Yes, I know most Linux distros ship LibreOffice now, but has anyone running Linux ever actually tried to install LibreOffice recently via the RPM downloads from the libreoffice.org? It's excrutiatingly packaged with so many flaws that it's embarrassing. Here's the list of what I have to put up with (at work, we use CentOS 6, which doesn't include LibreOffice):

1. There are *three* separate .tar.gz downloads (one for the core package, one for the main language pack and one for the help language pack (hmm...shouldn't the help language pack be merged into the main language pack)? Each of these .tar.gz's unpack into separate top-level sub-directories, just to inflame the awkwardness (I manually move what I want into the core package's RPMS sub-directory, but it's crazy to have to mess around like that). It should also be noted that the core package is dubiously labelled "en_US" but I'll get into that later on.

2. The RPM set has a major.major number *in the package name* (i.e. not in the version field where it should be). The lame official excuse for this is that you can install two LibreOffice versions side-by-side. How many normal end-users would *ever* do that, especially for two minor releases? Virtually no-one and yet this stupidity means that I can't upgrade any previous version easily. I have to manually uninstall all the old RPMs and then freshly install the new ones - completely maddening! Note that the developer version is named "LODev", so developers already have a completely differently named set of ("lodev"-prefixed) RPMs that can co-exist with the production release RPMs without the latter needing the version number embedded in the package name.

3. There are *two* core parts of the RPM package names: "libreoffice" and the bizarre "libobasis", so bang goes any chance to specify all the RPMs with a single wildcard.

4. I unpack the core package .tar.gz for, say, 3.4.4 and what do I see? Apart from confusingly having "rc2" in the unpacked dir name (yes, I know that the last RC = final, but it's still disconcerting), there's a shocking huge number of RPMs - 57 in all! For no reason at all, there's 7 "core" RPMs (core01-core07) when clearly they could put all that code into a single RPM. There are plenty of other RPMs that you suspect could also go into that single core RPM too.

5. Even worse, there are actually language-specific RPMs in the core package that make a mockery of having separate language pack downloads. Examples including *8* en-US RPMs (which I have to delete because I'm a British user and the en-GB versions are in the en-GB lang pack) and, even more astonishing than this is the inclusion of American English, Spanish and French dictionary RPMs, which I also have to delete.

6. There's also a "desktop-integration" directory in the core package, from which I'm supposed to install one of the RPMs ("redhat-menus" in my case) to get any sort of desktop menu entries, but shouldn't conditional code for this be included in one of the core RPMs and not as manually selected separate RPMs? I move the redhat-menu RPM up a level and continue...

7. Why is there a "testtool" RPM in the core package of a production release? I delete it and don't install it - normal end-users will never need it.

8. I then unpack the language pack download (en-GB for me) and have to manual move 9 en-GB-specific RPMs over to the core package directory (having had to delete the en-US equivalents first as I said earlier). Ditto for the help language pack (only one en-GB RPM this time).

9. I then have to run:
rpm -e `rpm -qa | egrep '(libobasis|libreoffice)'` to remove the previous LibreOffice release manually.

10. Finally, I get to install the new release with 'rpm -ivh libobasis*.rpm libreoffice*.rpm

No wonder almost all Linux users just used their distro's release of LibreOffice - the manual install is like having electrodes attached to your nether regions. I have never seen RPM packaging abused in such a significant way and it's especially galling when this is one of the most important apps - particularly for businesses - on Linux.

Apart from the fact that Microsoft isn't restricting the secure boot loader for Intel Windows 8 machines, but *is* for ARM equivalents (no logic to that and also blows any security reasons out of the water), there is the question as to what happens if the end-user wants to either repair the OS via a boot disk or upgrade to Windows 9.

I'm presuming that no-one other than Microsoft can make a ARM bootable CD image for ARM Windows 8 machines any more (so no more live ARM GParted etc.). My guess is that OEMs will have to provide a boot disk (or some burnable .iso file equivalent) to repair ARM Windows 8 should it fail to boot (that's something that - ironically - has gone out of fashion with most OEMs now for Intel Windows machines).

Also, will the secure boot keys for ARM Windows 9 or later be identical to the keys for ARM Windows 8 (or will MS insist on keys for 8, 9, 10 and 11 are included in all ARM Windows 8 machines?). If they're not, then no-one can boot an upgrade disc any more (i.e. upgrades would have to be done via a booted Windows 8 machine only). Even worse, no-one would be able to install a fresh retail copy of Windows 9 on an ARM Windows 8 machine either (or will it be signed with the Windows 8 key to confuse matters?). I do suspect that MS will just have one key to cover all the Windows stuff (Windows 8, Windows 9 etc and maybe the same for both Intel and ARM), otherwise it could get very messy as new releases come out.

This move by Microsoft will, I suspect, hurt them more than help them - I will never buy a machine that can only run Windows (which is the worst of all mainstream OS'es, IMHO of course) and I will actively dissuade anyone else from doing so.

The PDF list is by far the most interesting thing of this article and you'd expect it to be all media/software companies (since it's online piracy that the bill is concerned with). Surprisingly, there's a fair number of non-media/sofware companies who don't seem to have anything to do with online piracy at all - here's some:

Concerned Women for America (is there a Concerned Men for America too?)
Congressional Fire Services Institute
Coty / Estee Lauder Companies / L'Oreal / Revlon (why so many cosmetics companies?!)
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
Pharmeceutical Research and Manufacturers of America
Pfizer, Inc.
Tiffany & Co.

Not to mention a slew of slimebag lawyers who might stand to profit from any future legal action taken as a result of SOPA. About a third of the list includes conpanies that don't produce anything online to pirate and therefore, should never have been on the list on the first place (their presence is simply lobbying and not actually justified). I wonder how many boycotts we're going to see other than the frankly awful Go Daddy (who were terrible even before supposedly briefly supporting SOPA).

Being based in the UK, I wonder if a UK version of SOPA would result in a list of companies being released that supported the act - I don't know if companies in the UK publicly admit their support for legislation (or at least admitted in a way that a Freedom of Information Act request could reveal).

I bought a Dell Mini 9 a few years back for 149 pounds and I still use it regularly - more than I use my last purchase, a firesale HP TouchPad. In fact, my Xmas present this year is to be a replacement battery for the Mini 9 because it's only charging to less than half its original capacity.

What seemed to happen after my Mini 9 purchase was that netbooks with 9/10" screens started to get rarer, solid state drives (essential for a netbook surely?) disappeared, netbooks got more expensive (barely cheaper than a low-end laptop) and then tablets turned up (though I personally think the netbook form is far more productive than a tablet).

What I'd like to see is the original netbook spec come back. but beefed up a bit:

* A low price (must be lower than a cheap laptop).
* Dual core 64-bit processor.
* Upgradeable to at least 4GB RAM.
* Solid state drive (32GB isn't that expensive now).
* Either a normal 9/10" screen or a touchscreen variant (for Windows 8/Android/whatever).
* No fan! The entire netbook must be solid state - no moving parts.
* Linux pre-installed so at least we know there's Linux drivers for it.

Bring that in at under 200 pounds/$300 and I'm interested. A shame Dell isn't an option now because they got it right with the Mini 9, IMHO.

Paying advances allows the author to actually pay their bills whilst working on the book. However, you'd expect publishers to offer authors other models that might result in a bigger overall payout for the author if the book is really successful (e.g. smaller advance/higher royalties or even no advance/even higher royalties) if the author is already wealthy enough not to need the money right away. It's also not clear what happens if the book doesn't sell enough to cover the advance - does the publisher swallow that or does the author have to pay it back? I guess it depends on the contract.

As for e-books, it's clear to anyone that e-books should cost less than the physical version - it *must* be cheaper to distribute the electronic version than the physical one. How much less is up to debate, but even a nominal amount (e.g. 10%) would at least encourage more e-book sales if nothing else. A good example of publishing greed this year is that the #1 Amazon book of 2011 was the Steve Jobs biography. amazon.com has the hardback at a decent $17.87 (basically half price) - the Kindle version is $20.67 - WTF! It's price-gouging on e-books lke that which puts people off buying them and they end up pirating them.

Now that there's a continuous repository for CentOS 6, it's a pretty obvious Linux desktop to use in a work environment. It means GNOME 2, Sys V init scripts (i.e. stuff that works!) and updates for 7 years. If you're like me, you'll maintain a handful of packages manually (I have scripts to create RPMs of the latest Firefox and Thunderbird, plus I install the latest LibreOffice too), but with useful repos like EPEL, RPMforge and ELrepo filling in the remaining gaps, it's a pretty stable setup and a much more sensible choice than Fedora for a work desktop.

Bonus point: You can run the exactly the same OS on your desktop and servers! Even Windows can't do that...

DVD burners have been out for many years and now cost the same as CD burners (if you can even find the latter!). Blank DVDs also cost the same as blank CDs, so that cost advantage has gone now. DVDs hold more than 6 times the data than CDs and both read *and* write many times faster than CDs.

Given all of the above, even if a distro provides a 700MB "CD" ISO, you're still hugely better off writing that image to a DVD. You'll create the image faster, you'll boot it faster and you'll install your packages faster - all for the same price as if you burned the ISO to a CD instead.

The *only* benefit to a 700MB image is that takes less time to download than a multi-GB DVD image, but with broadband speeds getting faster, this advantage is dwindling rapidly. The same thing should have applied already to the "scene" w.r.t. movie downloads (my suggestion: standardise on 25% of the size of a single layer DVD for non-720p downloads instead of the current 700MB), but it sadly hasn't - we still see nonsense like 2-CD releases for movies - again, who on *earth* burns movies to 2 CDs nowadays (along with the ludicrous disc swapping that would be needed half way through)?

I got my UK TouchPad in the firesale (116 pounds for 32GB model - yes, rip-off Britain strikes again) and whilst webOS is OK, it's not as stunning as people make out. The card model isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread - your "flick to minimise" has to be precisely co-ordinated otherwise you end up having to use the bezel button instead (the number of times I've just scrolled instead of minimising is annoying). The lack of a close button on the windows mean two actions instead of one (flick+flick or bezel button+flick) to get finally close an app.

However, it's the lack of apps that's the real killer of WebOS - whilst software written for the various Pre mobile phone models had slowly increased, the ones that are TouchPad compatible (i.e. didn't run in a small Pre phone emulator) were building up even more slowly. So much so, there was an embarrassing trumpeting by HP recently that they'd hit 1,000 apps for the TouchPad, a mark that I suspect Android and iPad tablets exceeded within a week of their release (and that was a couple of years ago too!).

For example, I can't find a decent free fullscreen webOS chess or Sudoku for the TouchPad (they are either for the Palm Pre phone or cost money), whereas there are dozens of each on Android. It's why I'm now mostly using CyanogenMod 7 on my TouchPad - there's loads of apps on my Android TouchPad now don't have webOS equivalents (even with Preware installed, which I do have).

Whilst an msi would be better than an exe installer, at least Windows users get the latter. Mozilla has never provided a natively-packaged (.deb or .rpm) Firefox of any sort for Linux, never mind any official 64-bit builds. Yes, distros can and do provide both, but they aren't always updated timely, particularly if you're on an LTS release.

Mozilla should, if they're trying to catch any Linux admins, provide repos for the most common Linux distros (Ubuntu and Fedora to start, maybe others later) - it can't be too hard to automate the process? And to solve the "enterprise" angle, simply have an LTS repo that's updated infrequently and only for security/critical bug fixes. At the moment, I actually have a straightforward shell script to create RPMs of Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey from the downloadable .tar.bz2's because apparently it's too tricky for the Mozilla dev to write such a script :-(