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Good bye, Lotus. You deserve a lot of credit for helping computers catch on with businesses back in the early 80's. A lot of us owe our jobs to you.

It's not the free drinks or candy, although those things are nice. What developers want is to feel like they matter to the company. One of the ways a company can do that is to provide some small freebies. But freebies alone don't cut it.

I don't get it.

I've been watching the LibreOffice posts on slashdot since it began in 2010. To me, it looks like a political move driven by dislike of Oracle (however well-deserved that dislike might be). Why does my mother-in-law care about that? OpenOffice is good enough for her, and it's the name everybody remembers.

It seems to me that the only people who care about LibraOffice are motivated by ideology. The rest of us don't really care.

Windows 8 tablets have, what, 2% of the market? It might be a while before Google even notices!

Exactly. T-Mobile's new "standard" plan with no contract is $50, the old subsidized plan was $45 per month.

So they pass a law saying cable companies have to let you get your channels a-la-carte. So what? Cable companies will offer customers the "package" for, say, $100, or individual channels for $25 each. Who would go for that kind of-la-carte price?

That's all great, but the problem with third party fixes is that you can't count on it being there when you have to support other people's desktops, either individuals or at work.

Me too. I really hate for my friends and family to have to pay $80 an hour for GeekSquad or equivalent. What are friends for, if they don't help each other?

For a while anyway!

In the Greater Houston area, Comcast just doubled the connection speeds of ALL price levels. And Google isn't even here! Competition is a wonderful thing!

People who are still using IE...aren't reading slashdot or articles linked by slashdot. So hiring managers are still safe using this metric!

We Web developers would love to be able to just "stick to standards," if only that were possible!

Consider playing audio. Simple enough concept, right? The problem is, there is no single way to play audio today, that works across all browsers! There are many issues with applying styles and positioning that simply do not work the same on all browsers, even if you do stick to standards.

Microsoft can't even manage to stay compatible with their own previous browser versions, and now there are two different flavors of IE 10 (RT and desktop) that aren't totally compatible with each other!

If only life were so simple that we could just "stick to standards"!

The base plan T-Mobile is touting is $50 per month for unlimited everything (500 MB data at 4G speed).

Wal-Mart sells a T-Mobile plan for $30 per month for unlimited text and data (5 GB data at 4G speed). The catch is that the plan has only 100 minutes of voice. But if you are willing to use Google Voice with Groove IP, you can use your data to talk. I have this setup and love it! Better still, if you're in WiFi range, you can stretch your WiFi even farther.

Do you live in an underground bunker, with automated blast doors and multi-layer security? I doubt it. Does anybody really care enough to defeat such measures to get into your house? I suspect you're like the rest of us, with standard locks and maybe an alarm system or a dog, or both. That is sufficient to deter all but the most determined criminals. And if anyone is determined enough, your extra security won't stop them anyway.

Your data isn't that different. Nobody is really after your data, at least not to the point of being willing to spend serious money and time getting into your system. The real threats are things like malware (which won't even be slowed down by your encrypted drive), or somebody snooping around on your hard drive after stealing your laptop (when actually they are more likely to want to just sell it).

Common sense is the best protection for most of us. Don't save passwords in an unencrypted file. Use a non-trivial password to log on to your system. Hang on to your stuff. You get the idea.

The "cuts" are in fact cuts only from the increased baseline.

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/fairy-tale-spending-cuts