This is silly. First off, the Firestone thing caused DEATH. So if a software malfunction/bug caused DEATH because of the malfunction/bug, whoever wrote it should absolutely get sued for writing bad software. Just like malpractice suits. It's DEATH because of poor quality.
Off of that tangent, I think this is a great idea. Maybe software will come out slower because people are being more thorough. Maybe software will have a higher quality because people spend the time rather than rush it. Maybe it creates a whole new insurance industry for programmer's insurance.
Do you want missile guidance systems to have software bugs in them? Do you want your financial institution to "lose your accounts" because of bugs in the software? This is serious stuff folks. It's time to get serious about it.
I personally don't think it'll hurt the little guys at all unless they're creating bad software. In which case, maybe it should hurt them.
It matters because the people who make movies like LOTR go through a lot of hardships to get them made. So winning an award gives them a sense of fulfillment--like what they did is worth something to the world. It also helps them to get other movie ideas past the movie folks for potential making as well. So it's good to cheer for movies like this to win things that you think they should win.
I had a friend who used to threaten to use his overclocked CPU without the fan to boil his coffee in the morning.
I had another friend who bought a VAX at one of the MIT Flea Markets and used it as a coffee table.
I had a third friend what used to drop monitors from a second story window and record the sound of impact and use it in techno songs. When the monitor hits the ground it makes this funky metallic implosion sound.
Back when I was in college, our computer science lab had these DEC monitors that used to get super hot--hot enough to lightly toast Pop Tarts from the vending machine down the hall.
I'm sure there are other instances--but can't think of them off the top of my head. Most of these (except the monitor dropping one) involve the immense heat generated by some hardware and the rest involve the shape of the hardware. I'd be interested to see any alternate uses that don't involve heat/shape.
The guy who made var'aq is this guy I knew in college. He's a fascinating fellow--only he could create something like var'aq.
Anyhow, the interesting thing about var'aq is that because it runs on Perl, it's pretty ubiquitous meaning that if you really hate your job and feel the need for revenge, just go rewrite the production administration scripts in var'aq and then quit.
It started with the Infocom games. Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Then Civilization--I would come home and play that for hours on end. Then I discovered WarCraft II which was wonderful. Then Age of Empires. Then I discovered mudding. That was like 5 years ago. I've been mudding ever since.
Most of the games I became addicted to had a timeless quality to them but had different aspects I got addicted to.
In the case of Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, they were well thought out puzzle games.
In the case of WarCraft II and Age of Empires, it was the network play that was addicting--my roommates and I would play until the wee hours of the morning.
In the case of mudding--it's the immersive world. I know people there and I'm familiar with the places, and I can log in from wherever. I even got into writing my own mudclient and started a few mudserver projects. The problem domains involved in mudding and mud-building are just fascinating.
Well... That's all and good but in the OC/LA case, OC is a different world than LA is. I lived in Newport Beach for a year. We were an hour out of LA but used to go into LA for clubbing and such semi-regularly and it was a great time. Whenever I was asked where I lived, I always said Orange County. The people there feel very strongly about not being a suburb of LA--it's a serious cultural stigma.
Now I live in Waltham just outside of Boston. When I tell people where I live, I just say Boston. It's easier and there's no real stigma against it so people know what I'm talking about.
I know most of the records we're considering converting to CD can't be found on most of the peer networks I've been combing over the last year or so. I wouldn't be surprised if the guy asking the question has the same problem.
Some of the records never made it past vinyl format either. So it's not like we could pick up a CD copy at the store. I would assume this is one of the reasons that the songs aren't floating around the peer networks.
Serve alcohol--not so much to get people wasted, but to take the edge off.
Get one of the projectors from marketing, hook it up to a laptop with a serious 3d video card, and do the tunes with Winamp or some other player that has the ability for visual plug-ins like Geiss or something pretty that people can literally just stare at.
And get rid of the flourescent lights. Do some other lighting so people can see other people's faces, but aren't exposed to blaring light irritation.
Provide seating to. Most introverts I know are pretty non-excited about their bodies and feel awkward standing up which just causes them to be more shy than usual.
Don't run around telling people to have fun because it's a company party--that's just irritating.
Most languages that I program in either have an I10n or similar module or library that makes abstracting I10n issues out of your code and centralize them in a place allowing you to easily add new supported languages to your code base.
I never really thought about I10n until the last client I worked at where we had 8 different languages to cater to. Some of them could be done with the various iso-8859-x sets, but some of them required Unicode which caused real issues for us.
Now I think about I10n while doing the initial design rather than afterwards because it makes things a whole lot easier--even if you never really need it.
If you're doing any kind of Open Source project, I would seriously consider I10n issues at the beginning of the project since there are lots of people who speak lots of languages out there. It doesn't mean you have to do all the translations--just have to be able to support them. If it's important, you'll find volunteers to do translations for you. If not, you can always use babelfish or some other translator and attempt the translation yourself and someone will get irked enough to "fix" it for you.
The fact that it's really technical is exactly why you should get the magazine--it'll take longer to outgrow it. In the meantime, you'll be absorbing the technical stuff and at some point p between when you start reading LJ and when you're technically competent enough to skim it and understand what's going on, you'll be learning all kinds of exciting stuff accurately--which is why you wanted to look at magazines in the first place.
I've used blackbox as well for small linux boxes and it's got everything I look for in a window manager with the advantage of being very small.
I'm not sure I would use an old distribution though. If you ever want to upgrade things, it's a pain in the ass because you go through this massive dependency upgrade first. I have a RedHat 5.2 server still and as soon as I can, I'm going to install a new distribution version on it rather than upgrade all the pieces one at a time.
Instead of using an old distribution, I would suggest use a more recent distribution and uncheck all the boxes and install just the things you need. Maybe even use one of the tiny footprint distributions out there--there are a lot of them.
Definitely. What I would do is announce on all your development/announcement mailing lists that you are ending your reign as maintainer and happy to hand over the project to someone else. Also put a blurb about this on your project website right on the front page. Make sure all source code is available--toss in a README file with all your final thoughts and things you were thinking of doing and whatever else. Make sure you copyright all the code and place it under whatever license is important to you. This involves adding license text to the top of every file in the project as well as adding a LICENSE file with the download.
Then just move on with your life. If someone finds your project and has an itch they need to scratch, they'll contact you about taking over or whatever.
That's what happened with Lyntin--Lyn stopped development and a year later I discovered the project and we chatted and I took over and moved it to sourceforge and so on so forth.
On the flip side, you can always take a super passive role on your project. If it does everything you want it to do, then it's "done" and you can just hang out and deal with patches if people send them in.
I worked on a project with some 12 other developers and I think we all had our own different environments. Some were running Visual SlickEdit, some had Sun's Forte, some Kawa, and I (all by my little self) was running Cygwin, bash, make, ant, and vim (I'm not boasting or anything, just telling it like it was).
On the one hand, I had a lot more programming experience than those people so I could move around my environment faster than they could move in theirs. Including checking out files from Clear Case and running diffs and such. I would say that on average I could find a bug, diagnose the problem, and fix it in a quarter the time that it took most of my co-workers. I can move through a file in vim faster than they can with their GUI editors.
Given that, I would say that GUI tools help you start projects faster because they have templates and wizards and things that give you a decent skeleton. They also have better help systems--so you start typing in a Class name and it pops up a box with members and such.
CLIs are great for folks who know what they're doing because they're more easily customized and can be more efficient. But it does take time to script the infrasctructure.
To be honest, I'm not running any Linux workstations and collecting games that I'll probably never play doesn't sound too enticing. If they sold t-shirts and other gear (I realize that sounds a bit silly) I would definitely buy one of those. One more day I can go without doing laundry.:)
A few months ago, there was a Fox News report on Red Bull and alcohol. All day long they were hyping it up... "Tonight at 11... Red Bull and alcohol and how it's endangering your life!"
Because I occasionally drink Red Bull and vodka (which is trippy because you don't feel tired at all), I made sure to watch the segment which was well placed at the end of the 11 news hour. The startling discovery was that Red Bull and alcohol drunk in large quantities is not good for your heart.
Course, alcohol alone drunk in large quantities isn't good for your heart--so I chalk most of this up to needless sensationalistic journalism.
However, anything abused is almost certainly bad (if not fatal) to you.
I do a _lot_ of interviewing even though I'm a developer. I've gotten really good at qualifying applicants for development jobs on my team. One of the questions I ask to discern whether they're motivated or just looking for another job is by asking if they participate in or maintain any Open Source projects.
So you're asking about the next step--only interviewing Open Source folks.... I'm not so sure about that. I think it's better to find the best person you can whether they do Open Source or not. It just so happens that the folks I know that work on projects outside of work have better coding habits and style and methodologies than those that don't. Practice makes perfect.
/will
Python. One of the missions of Python is to become ubiquitous as the ultimate powerful learning language. They have documentation up the wazoo. And several books (Learning Python) that walk beginning programmers through some quick fundamental concepts.
Also, in the last few months, the headline articles on Slashdot have become more and more neophyte-related. Is this now News for Young Adults? What happened to News for Nerds--where we're assuming Nerds have already answered all these questions?
Do the people posting topics like this read Slashdot? If they did, they'd realize this is a topic that gets covered in almost every single language-war related article.
While I understand that I can tune Ask Slashdot articles out, I am somewhat saddened that this is no longer a place for Nerds, but rather for Nerd wannabes and political types and beginner developers and trollers.
I don't know if Slashdot folk have a mission statement revision, but "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." doesn't work anymore.
some of those webmail things and mailman run as root.
course, the scripts i'm talking about allow people to run arbitrary commands with root privs from a text box on a form with no ssl and no login or nothing. lets me remotely administer things without getting all farked up with all that security stuff. *giggle*
Most of the CGI that I have done either revolves around string munging or database access. Some of it involves running as root (ick!). For this Perl rocks. Apache with mod_perl is very cool. Very little you can't do with that combination.
Some of the CGI that I have done is intensly complicated and involved a well thought out design and implementation. And it involved a bunch of people working on the same project--so it needed to be easy to read and object oriented. For this Python is really good.
Some of the CGI that I have done needed to run fast and I had canabalized it from other places. This is pretty much entirely in C. C is good, but takes too long to write.
Over the years, I've had a Palm Pro, then a Cassiopedia E10, then a Palm III. I happen to like Palm Pilots better because I can develope for them without paying up the wazoo.
But the MS Office interoperability with the CE devices is just awesome out of the box. The CE device RASs into your PC--it's not a sync kind of thing. So then you can drag and drop things back and forth onto it's "hard drive" kind of thing.
Thus in a business environment where the business has a lot of MS Office type products, the CE device is extremely useful and you get more bang for the buck than with the Palm Pilots.
This new CE version looks to make that even better.
Will it eclipse Palm Pilots? Probably not. Mostly because the two really have different customer bases. Palm Pilots for tinkerers and laymen. CE devices for business folk who already rely heavily upon MS product lines.
There's a lot of shareware and freeware out there--folks who make their money putting out a product and hoping people in good heart give money back.
I know this certainly won't hit the 20K mark, but go through everything you own/use and such and send $100.00 checks to everyone on the list. Or search through Freshmeat for a couple of days and see what projects you think are pretty interesting and freeware/shareware like. There's a whole group of people out there who try to make their living off of the stuff they're writing. I would think that $20,000 would go a long way for a whole slew of them.
Also, $100.00 is a small amount of money that you won't have to worry about the ramifications of taxes and silly stuff like that (i don't think--IANA[whoever is involved with that]). And it's a small enough amount that it won't overwhelm the person you're giving it to. Large amounts of money to small groups who aren't used to having money tends to create a beaurocratic backlash... May inadvertantly kill some projects or cause the members to be angry with eachother.
And if you don't spend it all in the first week, that's cool. Just keep up the practice and such. At a bare minimum, it's a good motive to keep looking at what's out there. Might find solutions to problems you never knew you had.
Judging by the latest trend in patenting everything under the sun, I think you can patent everything under the sun except for what someone else has already patented.
Personally, I think the patenters aren't really patenting things to safe-guard their ideas. I think it's a funky new type of DoS attack on the system that overlooks, approves, and files the patents. "... Dude--if we patent everything we can think of, that'll like... make it difficult for anyone else to patent anything and then we'll crash the patent system! Yeah!"
I'm not sure they care about the resources required. They have a lot of money that they throw at research and development. There are countless R&D projects you folks never hear about. A large portion of Microsoft's budget goes to these projects.
Researching the prospects of porting MSOffice to Linux is a likely scenario. Whether they ship it or not, only time will tell. Who knows what the marketplace will look like next year?
Slashdot Mirror
This is silly. First off, the Firestone thing caused DEATH. So if a software malfunction/bug caused DEATH because of the malfunction/bug, whoever wrote it should absolutely get sued for writing bad software. Just like malpractice suits. It's DEATH because of poor quality.
Off of that tangent, I think this is a great idea. Maybe software will come out slower because people are being more thorough. Maybe software will have a higher quality because people spend the time rather than rush it. Maybe it creates a whole new insurance industry for programmer's insurance.
Do you want missile guidance systems to have software bugs in them? Do you want your financial institution to "lose your accounts" because of bugs in the software? This is serious stuff folks. It's time to get serious about it.
I personally don't think it'll hurt the little guys at all unless they're creating bad software. In which case, maybe it should hurt them.
It matters because the people who make movies like LOTR go through a lot of hardships to get them made. So winning an award gives them a sense of fulfillment--like what they did is worth something to the world. It also helps them to get other movie ideas past the movie folks for potential making as well. So it's good to cheer for movies like this to win things that you think they should win.
I had a friend who used to threaten to use his overclocked CPU without the fan to boil his coffee in the morning.
I had another friend who bought a VAX at one of the MIT Flea Markets and used it as a coffee table.
I had a third friend what used to drop monitors from a second story window and record the sound of impact and use it in techno songs. When the monitor hits the ground it makes this funky metallic implosion sound.
Back when I was in college, our computer science lab had these DEC monitors that used to get super hot--hot enough to lightly toast Pop Tarts from the vending machine down the hall.
I'm sure there are other instances--but can't think of them off the top of my head. Most of these (except the monitor dropping one) involve the immense heat generated by some hardware and the rest involve the shape of the hardware. I'd be interested to see any alternate uses that don't involve heat/shape.
The guy who made var'aq is this guy I knew in college. He's a fascinating fellow--only he could create something like var'aq.
Anyhow, the interesting thing about var'aq is that because it runs on Perl, it's pretty ubiquitous meaning that if you really hate your job and feel the need for revenge, just go rewrite the production administration scripts in var'aq and then quit.
It started with the Infocom games. Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Then Civilization--I would come home and play that for hours on end. Then I discovered WarCraft II which was wonderful. Then Age of Empires. Then I discovered mudding. That was like 5 years ago. I've been mudding ever since.
Most of the games I became addicted to had a timeless quality to them but had different aspects I got addicted to.
In the case of Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, they were well thought out puzzle games.
In the case of WarCraft II and Age of Empires, it was the network play that was addicting--my roommates and I would play until the wee hours of the morning.
In the case of mudding--it's the immersive world. I know people there and I'm familiar with the places, and I can log in from wherever. I even got into writing my own mudclient and started a few mudserver projects. The problem domains involved in mudding and mud-building are just fascinating.
Well... That's all and good but in the OC/LA case, OC is a different world than LA is. I lived in Newport Beach for a year. We were an hour out of LA but used to go into LA for clubbing and such semi-regularly and it was a great time. Whenever I was asked where I lived, I always said Orange County. The people there feel very strongly about not being a suburb of LA--it's a serious cultural stigma.
Now I live in Waltham just outside of Boston. When I tell people where I live, I just say Boston. It's easier and there's no real stigma against it so people know what I'm talking about.
I know most of the records we're considering converting to CD can't be found on most of the peer networks I've been combing over the last year or so. I wouldn't be surprised if the guy asking the question has the same problem.
Some of the records never made it past vinyl format either. So it's not like we could pick up a CD copy at the store. I would assume this is one of the reasons that the songs aren't floating around the peer networks.
Serve alcohol--not so much to get people wasted, but to take the edge off.
Get one of the projectors from marketing, hook it up to a laptop with a serious 3d video card, and do the tunes with Winamp or some other player that has the ability for visual plug-ins like Geiss or something pretty that people can literally just stare at.
And get rid of the flourescent lights. Do some other lighting so people can see other people's faces, but aren't exposed to blaring light irritation.
Provide seating to. Most introverts I know are pretty non-excited about their bodies and feel awkward standing up which just causes them to be more shy than usual.
Don't run around telling people to have fun because it's a company party--that's just irritating.
Most languages that I program in either have an I10n or similar module or library that makes abstracting I10n issues out of your code and centralize them in a place allowing you to easily add new supported languages to your code base.
I never really thought about I10n until the last client I worked at where we had 8 different languages to cater to. Some of them could be done with the various iso-8859-x sets, but some of them required Unicode which caused real issues for us.
Now I think about I10n while doing the initial design rather than afterwards because it makes things a whole lot easier--even if you never really need it.
If you're doing any kind of Open Source project, I would seriously consider I10n issues at the beginning of the project since there are lots of people who speak lots of languages out there. It doesn't mean you have to do all the translations--just have to be able to support them. If it's important, you'll find volunteers to do translations for you. If not, you can always use babelfish or some other translator and attempt the translation yourself and someone will get irked enough to "fix" it for you.
The fact that it's really technical is exactly why you should get the magazine--it'll take longer to outgrow it. In the meantime, you'll be absorbing the technical stuff and at some point p between when you start reading LJ and when you're technically competent enough to skim it and understand what's going on, you'll be learning all kinds of exciting stuff accurately--which is why you wanted to look at magazines in the first place.
I've used blackbox as well for small linux boxes and it's got everything I look for in a window manager with the advantage of being very small.
I'm not sure I would use an old distribution though. If you ever want to upgrade things, it's a pain in the ass because you go through this massive dependency upgrade first. I have a RedHat 5.2 server still and as soon as I can, I'm going to install a new distribution version on it rather than upgrade all the pieces one at a time.
Instead of using an old distribution, I would suggest use a more recent distribution and uncheck all the boxes and install just the things you need. Maybe even use one of the tiny footprint distributions out there--there are a lot of them.
Definitely. What I would do is announce on all your development/announcement mailing lists that you are ending your reign as maintainer and happy to hand over the project to someone else. Also put a blurb about this on your project website right on the front page. Make sure all source code is available--toss in a README file with all your final thoughts and things you were thinking of doing and whatever else. Make sure you copyright all the code and place it under whatever license is important to you. This involves adding license text to the top of every file in the project as well as adding a LICENSE file with the download.
Then just move on with your life. If someone finds your project and has an itch they need to scratch, they'll contact you about taking over or whatever.
That's what happened with Lyntin--Lyn stopped development and a year later I discovered the project and we chatted and I took over and moved it to sourceforge and so on so forth.
On the flip side, you can always take a super passive role on your project. If it does everything you want it to do, then it's "done" and you can just hang out and deal with patches if people send them in.
I worked on a project with some 12 other developers and I think we all had our own different environments. Some were running Visual SlickEdit, some had Sun's Forte, some Kawa, and I (all by my little self) was running Cygwin, bash, make, ant, and vim (I'm not boasting or anything, just telling it like it was).
On the one hand, I had a lot more programming experience than those people so I could move around my environment faster than they could move in theirs. Including checking out files from Clear Case and running diffs and such. I would say that on average I could find a bug, diagnose the problem, and fix it in a quarter the time that it took most of my co-workers. I can move through a file in vim faster than they can with their GUI editors.
Given that, I would say that GUI tools help you start projects faster because they have templates and wizards and things that give you a decent skeleton. They also have better help systems--so you start typing in a Class name and it pops up a box with members and such.
CLIs are great for folks who know what they're doing because they're more easily customized and can be more efficient. But it does take time to script the infrasctructure.
To be honest, I'm not running any Linux workstations and collecting games that I'll probably never play doesn't sound too enticing. If they sold t-shirts and other gear (I realize that sounds a bit silly) I would definitely buy one of those. One more day I can go without doing laundry. :)
A few months ago, there was a Fox News report on Red Bull and alcohol. All day long they were hyping it up... "Tonight at 11... Red Bull and alcohol and how it's endangering your life!"
Because I occasionally drink Red Bull and vodka (which is trippy because you don't feel tired at all), I made sure to watch the segment which was well placed at the end of the 11 news hour. The startling discovery was that Red Bull and alcohol drunk in large quantities is not good for your heart.
Course, alcohol alone drunk in large quantities isn't good for your heart--so I chalk most of this up to needless sensationalistic journalism.
However, anything abused is almost certainly bad (if not fatal) to you.
I do a _lot_ of interviewing even though I'm a developer. I've gotten really good at qualifying applicants for development jobs on my team. One of the questions I ask to discern whether they're motivated or just looking for another job is by asking if they participate in or maintain any Open Source projects.
So you're asking about the next step--only interviewing Open Source folks.... I'm not so sure about that. I think it's better to find the best person you can whether they do Open Source or not. It just so happens that the folks I know that work on projects outside of work have better coding habits and style and methodologies than those that don't. Practice makes perfect.
/will
Python. One of the missions of Python is to become ubiquitous as the ultimate powerful learning language. They have documentation up the wazoo. And several books (Learning Python) that walk beginning programmers through some quick fundamental concepts.
Also, in the last few months, the headline articles on Slashdot have become more and more neophyte-related. Is this now News for Young Adults? What happened to News for Nerds--where we're assuming Nerds have already answered all these questions?
Do the people posting topics like this read Slashdot? If they did, they'd realize this is a topic that gets covered in almost every single language-war related article.
While I understand that I can tune Ask Slashdot articles out, I am somewhat saddened that this is no longer a place for Nerds, but rather for Nerd wannabes and political types and beginner developers and trollers.
I don't know if Slashdot folk have a mission statement revision, but "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." doesn't work anymore.
maybe they should turn the operation into a distributed system. Everyone could use their spare cpu cycles to do searches and turn their friends in!
some of those webmail things and mailman run as root.
course, the scripts i'm talking about allow people to run arbitrary commands with root privs from a text box on a form with no ssl and no login or nothing. lets me remotely administer things without getting all farked up with all that security stuff. *giggle*
offtopic? who marked the parent post of this post offtopic? are you confused?
Most of the CGI that I have done either revolves around string munging or database access. Some of it involves running as root (ick!). For this Perl rocks. Apache with mod_perl is very cool. Very little you can't do with that combination.
Some of the CGI that I have done is intensly complicated and involved a well thought out design and implementation. And it involved a bunch of people working on the same project--so it needed to be easy to read and object oriented. For this Python is really good.
Some of the CGI that I have done needed to run fast and I had canabalized it from other places. This is pretty much entirely in C. C is good, but takes too long to write.
Over the years, I've had a Palm Pro, then a Cassiopedia E10, then a Palm III. I happen to like Palm Pilots better because I can develope for them without paying up the wazoo.
But the MS Office interoperability with the CE devices is just awesome out of the box. The CE device RASs into your PC--it's not a sync kind of thing. So then you can drag and drop things back and forth onto it's "hard drive" kind of thing.
Thus in a business environment where the business has a lot of MS Office type products, the CE device is extremely useful and you get more bang for the buck than with the Palm Pilots.
This new CE version looks to make that even better.
Will it eclipse Palm Pilots? Probably not. Mostly because the two really have different customer bases. Palm Pilots for tinkerers and laymen. CE devices for business folk who already rely heavily upon MS product lines.
/will
There's a lot of shareware and freeware out there--folks who make their money putting out a product and hoping people in good heart give money back.
I know this certainly won't hit the 20K mark, but go through everything you own/use and such and send $100.00 checks to everyone on the list. Or search through Freshmeat for a couple of days and see what projects you think are pretty interesting and freeware/shareware like. There's a whole group of people out there who try to make their living off of the stuff they're writing. I would think that $20,000 would go a long way for a whole slew of them.
Also, $100.00 is a small amount of money that you won't have to worry about the ramifications of taxes and silly stuff like that (i don't think--IANA[whoever is involved with that]). And it's a small enough amount that it won't overwhelm the person you're giving it to. Large amounts of money to small groups who aren't used to having money tends to create a beaurocratic backlash... May inadvertantly kill some projects or cause the members to be angry with eachother.
And if you don't spend it all in the first week, that's cool. Just keep up the practice and such. At a bare minimum, it's a good motive to keep looking at what's out there. Might find solutions to problems you never knew you had.
/will
Judging by the latest trend in patenting everything under the sun, I think you can patent everything under the sun except for what someone else has already patented.
Personally, I think the patenters aren't really patenting things to safe-guard their ideas. I think it's a funky new type of DoS attack on the system that overlooks, approves, and files the patents. "... Dude--if we patent everything we can think of, that'll like... make it difficult for anyone else to patent anything and then we'll crash the patent system! Yeah!"
/will
I'm not sure they care about the resources required. They have a lot of money that they throw at research and development. There are countless R&D projects you folks never hear about. A large portion of Microsoft's budget goes to these projects.
Researching the prospects of porting MSOffice to Linux is a likely scenario. Whether they ship it or not, only time will tell. Who knows what the marketplace will look like next year?
/will