if they really do push for this we'll end up replacing the internet, just like every other technology that becomes dated because a bunch of idiots who don't understand it make it crap.
I notice this happens a lot, unnervingly frequently. Not just with technologies, but also with brands.
There's a local sandwich shop here that eventually got popular enough to be sold. The new owners must've known some MBAs, because portions shrunk, quality of ingredients declined, but service, speed and uniformity improved. It's now much more convenient (like 1500%, if you don't mind a semi-facetious hyperbolic estimate) to get the sandwiches, even if they're $1 more.
What they didn't grok was that the audience who kept this business going was very specific. It was composed of people who liked the sandwiches because they were high quality, at a decent price, and reasonably convenient. By raising the price and lowering quality, the shop squeezed out this audience, and transitioned to the same people buying other types of fast food. In doing so, they've lowered the quality of their brand as perceived by the general public, and set themselves on a course for being unexceptional and thus not particularly sought, where before they had a die-hard constituency.
The internet works because everyone forwards everyone else's packets, costs are low and regulation is low.
Please don't mess with that formula or you'll make the internet become a lot like the older forms of media it is replacing.
People seem to think that increased regulation is the solution. I'm not so sure. I think big companies tend to find ways to manipulate regulation more than small ones do.
Roll it back to 1993 and keep the open, free and wild west internet.
This is about governments and other public bodies trying to keep secrets from the people who elected them (or, in some cases, didn't elect them).
That sounds good on paper, but in reality, there will always need to be secrets. Running a spy agency is essential and needs to be secret. Development of new weapons programs need to be secret. There is a lot of data kept by governments which affects individual citizens, local areas or groups, and that, too, should be kept secret.
The "publicize it all and claim it's transparency" option is going to force governments to stop engaging in activities which are necessary for a modern state. The result will be that governments will farm those activities out to NGOs and mercenaries. Think about the consequences of that.
People take it to mean, "If there's any information out there that I want, I should be able to have it, regardless of the consequences."
That was never the case, historically. Information wanting to be free means that when market forces restrict our access to factual information, like how a PDP-11 allocates memory, that information should be liberated.
That has nothing to do with piracy, secrets, etc. which have secondary consequences.
Ask yourself: if someone got a copy of all of your secrets, including your financial records and (lack of) sexual partners, maybe some stuff you'd rather bury for a century or two, and published it, would you be OK with that?
At this point my setup depends heavily on virtualization.
I need to run the desktop software for which Windows is famous, and prefer the Windows "everything has a device driver" model to fiddling with configuration files.
But when it comes to getting stuff done, it's time to drop into the virtual machine where everything is configured as I'm used to, and I have all the tools built-in that I need to get the job done.
Microsoft could perhaps sway me by making SSH, an advanced command parser, etc. available for Windows, but for now I just delegate that to Linux, although "technically" my home OS is Windows.
Did you hear that, Redmond? * shakes floppy at empty sky *
Violent extremism, as a phenomenon, requires a sea in which to swim.
What we have here is a classic confusion.
All A produce B does not mean that all B indicate A.
B is violent extremism. It arises, but not in every instance does it have a legitimate complaint.
You are claiming:
It's addressing real problems that already need to be addressed.
This validates all extremism (B) by claiming that it must have had a valid complaint (A).
My point is that every valid complaint can produce a better way of handling the situation than extremism, and this acts to filter out the people who have legitimate complaints from those who are most likely to be deranged and violent. Further, we don't want to give extremism legitimacy by listening to its complaints.
What violent extremist movement exists today that does not have a public, democratic, social, economic or otherwise legitimate way of addressing its concerns?
I ask you to answer that regardless of whether you, I or others consider the movement itself and its desired results to be legitimate. For example, for purposes of this discussion, al-Qaeda and neo-Nazis are movements who are seeking a legitimate way of expressing their concerns.
I would rather eliminate the hydra than fight it as it spawns new heads.
The point is that extremism is not a necessary consequence of their complaint. There are other ways.
I would rather encourage good behavior than give credence to bad behavior, because by acknowledging legitimacy to bad behavior, you encourage more of it.
I have noticed that many of them are extremely arrogant...I have noticed similar personality characteristics on Slashdot. Where does this nerd arrogance come from?
In literature, this type of arrogance is attributed to bureaucrats and technicians.
The reason is that they are masters of the machine, whether a political/paperwork machine or the literal machine.
This gives a lot of power to someone, but it's all negative power. They have the power to say no, or to wreck things, but don't yet (or perhaps never will) have the power to create.
I think you will find that, on Slashdot and in the world, those who have actual power (more than negation) tend to be confident, proud and perhaps "arrogant," but not in the way a lot of internet users are.
The people who are most arrogant in the way you describe are the frustrated ones who have a lack of options, and to compensate, create an inflated sense of self-importance which they refresh by imposing their will on others.
It's no different than any other kind of power abuse. Some fields (law enforcement, computing, bureaucracy) tend to attract more of these people than other fields do.
If there are alternatives to extremism, and others have taken those, nothing is forcing or encouraging anyone to become an extremist. They chose that path in preference to other options for dissent or political activism.
Those labels change from family to family and even person to person depending on their personal beliefs, their church, sect and priest/pastor/rabbi
Since you're not a fundamentalist, you agree that compatibility between beliefs is a matter of degree. However, that also means it reflects agreement on a general principle. Thus, it depends on what's in dispute to determine who's going to cluster with whom. For example, if it's materialists versus supernaturalists, almost all religions will be on the supernaturalist side. But if we're talking about more precise measurements, they may represent opposition to each other.
religion as one of the most arbitrary labels by which people divide themselves when involved in conflict
He's got it backward here -- it's one of the least arbitrary labels, since it reveals what underlying philosophy and values we stand for. It's similar to wars breaking out between existentialists and determinists, but we've found more interesting ways to encapsulate those philosophies in mythological symbolism.
Determine the conditions that inspire people to become—or, more importantly, support—violent extremists who threaten us and our values, and mitigate or eliminate those conditions.
You're missing some vital data.
1. Not everyone becomes an extremist, because there are other ways of expressing discontent or changing policy. 2. You assume they have no choice in the matter, and that our acts manipulate them directly.
This seems to be the type of permissiveness that rewards bad behavior and ignores good. If you're worried about bad things happening in politics, find the people who are doing good and get them into power.
By encouraging us to see the choice to become an extremist as normal, you are encouraging the devolution of politics into more conflict and terrorism.
Companies like Google and Facebook "pay you" for your personal information by giving you free service.
They're paying (with their free service) through the sale of ads. Ad sales do not require personal information. Think of a newspaper ad, or TV commercial. While those are targeted, based on what section of the newspaper (sports costs more than politics) or type of program they're featured in, they are also anonymous.
Regarding drone strikes on terrorists, we need to know what our other options are:
1. Let the terrorists live. 2. Send in a SEAL team to kidnap them. 3. Assassinate them by some other means.
Would these create more civilian deaths?
Is it worth taking civilian deaths on our side, through terrorism, to avoid civilians deaths on the other side?
Despite all the pretense of morality, voters are going to side with sending screaming death down upon these people if there's a chance that some of our people are going to get killed.
If a company wants your real information, they should pay you for it.
You are being exposed to greater risk for each copy of your information that is out there. Not only of identity theft and other scams, but of being targeted by more advertising that can waste your time. Spam is out; the new spam is like those ads on Facebook for products tangentially relevant to your life, but usually irrelevant.
Even more dangerous is that people are able to correlate information from different sources and form a good profile of how you live, work and shop. Spokeo.com is a prime example of this.
If I could do it again, I'd use fake information from day one. In the information age, it's better to be invisible than a known quantity.
The modern data center is a vestige of the time when computing power was expensive.
Now, computing power is cheap and storage is cheap. The question is scaling. I think we tend to discount the role that physical hardware plays in this process when we talk about "the Cloud."
Back in the late 1990s, people were predicting that the future data center would look like something out of Star Trek: many small "cells" which stored data or executed processing tasks, linked together by a neural net-like mesh that adaptively responded to traffic.
I think of that vision any time I wander into a data center, which now looks to me like the rows of industrial machines from the 1890s. Big steaming servers, pumping out tons of heat in a roar of fans. It seems so crude and ineffective.
Perhaps in another decade we'll look back on this dinosaur iron and say things like, "LOL, the unsubtle computing of the 10s, what a ball and chain that must have been! I hear you could take most of them down with coordinated SYN attacks!"
Over time, this principle has been reinforced: the more land a government oversees, and the more remote it is from a local area, the more likely it is to misunderstand the specific needs of that locality.
It's bad enough that the federal government makes laws that might work on the coasts but ignore the needs of people in the flyover states, but trust the UN to treat Texas like New York or Brussels and thus completely miss the point.
I'm not calling for Texas Secession yet, but it's tempting some days... and not just for Texas. Washington and New York are too far from most places to understand local needs.
Capitalism works great for non-critical, non-infrastructure goods and services... but when it gets its hands on something everybody needs, it's gonna take you to the cleaners.
While I'd love to blame an economic system for this, I feel the truth is more mundane: consumers are oblivious to what they are purchasing and are content to pay high prices for bad service.
Imagine if even 25% of the new phone buyers took a look at these plans and said, "Wow, that's a terrible option. I'm going to roll back to my old Nokia flip-phone and wait for industry to get its act together."
Yeah, well... they don't do that. They keep buying overpriced cable, ridiculous cell phone plans, Nickelback, lies by politicians, McRibs, etc.
The problem is that the consumers will deny themselves nothing, and if it's a bad deal, they just pass the buck along to someone else.
After that anti-trust investigation and suit in the 1990s, Microsoft has been waiting for other companies to take innovative steps so that it can adopt them later. The Apple "app store" was a boon to Microsoft, as they couldn't have done it on their own without ending up back in court.
What's come of this is an intelligent strategy. They are essentially reviving an older strategy for making a standardized interface, which will allow developers and users more ability to mix-and-match interface components.
It's also intelligent to sneak away from the venerable win32 and make a gift to developers, which is one platform for mobile, desktop and any other form of computing (knowing Gates: smart house and smart agents) that will arise.
While I have my doubts about the Fisher-Price interface as well, I also felt this way about the "new" desktop in Windows XP. It'll be great to see Microsoft restoring some competition to the world of computing with this new strategy.
Many good points, but these two hit me as particularly relevant:
Over the years a number of the issues I have submitted, mostly user experience related, are treated as enhancements, even if they are pretty important.
Steve Jobs left us a hell of a legacy, even for Apple haters. His legacy is the idea that the complete experience is the measure of a product. That includes everything from ordering it, to unboxing, to whether it "just works" when it starts up, to customer service and its ability to stand up to daily real-world use.
I don't think this is necessarily in opposition to what we conventionally think of as good engineering, which is making the back-end of the product work efficiently and elegantly. In fact, I think these two are different facets of the same goal, but are often seen by developers as oppositional.
The real problem seems to be a lack of interest or role in the open source project development for a person or team that steers development to real business world issues and pounds on all aspects of user experience including UI, functionality, expectations, interoperability, etc. to ensure that something of high quality will be the answer.
Great summary. And yet, "real business world issues" and "all aspects of user experience including UI, functionality, expectations, interoperability, etc." are how users pick software. They want it to Just Work. When FOSS accommodates that, it succeeds. Same as for commercial software.
I remember in the early 1980s how some of the early software firms lost users. They were accustomed to getting calls from harried secretaries and businesspeople who were hopelessly ignorant of basic computing principles. They didn't like taking these calls, and so they started to retaliate by telling users to RTFM.
The problem was that then, "RTFM n00b!" (or "m0e") became the default response to all user questions or complaints. As a result, people switched to software companies with professional documentation and/or gentler tech support lines. The same thing is true for FOSS: if MSFT (or APPL) seems to care about the user more, people will pay for that.
The reason why is "LibreOffice will wreck this layout" and "which means I would not be able to share the document with other people", and also "And even simple things like bulleted or numbered outlines get screwed up and wrongly numbered when sending from LO to MSO"!! How utterly braindead. And wasn't there a thing where "passwords are not secure so we won't implement them"? Anyway you just have to have MS Office if you want to do work in the real world, unless you can live in a perfect LibreOffice Oasis and only send PDF, etc to the rest of the world.
To a businessperson, this can mean hours of time wasted with OO/LO when MSO is only a few hundred dollars.
This is a problem in that it teaches people a simple lesson: FOSS is bullshit.
Naturally, I don't agree with that, as a longtime shareware/FOSS user; I want people to see the good examples of FOSS, not the incomplete ones.
For this reason, I give my professional opinion here: OO/LO is not ready to replace MSO, much less the professional packages.
We discredit all of FOSS when our solution to non-working FOSS products is zealotry. Zealotry is what happens when people point out flaws in FOSS, and instead of deciding to look into it, the FOSS community spends its time fighting back, and calling them idiots and trolls. That's a hateful and self-destructive attitude.
The correct response is to value community feedback, and improve the product, not pound on the walls and scream and claim it's perfectly viable. Until that happens, it's stupid and brain-dead to blame the users for not flocking to the defective product.
So you're saying that you don't volunteer your time to someone's project.
No, absolutely not. But in this case, I'm full up with projects and so this should be pay-to-play. As you can see, I give a lot of my time to free projects.
You don't care about them and have no interest in seeing them succeed.
Not really. But having an audience that can't tell "doesn't work" from "works" means I wouldn't waste my time on that particular product.
Further, my belief is that having more different types of word processors is more important than cloning MS Office.
Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken.
That's a great idea! Let's think it through, however. I don't own the data; that belongs to the client. Thus, I have to be somewhat vague. Further, I'm available for consulting at my usual rate -- my contact should be on my user page. I give very specific reports (not written in OO, LibreOffice or Word) to clients.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice this happens a lot, unnervingly frequently. Not just with technologies, but also with brands.
There's a local sandwich shop here that eventually got popular enough to be sold. The new owners must've known some MBAs, because portions shrunk, quality of ingredients declined, but service, speed and uniformity improved. It's now much more convenient (like 1500%, if you don't mind a semi-facetious hyperbolic estimate) to get the sandwiches, even if they're $1 more.
What they didn't grok was that the audience who kept this business going was very specific. It was composed of people who liked the sandwiches because they were high quality, at a decent price, and reasonably convenient. By raising the price and lowering quality, the shop squeezed out this audience, and transitioned to the same people buying other types of fast food. In doing so, they've lowered the quality of their brand as perceived by the general public, and set themselves on a course for being unexceptional and thus not particularly sought, where before they had a die-hard constituency.
This seems to happen a lot. Why, I wonder.
The internet works because everyone forwards everyone else's packets, costs are low and regulation is low.
Please don't mess with that formula or you'll make the internet become a lot like the older forms of media it is replacing.
People seem to think that increased regulation is the solution. I'm not so sure. I think big companies tend to find ways to manipulate regulation more than small ones do.
Roll it back to 1993 and keep the open, free and wild west internet.
That sounds good on paper, but in reality, there will always need to be secrets. Running a spy agency is essential and needs to be secret. Development of new weapons programs need to be secret. There is a lot of data kept by governments which affects individual citizens, local areas or groups, and that, too, should be kept secret.
The "publicize it all and claim it's transparency" option is going to force governments to stop engaging in activities which are necessary for a modern state. The result will be that governments will farm those activities out to NGOs and mercenaries. Think about the consequences of that.
I think this phrase is vastly misunderstood.
People take it to mean, "If there's any information out there that I want, I should be able to have it, regardless of the consequences."
That was never the case, historically. Information wanting to be free means that when market forces restrict our access to factual information, like how a PDP-11 allocates memory, that information should be liberated.
That has nothing to do with piracy, secrets, etc. which have secondary consequences.
Ask yourself: if someone got a copy of all of your secrets, including your financial records and (lack of) sexual partners, maybe some stuff you'd rather bury for a century or two, and published it, would you be OK with that?
...for running Linux in a virtual machine.
At this point my setup depends heavily on virtualization.
I need to run the desktop software for which Windows is famous, and prefer the Windows "everything has a device driver" model to fiddling with configuration files.
But when it comes to getting stuff done, it's time to drop into the virtual machine where everything is configured as I'm used to, and I have all the tools built-in that I need to get the job done.
Microsoft could perhaps sway me by making SSH, an advanced command parser, etc. available for Windows, but for now I just delegate that to Linux, although "technically" my home OS is Windows.
Did you hear that, Redmond? * shakes floppy at empty sky *
What we have here is a classic confusion.
All A produce B does not mean that all B indicate A.
B is violent extremism. It arises, but not in every instance does it have a legitimate complaint.
You are claiming:
This validates all extremism (B) by claiming that it must have had a valid complaint (A).
My point is that every valid complaint can produce a better way of handling the situation than extremism, and this acts to filter out the people who have legitimate complaints from those who are most likely to be deranged and violent. Further, we don't want to give extremism legitimacy by listening to its complaints.
What violent extremist movement exists today that does not have a public, democratic, social, economic or otherwise legitimate way of addressing its concerns?
I ask you to answer that regardless of whether you, I or others consider the movement itself and its desired results to be legitimate. For example, for purposes of this discussion, al-Qaeda and neo-Nazis are movements who are seeking a legitimate way of expressing their concerns.
The point is that extremism is not a necessary consequence of their complaint. There are other ways.
I would rather encourage good behavior than give credence to bad behavior, because by acknowledging legitimacy to bad behavior, you encourage more of it.
In literature, this type of arrogance is attributed to bureaucrats and technicians.
The reason is that they are masters of the machine, whether a political/paperwork machine or the literal machine.
This gives a lot of power to someone, but it's all negative power. They have the power to say no, or to wreck things, but don't yet (or perhaps never will) have the power to create.
I think you will find that, on Slashdot and in the world, those who have actual power (more than negation) tend to be confident, proud and perhaps "arrogant," but not in the way a lot of internet users are.
The people who are most arrogant in the way you describe are the frustrated ones who have a lack of options, and to compensate, create an inflated sense of self-importance which they refresh by imposing their will on others.
It's no different than any other kind of power abuse. Some fields (law enforcement, computing, bureaucracy) tend to attract more of these people than other fields do.
If there are alternatives to extremism, and others have taken those, nothing is forcing or encouraging anyone to become an extremist. They chose that path in preference to other options for dissent or political activism.
Good question. The answer is both yes and no.
Was Hitler a Christian? on The Straight Dope
Since you're not a fundamentalist, you agree that compatibility between beliefs is a matter of degree. However, that also means it reflects agreement on a general principle. Thus, it depends on what's in dispute to determine who's going to cluster with whom. For example, if it's materialists versus supernaturalists, almost all religions will be on the supernaturalist side. But if we're talking about more precise measurements, they may represent opposition to each other.
He's got it backward here -- it's one of the least arbitrary labels, since it reveals what underlying philosophy and values we stand for. It's similar to wars breaking out between existentialists and determinists, but we've found more interesting ways to encapsulate those philosophies in mythological symbolism.
You're missing some vital data.
1. Not everyone becomes an extremist, because there are other ways of expressing discontent or changing policy.
2. You assume they have no choice in the matter, and that our acts manipulate them directly.
This seems to be the type of permissiveness that rewards bad behavior and ignores good. If you're worried about bad things happening in politics, find the people who are doing good and get them into power.
By encouraging us to see the choice to become an extremist as normal, you are encouraging the devolution of politics into more conflict and terrorism.
They're paying (with their free service) through the sale of ads. Ad sales do not require personal information. Think of a newspaper ad, or TV commercial. While those are targeted, based on what section of the newspaper (sports costs more than politics) or type of program they're featured in, they are also anonymous.
Regarding drone strikes on terrorists, we need to know what our other options are:
1. Let the terrorists live.
2. Send in a SEAL team to kidnap them.
3. Assassinate them by some other means.
Would these create more civilian deaths?
Is it worth taking civilian deaths on our side, through terrorism, to avoid civilians deaths on the other side?
Despite all the pretense of morality, voters are going to side with sending screaming death down upon these people if there's a chance that some of our people are going to get killed.
If a company wants your real information, they should pay you for it.
You are being exposed to greater risk for each copy of your information that is out there. Not only of identity theft and other scams, but of being targeted by more advertising that can waste your time. Spam is out; the new spam is like those ads on Facebook for products tangentially relevant to your life, but usually irrelevant.
Even more dangerous is that people are able to correlate information from different sources and form a good profile of how you live, work and shop. Spokeo.com is a prime example of this.
If I could do it again, I'd use fake information from day one. In the information age, it's better to be invisible than a known quantity.
The modern data center is a vestige of the time when computing power was expensive.
Now, computing power is cheap and storage is cheap. The question is scaling. I think we tend to discount the role that physical hardware plays in this process when we talk about "the Cloud."
Back in the late 1990s, people were predicting that the future data center would look like something out of Star Trek: many small "cells" which stored data or executed processing tasks, linked together by a neural net-like mesh that adaptively responded to traffic.
I think of that vision any time I wander into a data center, which now looks to me like the rows of industrial machines from the 1890s. Big steaming servers, pumping out tons of heat in a roar of fans. It seems so crude and ineffective.
Perhaps in another decade we'll look back on this dinosaur iron and say things like, "LOL, the unsubtle computing of the 10s, what a ball and chain that must have been! I hear you could take most of them down with coordinated SYN attacks!"
Over time, this principle has been reinforced: the more land a government oversees, and the more remote it is from a local area, the more likely it is to misunderstand the specific needs of that locality.
It's bad enough that the federal government makes laws that might work on the coasts but ignore the needs of people in the flyover states, but trust the UN to treat Texas like New York or Brussels and thus completely miss the point.
I'm not calling for Texas Secession yet, but it's tempting some days... and not just for Texas. Washington and New York are too far from most places to understand local needs.
Whenever you hear the new Microsoft Surface mentioned, say, "Oh, is that the one that's Linux-based?"
It's a better Google bomb than the Justin Bieberwoman thing.
While I'd love to blame an economic system for this, I feel the truth is more mundane: consumers are oblivious to what they are purchasing and are content to pay high prices for bad service.
Imagine if even 25% of the new phone buyers took a look at these plans and said, "Wow, that's a terrible option. I'm going to roll back to my old Nokia flip-phone and wait for industry to get its act together."
Yeah, well... they don't do that. They keep buying overpriced cable, ridiculous cell phone plans, Nickelback, lies by politicians, McRibs, etc.
The problem is that the consumers will deny themselves nothing, and if it's a bad deal, they just pass the buck along to someone else.
After that anti-trust investigation and suit in the 1990s, Microsoft has been waiting for other companies to take innovative steps so that it can adopt them later. The Apple "app store" was a boon to Microsoft, as they couldn't have done it on their own without ending up back in court.
What's come of this is an intelligent strategy. They are essentially reviving an older strategy for making a standardized interface, which will allow developers and users more ability to mix-and-match interface components.
It's also intelligent to sneak away from the venerable win32 and make a gift to developers, which is one platform for mobile, desktop and any other form of computing (knowing Gates: smart house and smart agents) that will arise.
While I have my doubts about the Fisher-Price interface as well, I also felt this way about the "new" desktop in Windows XP. It'll be great to see Microsoft restoring some competition to the world of computing with this new strategy.
Many good points, but these two hit me as particularly relevant:
Steve Jobs left us a hell of a legacy, even for Apple haters. His legacy is the idea that the complete experience is the measure of a product. That includes everything from ordering it, to unboxing, to whether it "just works" when it starts up, to customer service and its ability to stand up to daily real-world use.
I don't think this is necessarily in opposition to what we conventionally think of as good engineering, which is making the back-end of the product work efficiently and elegantly. In fact, I think these two are different facets of the same goal, but are often seen by developers as oppositional.
Great summary. And yet, "real business world issues" and "all aspects of user experience including UI, functionality, expectations, interoperability, etc." are how users pick software. They want it to Just Work. When FOSS accommodates that, it succeeds. Same as for commercial software.
I remember in the early 1980s how some of the early software firms lost users. They were accustomed to getting calls from harried secretaries and businesspeople who were hopelessly ignorant of basic computing principles. They didn't like taking these calls, and so they started to retaliate by telling users to RTFM.
The problem was that then, "RTFM n00b!" (or "m0e") became the default response to all user questions or complaints. As a result, people switched to software companies with professional documentation and/or gentler tech support lines. The same thing is true for FOSS: if MSFT (or APPL) seems to care about the user more, people will pay for that.
You make a really good point:
To a businessperson, this can mean hours of time wasted with OO/LO when MSO is only a few hundred dollars.
This is a problem in that it teaches people a simple lesson: FOSS is bullshit.
Naturally, I don't agree with that, as a longtime shareware/FOSS user; I want people to see the good examples of FOSS, not the incomplete ones.
For this reason, I give my professional opinion here: OO/LO is not ready to replace MSO, much less the professional packages.
We discredit all of FOSS when our solution to non-working FOSS products is zealotry. Zealotry is what happens when people point out flaws in FOSS, and instead of deciding to look into it, the FOSS community spends its time fighting back, and calling them idiots and trolls. That's a hateful and self-destructive attitude.
The correct response is to value community feedback, and improve the product, not pound on the walls and scream and claim it's perfectly viable. Until that happens, it's stupid and brain-dead to blame the users for not flocking to the defective product.
No, absolutely not. But in this case, I'm full up with projects and so this should be pay-to-play. As you can see, I give a lot of my time to free projects.
Not really. But having an audience that can't tell "doesn't work" from "works" means I wouldn't waste my time on that particular product.
Further, my belief is that having more different types of word processors is more important than cloning MS Office.
That's a great idea! Let's think it through, however. I don't own the data; that belongs to the client. Thus, I have to be somewhat vague. Further, I'm available for consulting at my usual rate -- my contact should be on my user page. I give very specific reports (not written in OO, LibreOffice or Word) to clients.