What kept me from using a wacom style tablet before? Well, being able to carry a single device and jot on it in the same way as one would a real clipboard and paper is not possible if you're carrying multiple devices with cables between them. With surface pro, you literally walk around taking notes, snapping photos recording conversations or jotting quick pieces of information as you go, with a device that can do what a real piece of paper can as well all the other cool stuff a laptop can.

If you've managed to be paperless using a wacom style tablet, then congratulations on being able to, but your job differs from the majority of normal peoples' jobs.

Modern note taking is a technically non-trivial task, especially when you consider that OneNote consolidates free inking functionality, text note taking with a keyboard, importing content from Internet, embedding audio and video notes and makes it all nicely polished. If notepad.exe suffices for your needs, then fine, but I believe I pre-empted the "my use case is simple therefore anything more complex is wrong" argument in my previous post.

Latex isn't even analogous to a word processor. Do you have any connection to the real work that real people do? Or are you one of those BOFH types who revels in wielding petty power from the dungeon of an office building, only emerging to unjam a printer somewhere?

You say MSO is hard to use after considering Latex to be an alternative product? You're living on bizarro world. Thankfully, I don't live there, which is why we disagree.

Copyleft makes sure that users retain freedoms, including the freedom to hire developers to make the software do what the user wants.

Perhaps the difference is that in the FSF philosophy, the "freedom" to take freedoms away from users isn't a freedom to begin with.

Except that Nokia could have dominated Android.

At the time of the Burning Platforms memo, Samsung had not established its dominance over Android, Nokia had one of the best brand names, it had the largest market share of smartphones (yes, more than Apple at that time).

Had Elop not Osbourned the Symbian phones, he would have had time to transition to Android and could have leveraged its market share to advantage instead of adopting a platform with a history of failure.

- The XBox line isn't exactly a sidelined product.
- Surface Pro is loved by those who use it, and many (including me) think it is a product whose time is only just arriving. It is the closest we've come yet to being able to go truly paperless, especially as a student.

- OneNote is the best note-taking app on the planet, the only limitation being it's lack of broad device support.

- Office 365 with documents stored on Skydrive ROCKS. It is like GDocs, except with more features and not totally sucking. Full real time collaborative edits would be nice, but I'll take the ability to work on and generate .docx / .xlsx files without munging them up any day*.

Let's also not forget that even after decades, Excel and Word are light years ahead of anything else that has attempted to challenge them.

Sure, I have issues with some of their moves (I'm looking at you, Metro!), but I can't say, as a mature objective person, they anything they've done has totally ballsed things up to the point that I have to go running into the decrepit arms of OpenOffice.

Oh, and before you go off yelling "OMG shillz0r!!" I would like to point out that I have been around here a long, long time. I've earned my stripes. I use Linux daily, admin several servers, have a homebrew NAS running FreeBSD and did my share of M$ bashing. However, berating them as though their products aren't worth anything is just immature. Grow up.

Also, don't be coughing up the old argument "$other product is better than Microsoft's offering because my personal use case fits into its feature set!"

* And yes, the OOXML format is here to stay. It's what the vast majority of businesses use, so get used to it. It'd be nice if ODF was the standard, but then again, try creating ODF files in OpenOffice, editing them in AbiWord and back again a few times. ODF is no better at providing word processor agnosticism than is OOXML, and has the detraction that all the ODF word processors suck royally.

I too am honestly curious.

What is the value in slagging what appears to be a completely Free/Libre OS?

And what other "ecosystem" did you have in mind, other than that of Apple/iOS or Microsoft/WinWhatever?

Diablo3 is actually a really fun game for the first 500 hours. It gets tedious, but that's the point of a treasure grinding game.

Or are you still butthurt over the initial user experience the first month after launch last year? Shit takes time to get figured out and some things, like server capacity, can only be figured out after launch.

For most people Diablo3 only sucked because someone told them it sucked. And that person that told them it sucked? He got his opinion the same way. Everyone that bitched about Diablo3 did so only because they didn't understand what they bought.

Diablo3 is not a game that you will want to play forever, it is maybe a 30 hour game from start to finish and a complete grind fest after that, exactly the same as Diablo2. If you get bored of repetition then the game sucks pretty quick, but no more so than Diablo2. After grinding a few hundred hours, in my case over 700, the game gets old and genuinely better games like Skyrim, Fallout, or Starcraft2 reclaim their appeal.

Continuing to hate Diablo3 because the first month sucked and a bunch of bloggers called it crap is about the most pathetic excuse to avoid a game that I've ever heard. Go play it some time, it's actually a lot of fun if you give it a chance instead of prejudicially taking the word of others.