What's your source on this?

Does anyone else find that plodding kick drum in the background really annoying? Completely ruins it for me.

A pro-active media strategy will solve it. Get in front of the story by acknowledging the sober truth up front ( "one day it will happen" ) and combine that with public education campaigns, facts and figures type stuff. The message is the exact thing we're already espousing on here - that it can't be 100% safe, but it's better than people. Give that a year or two to become the default mantra, and when that first fatality DOES occur, it'll be a non-issue. The only way this gets blown up is if it catches the public unaware and gets turned in to the Next Big Story.

The difference between GD and Word is one of presentation. Both word processors are perfectly capable of making headers and lists and tables and paragraphs, but Word can make stuff really pretty. The majority of the time I'm working on a document though, collaboration and accessibility is the most important factor. The only time presentation is an issue is when it's going to be sent out to a client, and for those times, we often edit in GD and dump in to a Word template. Word isn't going away any time soon, but it's becoming less and less relevant. We do about 70% of our documents on GD already, this is only going to grow as its presentational capabilities increase.

It is t3h jailbait.cx
No, I am not Ensign McPPPPherson. Thank god.

p.s. avoid everything else on reddit like it has AIDS, which is probably true.

A story for which my signature is appropriate!

Magento is awesome, don't listen to the haters. Yes, it probably requires a VPS, but a 1gb VPS will handle a fair bit of traffic with Magento's caching turned on. Secondly, you know all those crazy requirements ecom customers want, like their own special fancy way of doing things? Magento is a thousand times more configurable than any of the other OS ecom packages out there, I can't tell you the number of times we've been able to meet a client's requirement just out of the box. Sure, it's huge and complicated, but it's also very powerful, and absolutely devours ZenCart and osCommerce, both of which I've used, and both of which have just the worst imaginable codebase.

Wow, 8 days without spam bots? Could it be time for the resurrection?

One only has to remember what things were like with Linux 10 years ago, in the year 2000, to know why the interest just isn't as strong today.

At the time, it had a massive advantage over the Windows 98 platform, which was the common desktop at the time -- it crashed constantly and required formatting every few months, and was vulnerable to total crap like TCP/IP flooding, running unlimitedly powerful .vbs scripts, typing "con con" into a console, and giving IE basically Admin access to your system through ActiveX. Doing anything from zipping a file to hex editing to writing code to making simple video and sound files required outright piracy and the use of horrible freeware -- friendly, open source, cross-platform apps and web apps weren't common. Winamp was a shining example of a great, free program back then, and it wasn't open source and came bundled with AOL crapware.

Linux, on the other hand was rock solid. It didn't crash, it had anything you needed readily available and installable. Need a web server, an IDE, a hex editor, an image editor more advanced than mspaint, PERL, an audio player, an IRC client or anything else? It was there, no running keygens or installing adware. Same with using existing things like ICQ, IRC, the web, usenet, etc. And they were actually competitive in terms of friendliness compared to what was on the Windows platform. You could also script them no problem from a totally OP command line.

But it was a terrible pain to install for a young amateur compared to just popping a LiveCD today. Have fun partitioning your HD with raw fdisk (cfdisk if lucky) and setting up XFree86 by hand to see any graphics. Try setting up non-PNP ISA devices with screwy drivers -- often you had to go hardware swapping for something specific, like a $10 Crystal Sound card. Try rebuilding the Kernel with an ALSA patch to get that to run. Try not using a packaging system for anything -- RPM was terrible at the time, you were better off just compiling things.

But socially, if you could pull it off, you were pretty elite. You had a solid, invulnerable, insanely powerful OS with every tool you'd want at your hands. It was rebellious against the suits and it had the promise of an open source world. The programming was much better -- OpenGL was way, way easier to write for than DirectX 6, which was just nasty, and was cross-platform to boot. The internet population was far more technical at the time and also respected it. Social networking / multimedia was years away from being mainstream at the time. Anyone who ran Linux wasn't a 'n00b' or a 'lamer' on primitive web forums, Usenet, IRC, etc.

Today? Windows XP/Vista/7 has been comparatively stable and isn't nearly as vulnerable, unless you're just stupid. There's mountains of OSS software out there for every task that runs under Windows, if it wasn't built to run under Windows. No one cares that you run Linux, and will just get frustrated if you can't run the 10% of things a PC can. Ten years ago, the biggest PC game -- Quake 3 -- ran great under Linux, but try getting MWF2 to run under it today.

So there's no real motivation to get into it now -- it doesn't have the appeal comparatively it did 10 years ago.

And the desire to make a patent free format had nothing to do whatsoever in even the slightest way with the fact that commonly used formats like GIF were patented?

Since when is it the role of the courts to arbitrarily legislate to protect the failing business models of certain corporations?

This is exactly right. A police officer's testimony counts for more than the common person's testimony when it comes to a straight your word versus theirs. Typically cases brought before the court are more complicated than that, but should something as simple as your word versus theirs get brought in, the copper will win. Of course, should that officer ever get caught lying to the court in any future cases, you'd have an excellent case to get your conviction overturned.

Bing results pretty good? Sure, if you don't mind them actively filtering search results to remove anti-MS content: http://advice.cio.com/shane_oneill/bing_search_tainted_by_pro_microsoft_results

I think the Pirate Party should rebrand itself as the Internet Party, Digital Party or Future Party, some such thing, and just fight for the rights of all things that service the good of the Internet, which is kinda what they're doing anyway, except to the layman, who asks "what the hell has pirates got to do with the Internet"?

MOD THIS UP