Hey, if OpenOffice.org actually worked as better than or even ALMOST equal to M$ Office, everyone at the small epublishing company I work for would be using it. But we have spent MANY hours having to fix OOo documents that just don't work in Word, and have had to require M$ Word. And when we report the bugs, OOo tells us they are not interested in fixing it. I WANT to use OOo. I simply can't, it makes my work MUCH harder. I am happy for those of you who don't have any problems with it. Usually the only way that I can effectively use an OOo DOC or RTF is to convert it to TXT, open it in Word, and add the formatting back in. I am one of dozens of people I know who want OOo to work, and they have thumbed their noses at us and others. I would not need to use a Windoze machine at all if the open-doc office package was available that actually could be used. (Amazingly, AbiWord has fewer problems -- ad KOffice more-- and Ashampoo Office (for Windoze) even fewer, but still not quite good enough.)

Then that explains why they are holding secret meetings, but does not explain why they are openly discussing open meetings.

I have just read this article and two layers down in links, and have YET to find what "ACTA" is or means. Please add this information to the article -- not all of us can remember the tons of alphabet soup we are being fed.

I hope I'm not the only one who noticed that the headline neglected to include Firefox, but that the article makes it clear they are equally at risk.

This is really not a story -- Yahoo has been censoring porn in India for well over a year. I have a Yahoo! India email account, and occasionally do searches on Yahoo! India... while most of my searches have been finding pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses, I have looked at human goddesses as well... and always have to go to another Yahoo or other Search engine, despite my having my preferences set to no filtering. In fact, for a long time, I could click the button to stop filtering -- but there was no button to save that preference, so it never 'took'.

Actually, the ASUS-Xandros which came on my Eee PC 901 had a bit longer battery life... but Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix has more than enough added usability to make it worth it, and accurately reports battery data... I'm getting about 5.5 hours on a charge.

LOL Yeah, the only thing I use KDE for is on Windoze to get some Kool games... Gnome is just as flexible and tons faster...

I often find information on my favorite musical artists -- often those overlooked by the media and radio -- on Wikipedia. However, when I find one they missed, and add a page for them, it is almost invariably deleted because the information I entered is too similar to the artist's own website. Well, where else are you going to get the discography? I have given up, although I have not officially informed Wikipedia of this fact.

The earlier reports were quite a bit rosier, and a French company is already stepping up production of these vehicles. Which raises the questions: Is this Berkeley study funded by oil companies? Were the earlier stories inflated? Or both?

A later question could be, are there more efficient or less polluting ways to compress (or release) air than the one Berkeley studied?

SBC did not buy Ameritech, or, if they did, it was not a significant purchase. SBC bought BellSouth, which owned Cingular. They did not buy AT&T -- AT&T went under, and SBC bought only the name, although it might have included whatever was left of AT&T Long Distance. Much cheaper transaction.

Mandrake 9 was the first Linux I actually got to install and run on any of my computers (after several attempts with others). Unfortunately, 10 did not do so well... and Mandriva did make a mess of things for a bit... My next success was Ubuntu 8.04 HH, and I've stuck with that even through some computer glitches and an upgrade glitch with 8.10. 9.10 Karmic Koala looks really great.

My only complaint with Linux is not with Linux, it's with OpenOffice.org and all the other open document office suites. They all use the same open source conversion program to convert to/from DOC/RTF, and the resulting RTF file is seriously messed up. As I am a professional editor, and some of my documents need to be in RTF format, I'm stuck using Windoze until someone fixes this (I don't have the skills to do so), and OOo has stated repeatedly that they are aware of this bug and intend to do nothing about it.

So now that I am officially off-topic, I will end this post.

I bought two Eee PC 701s and later two Eee PC 901s for various homeless people in Asheville. Of the four, two have reported issues, and one has reported issues with the SSD... it's a 901 with the 20 Gb drive, which they partition into a 4 Gb and a 16 Gb drive. The one with issues can't find the 4 Gb (Primary, Boot) partition, but boots fine if you hold F9 down while booting and then reports the other drive is there and working fine. No clue if it's the drive or the OS is messed up, but I've done Restore a couple times so I suspect the drive.

OOo has always had problems converting from DOC to RTF, creating major formatting issues in the rsultant RTF file. It has been reported, by myself and others, quite often. Usually the response is that they are not interested in working on it. Fixing this one bug alone would allow me to cast aside Windoze and operate fully in Linux... however, as a professional editor who needs to submit several of my documents in RTF, OOo continues to come up short.

I would point out that MailMerge has always been complex and weak at best, but they may yet fix this. I also reported another bug, but it was not important enough to even remember.

Fix one bug. OOo (and Sun) knows what it is, and refuses to do anything about it. That's why OOo will constantly trail MS and other Office packages.

I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is thisâ"who will count the votes, and how. - J. Stalin

Oh yeah. Like AT&T hasn't already thought of that, and prevented it. Let me know if you're right though, I'd love to find another service.