Oh, I do apologize. It's clear I'm not giving this the earth-shattering priority it deserves, since I couldn't even keep track of how long the tease went on.

Oh, come on. It's not like Elvis finally came out of hiding and released a new album or something.

Just the Beatles?

But this is was a world changing announcement. They've made us wait for several days and pundits have been speculating on this for all that time.

It's a big deal.

Really big.

I know, since Apple said it would change my world.

It's not like it's something trivial that won't effect most iPod or iPhone or iMac users, is it?

I, for one, welcome our new Mighty Mouse overlords.

Actually, he had it re-attached after the event and even made a porn movie afterward to prove he had working equipment.

Not really.

Now if they could make funnier Vikings than Monty Python, THAT would count for something!

And your sarcasm is really not clever at all. I could go on and be as sarcastic as you to try to prove I'm clever, but I won't.

The point is they've earned the name by many local ex-employees. I didn't go into details, but did you ever see the site crapitalone.com while it was still up? It, along with the number of IT guys I knew that had worked there made the point very well about what kind of culture ran throughout the company.

But if you insist on just dwelling on what you think I thought I made up to be funny so you can prove you're oh, so clever, please, feel free to continue.

Yeah, I'd feel dirty if I defended Capital One, too.

They're local here and known by many people as Crapital One for their firing sprees and tendency to make employees disappear. They're also the fastest bank in the nation to sue their own customers. (I sell data to bankruptcy lawyers who keep up with this kind of thing.) They're the last bank I'd go to for a credit card or a loan anyway.

Definitely depressing. I used to teach full time, but before that, I subbed. I spent a week writing a script to send out (that later got me in touch with a Hollyweird agent, so it did its job) and after that week, went back to sub at one school I liked. That break of doing something I loved put me in a different frame -- when I drove up to that school, I started getting really depressed and realized a lot had to do with the building itself. We design offices so we like them. The same with homes. But schools are still, more often than not, dull and functional and uninteresting buildings. It's a wonder kids can stand them or teachers will put up with working in many of them.

There's also a story in education reform where there were a few men shopping for desks and noticed they all had small surfaces and went to someone who sold furniture to schools. The described what they wanted and he said, "Oh, you won't find that. You want a desk where students can work and be creative and functional. These desks are designed solely for listening."

Really a sad statement on the abuse we foster on our children in the name of education.

Oh, so you've read the fine print in the Obamacare packages?

Actually, ads in ebooks is a natural progression, it's just returning to how literature used to be published. A lot of literary works have been published or serialized and published in magazines supported by ads.

Buying a proven product does not involve anywhere near the risk of building that product in the first place, before it was proven. The risk and planning are a major part of the work.

It's a lot easier and the risk is a lot lower to buy something with a track record than to invest in creating a new product and then establishing that track record.

Oracle has, as of now, taken almost no risk on OOo, while Star Office took a major risk. Sun also took a risk, although not as big a one as Star Office did in creating the program.

Comparing that to the employee, working for the company that took the risk, is invalid.

Technically, remember, that OOo is basically a dressing up and improving of Star Office, started by a German company, so if you want to attribute 90% of the work to someone, I'd put it there, but I don't think, at this point, you can contribute 90% to one entity.

Granted, Star Office, both program and company, were bought by Sun, but a lot of the work was done well before Sun stepped in and bought it.

And, I know it's a small detail, but it can matter legally, it's not GPL, it's LGPL. There are differences.

I noticed that as well. It doesn't speak well of the Oracle people involved, since it essentially means they see Libre Office, which truly wants to remain free, as competition, and they only reason they'd see it that way is if Oracle's goals, which have not yet been stated, involved some way to tighten controls on OOo.

Cool! Glad you posted it!

entered a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

It goes back even more, to the 1960s or 1970s, in the "Casino" episode of Mission: Impossible (the real one, the good one, not that crap with the self-aggrandizing Tom Cruise). They drilled into a vault and ran a vacuum to suck out all the money.