I don't know about you, but I consider being able to leave the office and work outside on a sunny day or in the pub on a rainy one to be a feature. I have friends who have an hour-long commute on a train or bus each way in London and Silicon Valley, and they're very happy that they can count this time towards their working day, rather than as personal time.

The best test of whether you understand something is whether you can explain it to someone else. If you can't write good documentation, then you probably don't really understand your code, which means that you're not a programmer you're a code monkey (and not a very good one, at that).

WYSIWYG is a terrible way of writing, but it's a great way of editing. The problem is that most modern tools conflate the two. When I write, I prefer to use vim and minimise the distractions - I see the words, I focus on the words and the markup describing their meaning, and I worry about the typesetting later. For articles, actually I don't worry about the formatting at all, my publisher sorts all of that out and so there's no reason for me to bother. I don't care what it looks like - that's not my job as a writer - I care that it's coherent and fluid prose. For books, I use LaTeX, and then I typically have a few rounds of iterations at the end of each chapter when I do the tweak-recompile-check cycle. I structure my environment such that I can build each chapter independently, which speeds up the build times, but it's still painful getting the style tweaks in correctly. I'd be much happier if I could get LaTeX to do a first formatting pass and then use a visual WYSIWYG editor to tweak everything and have those changes preserved the next time I do a formatting run from the source text.

You can fix it, but I agree that it usually puts it in the worst possible place. The problem is that TeX uses an elegant dynamic programming model to determine where to break lines in a paragraph, but uses a greedy algorithm to do page layout. Why? Because the PDP-10 didn't have enough RAM for the dynamic programming tables that would be required to do elegant page layout on a typical document. On a modern computer, even if it takes 2-3MB for the tables, you most likely have a single image in the document that is bigger than that (in early TeX, images had to be added afterwards in a separate compositing phase after you sent the typeset document to the printer, because computers weren't powerful enough to handle nontrivial images).

I tried implementing the TeX linebreaking algorithm for page layout in some naive (unoptimised) Objective-C a few years ago and ran it on a 900-page book that I'd written. Even then, it took under a second to run on the laptop I had at the time. There's no reason not to do it now.

The flamebait mods are obviously from people who use the other editor.

I like rST, but Markdown seemed to get wider support so I gradually switched to using it instead because they're sufficiently similar that it's annoying using both and lots of things didn't support rST. They're both roughly equal for the sorts of things I use them for: blog posts, articles, doc comments in code. There's no way I'd write a scientific paper or a book in either though: LaTeX is still the king there.

And if you ever talk to a British soldier, you'll find that they're even higher up the list of complaints than the food...

I just had management freak out over this at my workplace last week. ... even though I am not the damn IT guy at the other company who setup Citrix!...

Anyway you need to set the default printer and then open it Citrix remote desktop. If it is not default then they call you and expect you to fix another company's system that is remote ... and fix the internet while you are at it.

Citrix cost some employees their job as IE pops randomly do not go up when it gets busy and they can't read HIPPA documents to customers on the phone. It freezes up even under a light load where the cpu usage is 15% and ram only 40%.

I hate that thing with a passion and wish VMWare clients were cheaper.

LOL

I call bs on that one. I hope you did not do any online banking on that machine seriously. DOS was the best ever because I am familiar with it. To hell what imrovements have been made too right?

Windows 7 has kernel level sandboxing, DSLR (ram scrambling), DEP (data execution prevention), no real admin acount but a token broker, seperation or privledges and many many other improvements. Stack smashing, buffer overflows, and inserting data into ram addresses of .dlls are difficult on Windows 7. On XP they can just do it easily if you are admin and go through the front door rather than breaking through the back.

My guess is your Win2k did not have flash, java, or internet access which made it have less vectors. Windows 7 has more security than even Linux at this point with features making it very hard to hack. Most hackers just use flash and PDFs to get around this. However this past 1.5 Adobe now uses Windows Vista/7 kernel leveling sandboxing as well.

No support is an excellent reason to change.

The ribbon is much easier to use and learn. The issue is why change and a resistence to it because the change came from MS. It is silly.

Having documents not formatted properly in later versions will make customers question the professionalism of your employer. Office 2013 makes .docx that are not compatible with office 2003 right now! Office 2014 will be out next year and the newer versions have cloud services and app stores so employees can work at home with skydrive pro as well as Salesforce app etc.

That is important in business and time has moved on. I might as well say it takes time to learn Windows since dos is what employees are familair with so why change too.

A single excel macro can take down a company after April since MS wont patch it! Can you say code red and you can bet your ass hackers and criminals are stockpilling macros and XP exploits as I type this waiting for April to come by and bring all hell out.

When he gets 0wn3d because his version no longer recieves updates afte april don't blame me. ... better yet call me and I will clean it off his XP system for $75 an hour :-)

Just throw it on any server at work or on an ISP. This is FOSS like apache where a user can do whatever the hell he or she wants. Office 365 is managed by someone else. This would be managed by you and your ISP backs it up or your IT department, or yourself. This is a we cloud instead of a their cloud.

Have you tried Office 2010? Try the ribbon for a week? Afterwards you will see you can preview changes with just a mouse hovering over items. Hit the alt key and you have smart tags showing all the shortcuts with it which is nice with a laptop.

Office 2010 is much better. I saw the research back then and was exciting to learn something new as real scientist had data to show it is better and statistics back them up with real usage. It is not Metro by a longshot or pushed by marketing folks unlike Windows 8.

Office 2003 is old and it is a horrible pain in the butt to get to a custom function and will be very insecure after April of next year. I do not want to go back to that release.

Want a reason to switch? How about file compatibility? You think the .docx of 2013 is compatible and a future manager will be able to read your resume in a few years when Office 2014, 2015, come out? Think again.

I find using Office without the ribbon unusable. I can't find where anything is at now.

Does that mean menus are inferior? No. It means I got used to a different way of doing them.

Now if you want to argue that I am stupid and do not know how to use a menu I would like to point out I have used Office since the 3.1 days and knew it fairly well before 2008 when my brain still reserved these things in memory as it was important to remember. I also remember hating the hiding function in office 2003 where you had to hid the the arrow to get to anything. I always disabled it after a fresh install back then.

But the fact of the matter is I can preview changes, make graphical effects and titles, and get to seldomly used functions in a fraction of the time now! Statistics back me up on this too as 80% of users only used 40% of the functions and kept requesting things Office has already been doing for years.

Do not be offended when I say it is hard to change sometimes, as even people with great computer skills can get stuck with a particular gui like Firefox 3.x for years as it has 100 security exploits at this stage. It took a week for me to get someone productivity with the ribbon. After seeing how I did not need a mouse with the newer keyboard shortcuts which navigate the ribbon with smart tags and I was in bliss.

Today I am happy feel Office 2010 is the best release.

Easy. I can view my docs anywhere. From my phone, home pc, work pc, whatever. Dropbox has some of this but office file compatibility is a problem for example when it comes to spreadsheets.

Second, it is a damn pain in the ass to setup software to be updated and pushed on thousands of PCs in a work envrionment. With this you push a group policy for a hyperlink. Sovled as the website or intranet site takes care of everything. No hunting down damn Outlook archive folders when upgrading a PC. If a company wants something confidential they flag it and it instantly is unavailable elsewhere. On the cloud means it wont leave on flash drivers either.