each other on OpenBSD. In all other respects, they are completely independent.