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Comment Re:less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score 3, Interesting) 81

I've been using LO pretty much constantly for the last two years (even wrote a novel on it). Like any interface, it just takes time to become familiar. In fact, I like the way Writer organizes styles and style configuration far better than Word, and often, even for DOCX files, do initial style set up and layout in Writer and then move to Word if I have to (which is seldom enough).

LO is a damned good office system. Its default UI is older, but since I used MS-Edit and Word pretty extensively back in the 1990s, it feels familiar to me. There is a ribbon interface, but I've only tried it a few times before remembering why it is I actually don't like the Word ribbon.

Comment Re:Uh... I have a bad feeling about this. (Score 2) 29

F = G * (m1 * m2) / r^2

Or as we call it, Newton's inverse square law, where the force of gravity on any two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Space is really really really really really big (the observable universe has a diameter of about 93 billion light-years), so it is literally impossible for any combination of mergers to have any effect beyond an infinitesimal region of the universe. Even a galactic merger which caused two supermassive blackholes to merge would have little or no measurable effect on a neighbouring galaxy as far away as Andromeda is from us (about 2.54 million light years away).

In fact, it's not until LIGO that we have even been able to detect the mergers of super dense and super massive objects like neutron stars and black holes, just to give you an idea of how the inverse square law limits the influences of gravity over very large distances.

Comment Another Nail In Supersymmetry's Coffin (Score 1) 42

Just like the subject says, supersymmetry, an elegant solution to a number of problems, in particular the best theoretical extension to the Standard Model, slides closer to oblivion with each large scale and small scale (accelerator) experiment meant to find these large supersymmetrical particles.

Comment Re:Perpetual (Score 2, Interesting) 71

Having spent a whole hell of a lot of time lately on Gnome, configuring it and testing various configurations for rollout at the company I work for, all I can say is that it just works. There's a browser, and bizarrely, printers just work on Linux now in a way they just used to work on Windows, and it's now Windows, at least in an enterprise environment, where printing has become the technical equivalent of having your teeth filed down. Where work does need to be done is on accessibility, so we have one staff member who will stick with Windows 11 for now. Libreoffice's Calc is good enough for about 90% of the time, and Writer about 95%. We remain open to Windows machines for special use purposes, but most people after mucking around for a bit are able to navigate Gnome perfectly well, since once they're in the program they need to use, what's going on on the desktop is irrelevant.

On the enterprise back end, supporting global authentication has been around a long time, and if you only have admins who know how to navigate a GUI, then you have idiots. The *nix home folder is infinitely superior in every way to the hellscape that is roaming profiles, so already you're ahead of the game.

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