IBM have some OpenOffice commercial variant whose name escapes me.

More likely they'll flog the tech on to some niche company to support that market the way they did with OS/2. Doubtless they'll cite all kinds of reasons they couldn't possibly open source it and some of them may even be true.

Probably because they've bought a site licence. Once they do that, all rational thought about switching to something better goes out the window.

Notes is without doubt the worst software I have ever had the misfortune to use. It's slow to start, extremely unintuitive (even 8.5), unforgiving, buggy as hell, baroque, and employs terminology and idioms which are meaningless in the modern world. It really sucks in every way a piece of software can suck. I probably wouldn't care if I had to run it once in a blue moon but this heap of wank is how I'm supposed to communicate with colleagues and organise my calendar. I cannot fathom how it manages to cling on so tenaciously in certain corporations when it is so awful.

The "so what?" is that governments build tax systems that resembles swiss cheese with loopholes and incentives for companies structuring themselves in certain ways and then act all indignant and outraged when its brought to their attention.

While I am certain that it is very hard to build a fair and equitable system of taxation, particularly against multinationals, I am sure there are certain things governments could do to make it very odious to avoid tax and thereby encourage companies to pay their fair dues.

It's not the shortage of teaching material but the fact that it must follow the curriculum. i.e. the state says what students should learn at certain ages and subjects and the course, books and teacher's guide is shaped around it. So typically school books are monopolized by a few publishers which go to the effort to produce suitable books and get them endorsed.

Anyway I have no problem with that. More insidious however are the constant revisions which render them worthless after a year or two, or even worse "work books". Work books are the kind where the child writes answer into the page in thereby making it impossible to reuse.

Here in Ireland almost all the primary school books are like this and the cost of books could be 100 per annum per child. The state could ban the practice in an instant and save parents a lot of money but for some reason they won't.

It's not my computer, it's a work one, but yeah, you're right, it's running Windows and IE.

If IBTimes wants to piss people off with autoplay videos, why link to them?

Here's El Reg's version of the same story:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/17/lulzsec_analysis/

I don't think you get what White Privilege and Heterosexual Privilege are, but you should maybe* look into that.

*definitely

It's going to be a lot more interesting, and presumably compelling when it's completed. Hangouts isn't intended as a simple chat client replacement.

Google dropping XMPP support is only mildly interesting, but the reason behind it is far more ambitious than TFA discusses. The Verge has a better article, but TLDR is that It's part of a long-term plan to change the way communication works on phones and computers.

XMPP obviously won't be suitable for unifying so many different communication paths. Given Google's efforts with WebRTC, I suspect that'll be the underlying standard for their new platform, though it hasn't been stated as such anywhere I'm aware of.

Or walk around an IKEA. There's plenty of existing furniture that does the job.

While all the news and discussion on Slashdot revolves around Apple, there actually IS a fork of Android for DoD and business.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/mobile/solution/security/samsung-knox

I expect most of the security improvements will also be available for standard Android before too long.

The only problem with that scenario is that it was Yahoo that bought it.

Which means Tumblr will go the way of Flickr. It will be milked and ignored until it's about as dated as black and white TV.

Just like Flickr!

Maybe half a decade ago. Now, for anything that's supported, Linux is far easier than Windows.

Sometimes, but most times you ahve to track down and install a driver along with a gigabyte or two of annoying bloatware to get a device which works, but constantly nags you with crap you don't want to have to deal with.