I can't leave Office because I can not guarantee that my resume will look the same on someone elses computer running Office if I make it under LibraOffice

I suspect this is the case for more than your resume. If not, just save it to PDF from OpenOffice. That makes it hard to put in a big searchable database, but you may find a more direct approach works better for getting jobs anyway ;-)

The horses were not missed except by horse lovers. The keyboard will be missed by a lot of people, but not by those who don't use the device for work. Mostly though, I wanted to address the way the author called MS unimportant while missing the fact that Apple is in the exact same situation. Me - I run Linux and claimed people could just walk away from MS 10 years ago. Turns out that thinking overlooks a number of factors that keep users on a platform.

'Like the curtain finally falling from the Wizard of Oz to find just a small, frail, man pretending to be far more powerful and relevant than he really was,

That actually sounds like someone talking about Apple more than Microsoft.

Truth is they just want MS Office on Apple products because tablets will continue to be irrelevant to a large part of the world unless they have those apps. Also, the people trying to use them for business think what's missing is Office, but when they get it, they'll be missing the keyboard too, and probably the mouse.

Most farmers do everything they can to get rain water to run off the fields so they don't flood and over-water the crops. Then they pump water out of the ground and apply it to the fields as needed. The rain water then dumps very quickly into the rivers and causes flooding down stream. A simple way to take care of this is to dig a large basin (1-2 percent the area of the fields and say 20-30 feet deep) to collect the rain water, then pump that back onto the fields as needed and only when it's dry would they need to pump water from the deep aquifer. It would help all of the problems, but would cost a bit to set up. Oh, and this would re-apply the fertilizer that washes away when it rains - which is another problem both down-stream and as a cost to farmers and a natural resource issue (phosphorous).

All those problems come down to poor resource management.

Many of us creating Linux don't care about "gaining market share." It is a tool we create for our use not for whiners trying to escape the tyranny of a commercial vendor.

Anyone who thinks that should not be on the Gnome team, or working for RedHat, or on the Fedora project. Since all of these organizations claim to be developing stuff for their "users" not their developers.

There's a big difference between Apple and GNOME.

Yes, Apple uses a desktop interface on the desktop and a phone interface on portable devices. Gnome thinks a poorly done phone interface is good for the desktop too.

I would say that a good desktop interface might scale down to a tablet, and a phone interface can scale UP to a tablet. But the phone interface does not work, and will never work on the desktop. If these people understood what people actually DO with devices of different types, they might understand this.

His definitions require replication with variations. So if someone found a way to suppress genetic mutation in humans, we would not be alive right? An artificial creation can also not be alive unless it can reproduce? Does factory production count? It seems we can shorten his definition even more if we embrace his bias:

Life is: from evolution.

I don't object to evolution, but I don't think it's correct to define life by this existing process. Or am I missing something?

If you think these methods of rating programmers are faulty then this patent is good. Nobody will be able to use these faulty metrics (except IBM) because they are patented ;-)

"...which protects the sale of intellectual property copies..."

The law does not recognize "intellectual property" or copies thereof. The section linked specifically calls out copyrighted works as well as "literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works". But no, the popular catch phrase "intellectual property" is not to be found. Just sayin (like RMS) there is no IP, only copyright, trademark, and patent law. Let us not try to broaden any one category by deliberately confusing them all, or elevate them to some higher "intellectual" level.

How does the code look that much different? Besides some syntax differences, they're all almost *exactly* the same. Some languages force you to format your declarations and types differently, but a for loop is a for loop

for (x=0; x lessthan 10; x++) //sorry, can do lt in comment
{
square[x] = x*x;
}

That's a for loop, while this:

square = [x*x for x in range(10)]

is a list comprehension in Python.

You can write it like a for loop - and I did when I was first learning Python - but it sucks to do that. This is probably what the GP was alluding to. If you really know a language you don't want to read crap written by people who think they're all the same with different syntax. This of course is but a single small example.