Wow, apparently my "I hate to be that guy" was subconsciously swiped from my GP, including quotes. I promise we're different people though... you probably won't have to search far to find out that "name one thing that MS Office does that OpenOffice doesn't" is not something I'd be very likely to say. :-)

I hate to be "that guy", but why not Latex? You obviously know about it.

My software came from and is updated via my Linux distro. Add in all the Linux downloads and the install number used in his analysis is very under stated.

I suspect that you'd see something similar to Firefox, though to a less extent: even though Firefox is pretty universally used among Linux users (maybe less so since Chrom(e|ium)), Linux Firefox users are still a very small part of overall Firefox users. Similarly, I expect there are far more Windows OpenOffice users than there are Linux OpenOffice users.

And I suspect that the number of Windows OpenOffice "users" like me -- I download Open/LibreOffice every couple years to see if Impress is still shitty -- rather outweighs the number of Linux users getting it from their repo instead of the OO/LO site.

Not really. OpenOffice is something you can try on a whim. Maybe you hear from a friend that it exists, and decide to give it a try. Maybe you like it, but maybe you don't. (There are plenty of people who feel strongly for one side or the other, as shown by the comments on this story.) But if you don't, the cost of trying it out is very low to zero depending on how you count.

That's not true of MS Office. Who is going to go spend $150 on a lark just to try it out? Very few.

Now, MS Office does have another thing going "unfairly" for it: bundling. In the above analysis, I'm counting people who go out and actually buy it explicitly, including upgrades and checking the "give me Office" box when buying a computer, not people who just go out to Best Buy and walk out the door with a computer with Office preloaded.

(You could say that counting one but not the other is a bit unfair; to some extent you're right. However, I maintain that the two characteristics are very different, and that the original comment was on just the one.)

FWIW, I don't know what you did to get that then.

I tried it in LibreOffice 4.0 on Windows and on 3.5 on Ubuntu 12.04. The correction suggestions on the Windows one has 11 words, none of which are "quick". The Linux one did, but it was #13 of 13.

As another point of comparison, Opera on Windows suggests it as #2 out of a pretty-obnoxiously-long list of options.

Now, that being said, that's one word. I'm certainly prepared to believe that Word gives better suggestions, but "qick" is far from proof. For instance, "qyick" and "qjick" will give "quick" as the first suggestion.

Yes and no.

Let's take your examples:

If a group of doctors volunteer their time and work in a clinic and treat the poor, pro bono, are they not entitled to claim the value that they provide is based on their normal rate? Same question for lawyers who provide pro bono counsel to those who cannot afford it. Can't they claim the value they produce per their normal hourly rates?

What about the doctor who stepped into the clinic to ask a few questions and ask how things are done, applied a couple bandages, then walked out? Can he say that he provided the same amount of value as one of the long-term doctors?

What about the lawyer who decided to download the latest version of LibreOffice to see if Impress was less donkey ass, then decided to go back to MS Office?

A lot of those downloads are going to be for things like that -- where there was a download, but it really didn't provide value. Or what's the incremental increase in value for someone who went from LO 3.5 to 4.0 vs. someone who stuck with Office 2007?

I understand that the word processing of LO and MS Office are about par, but is the same thing at all true about the Excel & PowerPoint programs?

I can't speak to Writer or Calc... but when it comes to Impress, IMO the answer is a big fat "NO!"

I've done a fair bit of evaluation of the two back when I was trying to decide whether to buy MS Office or stick with OO (spoiler: I did), and about the only thing that Impress manged to impress me with was how impressively bad it was. I haven't used Office XP for a while but I don't think it was even as good as that version of PowerPoint. And while I'm generally pretty indifferent on the ribbon, I think 2007 improved on 2003 a ton, and somehow 2010 actually managed to improve on 2007, though not enough for me to upgrade. (My use of 2010 was a "use at work" thing.)

Just a couple days ago I wanted to make a diagram, and decided to give LibreOffice Draw a try. The block corner arrow doesn't even have a handle to adjust the width of the arrow, which means that unless I'm missing something that shape is essentially useless. This problem is in both Draw and Impress.

(I'd love to try Keynote... but my usual line there is that I don't want to spend $1000 on presentation software, even if it does come with a free computer. :-))

I have some kind of account with three different banks (a local credit union for checking & savings, an online "high yield" (not so much any more) savings, and a credit card); to my knowledge, none of the three offer those dongles.

I get the impression they're common in Europe, but I think they're pretty unheard of in the US.

Also, I needed to make a diagram just this morning, and decided to give LibreOffice Draw a try. Even in the new LO release, the corner block arrow has no handle for changing the width of the line, which means that AFAICT the thickness scales to the overall size of the diagram portion.

This one thing basically left Draw dead in the water for what I wanted to do.

(Actually Impress seems to have the same problem. I wonder if lack of control like that was part of why I disliked Impress.)

Except Libre office has much better functionality, even though its less on price.

I'd just like to issue a counter-argument. I use word processors... well, basically only ever to read stuff other people have made, and then rarely. Almost all of my writing is done in plain text, in HTML, or in Latex.

But what I do use office suites for with some regularity is presentations. And to be honest, IMO Impress doesn't even hold a candle to PowerPoint. A few years ago I was gearing up for something which I expected would need me to make a lot of presentations. (Turns out I did something different, but whatever.) I spent a fair bit of time just trying to use both PPT and Impress, so I could figure out which I wanted to use. And for whatever reason, Impress was just really frustrating to use. At the time, it was far worse than even old versions of PPT, and 2007 was (I think) a large improvement over 2003 for reasons other than the ribbon. (Actually even 2010 made some very nice UI improvements over 2007, which surprised me.) The situation is a bit better now with Impress, but it's still not even close IMO.

PowerPoint has some problems, and it's not really the presentation software that I actually want. But it's still worlds better than Impress. (I'd like to try Keynote, but my usual line there is I don't want to spend $1000 on presentation software, even if it does come with a free computer. :-))

(For all the Beamer fans out there, as much as I like Latex for other things, I think it's kind of crazy for presentations. IMO, presentations are a medium where Latex's strengths are unimportant and its weaknesses are important.)

(Also, just to be clear, I am somewhat a MS fanboy by /. standards, but my closest relation with them was failing to get an internship with them not quite a decade ago.)

iTunes, Bandcamp, and Amazon sales (almost all iTunes and Bandcamp). $82,651 between Oct 2011 and March 2012. Make sure you flip between the different spreadsheet pages via the "tabs" at the bottom.

Wikipedia says the median income in the US is $45K. There are a lot of wrenches thrown into this comparison. Perhaps there was something special in that time that caused it to be above average (though no close-by releases; here solo albums are from 2004, 2005, 2010). Because she's self-employed, she also has (or potentially has) a ton of expenses that most full-time employees don't; if you take the typical rule (IIRC) that the cost to an employer is double that of the salary, that means that in some sense her income is half of the above numbers (which when you add in other stuff would put her reported income right around the median income). Or maybe she has health insurance through a husband, I have no idea.

But that IS only for 6 months, and it doesn't seem like it includes touring income either. (Though other information she's reported indicates that she gets rather less revenue from touring than the above sales, and there are also a ton of expenses to that.)

From a comment above, the problem is that it's not case sensitive, except for an internal sanity check which is.

E.g. the dispatching code said "the user typed File:/// and I have a handler for file:///, so I'll call it", but then the handler had what was basically an case-insensitive comparison assert(url.startswith("file:///")).

So the problem isn't case sensitivity or insensitivity -- it's that it was being inconsistent about it.

Yes, input validation is usually a good thing and no amount of you hating Apple Inc is going to change that.

That's true. But a crash is not the way to handle invalid input.

(Also, "wooosh", I know.)

I'm plenty used to /., and am fairly used to having disagreements with large portions of it. And on most issues I've got pretty think skin, so I'm okay. Heck, most of this conversation isn't even really disagreements with Keating as an outright misunderstanding (if a somewhat understandable one) of her beliefs about streaming.