Although I have not looked at O'Reilly books from this perspective, I can imagine a "how to" book for Linux which your grandmother could use. I can imagine a support service which could help her find drivers (e.g. send a driver as an email attachment or mail a CD) if she has trouble with new hardware. Why should this be so hard? She could learn to type "emerge sync", "emerge -u world", etc. I believe someone will make money from support for "grandmas" and this support will be cheaper for grandmas than the sum of the MS tax + the anti-virus tax + the cost of recovering from spyware/virus/worm/etc.
Houses are built in unsuitable places (e.g. in Florida). Nature points out this error using hurricanes. In many cases, the people who lost everything were living in places which were known to be unsafe and yet they built/bought/rebuilt homes there. In light of this, I find this comment of yours difficult to support.
Feeding and clothing millions of displaced families who may have lost everything they own is a little different than funding public schools.
The kids in Florida whose families lost their homes are not responsible for living in an unsuitable location.
The kids anywhere in the U.S. whose families live in (educationally) poor school districts are not responsible for living in an unsuitable location.
In each case, however, their parents are responsible.
How do you justify supporting families in one situation but not another?
I am really impressed with the knowledge which/. moderators bring to the table. The parent of this post corresponds to the opinion of the majority of mathematicians, which is that Mandelbrot has done some good work but is a self-promoter, does not always acknowledge the work of others and probably is not considered a Math Legend by most mathematician.
I am a peon with a Ph.D. in math who has been doing research for less than 30 years; I have only one paper which received a
Featured Review and I consider myself to be a fairly ordinary person with three kids.
Slashdot moderators know much more than do I about contributions to geometric measure theory, Hausdorff measures, self-similar sets, fractals, etc. and I accept that my previous post was flamebait since I am ignorant.
However, lots of other people deserve credit for their work on fractals. I will just mention two,
John Hutchinson and
Michael Barnsley.
I just met John when I visited ANU recently; I believe I also saw Michael.
I do not think they invented fractals or claim to be the smartest people in the world but they did some interesting work.
Since our slashdot moderators are so smart, they can even tell you about this research.
(Just in case they are too busy,
here are some recent papers.)
Considering Sun's opinion of FOSS (... What is Sun's opinion of open source? It is not 100% support of FOSS; maybe 30% support??...), I have trouble trusting anything related to Sun. What patents do they hold? When will they spring something on "us"?
I would just as soon see Sun die. (If I could trade DEC for Sun, I would do so in a nanosecond. I don't know how far out of date is Alpha development, but with Intel, etc. hitting the wall w.r.t. single cores, I wonder if smart, rather than just fast and dumb (e.g. P4), CPU design would still be better.) HP is probably on a five year death march; they will missuse their DEC assets, milk COMPAQ over the short run, follow their great LEADER's instructions and die in front of all of us.
I just checked
here and found that my salary would be equivalent to $167,364 in San Jose, CA. I would need to double my salary to live in San Jose as I live now.
The twin cities probably distort the overall picture for the state. You'd probably see the same for Missouri and Kansas if you removed Kansas City and St. Louis from consideration.
I would generally agree with you. Each of these states has a
top 50 city,
Minneapolis, Minnesota and Wichita, Kansas.
The two largest privately held companies in the U.S. are located in MN
(Cargill) and KS (Koch) with revenues of $48B and $40B respectively.
However,...
The twin cities probably distort the overall picture
Hormel has its headquarters and R&D in
Austin, Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic is headquartered in
Rochester, Minnesota, Cargill started in Austin, Minnesota and is headquartered in
Minnesota, etc.
Of course, Minnesota has large companies in the twin cities (e.g.
3M is headquartered in
St. Paul, Minnesota.)
see the same for... Kansas if you removed Kansas City
The largest city in Kansas is
Wichita
(not Kansas City). The
aircraft industry in Wichita (e.g. Boeing, Raytheon (Beech),
Cessna & Learjet) is a big employer in Wichita and Koch is
headquartered there.
My guess is that the rural areas in MN and KS are seeing a population decline;
I am too lazy to actually check. Other than "spillover" from large urban areas (e.g. Las Vegas), I suspect rural areas are losing population all over the U.S.; does anyone know if this is true in upstate NY?
When a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Indiana came back here, the first thing she did was force me to take her out to eat because she hadn't been able to find Thai food for six months.
Is Bloomington that bad?
You cannot get real Thai food in the U.S. like that in Thailand; however, around here there are several good Thai restaurants.
Local Population Mix: White: 75%; Black: 11.5%; American Indian and Alaska Native: 1%; Asian: 4%; Other race: 5%; Two or more races: 3%; Hispanic/Latino: 9.5%.
Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and even
French, German, Lebanese restaurants are available here, even though I do not live in the urban paradise which is San Jose. (Does Milpitas have its
city hall in a shopping mall? It did when I was last there but I guess the elected officials decided it was too hard to park far away and walk to the office.) It is not necessary to live in CA (or even on a coast) to
enjoy different cultures. Your comment: There are certainly immigrant communities elsewhere in the US, but only on the coasts, and pretty much only in the major urban areas on the coasts, do you find such a varied mix of people from all over the place, all getting along just fine most of the time.
sounds like a California comment; I say this as a person who lived in California for the first 21 years of his life (and returns fairly often).
I realize how
provincial ("Limited in perspective; narrow and self-centered.")
are (many of) the people in my birth state. (I was at LAX a week ago and the "natives" from LA were very funny.)
I have students and colleagues from all over the world. I suspect that I have been to more foreign countries than have you, even though I do not live in San Jose (motto: world's greatest parking lot after Mesa, AZ.).
Why only consider small (100,000 - 200,000) sized cities in rural states?
Here are profiles of the fifty largest
cities,
which vary in size from 350,000 to 8,000,000. I was going to attempt to pick out the cities which might be considered to be inexpensive and located in rural states; I realized that this was very subjective and just provide the complete list:
Albuquerque, N.M., Atlanta, Ga.,
Austin, Tex.,
Baltimore, Md.,
Boston, Mass.,
Charlotte, N.C.,
Chicago, Ill.,
Cleveland, Ohio,
Colorado Springs, Colo.,
Columbus, Ohio,
Dallas, Tex.,
Denver, Colo.,
Detroit, Mich.,
El Paso, Tex.,
Fort Worth, Tex.,
Fresno, Calif.,
Honolulu, Hawaii,
Houston, Tex.,
Indianapolis, Ind.,
Jacksonville, Fla.,
Kansas City, Mo.,
Las Vegas, Nev.,
Long Beach, Calif.,
Los Angeles, Calif.,
Memphis, Tenn.,
Mesa, Ariz.,
Miami, Fla.,
Milwaukee, Wis.,
Minneapolis, Minn.,
Nashville-Davidson, Tenn.,
New Orleans, La.,
New York, N.Y.,
Oakland, Calif.,
Oklahoma City, Okla.,
Omaha, Neb.,
Philadelphia, Pa.,
Phoenix, Ariz.,
Portland, Ore.,
Sacramento, Calif.,
St. Louis, Mo.,
San Antonio, Tex.,
San Diego, Calif.,
San Francisco, Calif.,
San Jose, Calif.,
Seattle, Wash.,
Tucson, Ariz.,
Tulsa, Okla.,
Virginia Beach, Va.,
Washington, DC, and
Wichita, Kans. .
For many of these cities, housing prices are reduced because rural land is available nearby and more housing can easily be added. (Try that in Seattle.)
All (almost all?) of these cities have a national or international airport nearby. These advantages means workers can live well on lower salaries and companies can conduct business conveniently and inexpensively.
"Here's the top 20 from the latest US census.
3. Colorado - 35.7%
9. Minnesota - 30.5%
13. Kansas - 29.1%
17. Illinois - 27.3%
18. Nebraska - 27.1%"
I have included all of the states which might claim to be part of the "midwest" and fail to see either Iowa or North Dakota. Of farming states which might be like Iowa or ND, Minnesota, Kansas and Nebraska (although this may not correctly characterize MN or KS, which have large industrial sectors) do make the list while Iowa and ND fail to do so. Why?
U. Iowa and Iowa State U. are good universities; Iowa also has some good private universities. I am surprised to find that Iowa is not in the top 20.
lifestyle items (cars, DVDs, even most food products) cost about the same all over the country
Local and state sales taxes vary and are often higher in more urban states. For this reason (plus vehicle regestration, auto insurance, etc.), cars may not cost about the same all over the country.
I have found food costs to vary widely (within the US and in foreign countries). Food in Germany is very reasonable (wrt cost).
Food costs in CA are fairly high compared with those in the middle of the country (i.e. the red states - I hate the fact that the state in which I live is a red state; I thought we got rid of those commies a long time age).
Mandelbrot is not as smart as he claims to be. As I recall, fractal compression was developed by mathematicians at ANU (Canberra). Mandelbrot made some contributions but so did other people. It is unfortunate but, as with all disciplines, there are "mathematicians" who have huge egos and little regard for the contributions of others (and "no", I have never done any research on fractals and am not one of the people whose contribution is usually ignored by Mandelbrot - I have no personal ax to grind).
This isn't MS being hypocrites, it is an employee breaking company policy and bringing in outside sofware.
How do you know this? Posters have mentioned other examples of MS products with this kind of problem. Do you work at MS and have knowledge of this specific instance?
Granted some of these jobs are not in what I consider desirable locations (like Minnesota, Maine, Kansas or Miami), but others may love these locations.
My guess is that housing and food are much cheaper in Minnesota and Kansas while Miami might be more expensive. I have no idea of how expensive Maine might be. Anyway, a lower salary in the midwest will go a longer way than a "high" salary in CA. For example, I would guess that an apartment in Palo Alto goes for at least $2000 per month; I have not lived in the Bay Area for some time. The same apartment in a midwestern city might be only $600 or $700.
(Someone who knows might correct my figures.)
Anyway, did you mention these states (+ Miami) at random or are these places with jobs? What types of jobs? (What about Idaho? Can we blame Canada?)
I just got back from Canberra last Saturday. The prices (for food and normal items) were very high, sometimes four times as high as in the US. Some things were reasonable and I was told that lamb was very inexpensive. Of course, gas (petrol) was about twice as high as in the US. Overall, Australia seems expensive.
Can you imagine Thai food with no (hot) spices? Vietnamese food was really mild. The same was true of Indian (Inda) and other food from Asian countries. It was a joke. I am told Sydney is better. Who knows?
If you are single and your employer pays for your health insurance (as do most universities), health care in the US is not too bad. If I did not have kids, I might pay $40 per month for my share of the health insurance; the kids jack this up to $450 per month for health insurance. If I were in (most of) the EU, I would save a lot of money (which I might be spending on taxes).
I was never sick while visiting the EU (UK, Germany, Italy, France) but dentists in Germany (for a friend) are very cheap compared to the US. (You can easily get a quick appointment with a dentist in Germany and a filling might cost 20 Euros.)
Taxes are generally lower in the US. Services (e.g. health care) are better (w.r.t. price) in the UK. I do not think I have been to Berkshire, where is it? (Near London?) Seattle can be rather expensive; do you have a place yet?
No one knows who anyone else is on slashdot (at least in theory) and therefore all information (e.g. salary) posted here is anonymous. I believe that if I ask someone about salary, I should be prepared to give the same information. (So ask if you care; don't if you do not).
I do not consider the $60K figure to be very important. There are probably programmers who make $200,000 and others who make $10,000 (e.g. low level programmers in game design). Comparing any salary to the average over the entire "industry" is fairly silly. If you can live on your salary and live in a different country, more power to you.
"there's not much." Unfortunately, the best
university in Australia is there. A friend (& coauthor) is driving from Melbourne to meet me in Canberra and she might be willing to take me around to see some of the sights. She would be my ride to Wollongong if I go there; I plan to meet an old "friend" (i.e. correspondent) I have never met but he may want to get out of Wollongong for a few days. I may end up in Canberra for all three weeks.
If I sneak down (up ?) to Sydney, would this be worthwhile? (E.G. Can one get opera tickets? Reasonable price?)
How do the financial aspects compare?
UK salary? (In USD?)
US salary?
City in UK? (e.g. Edinburgh is cheaper than London)
City in US? (OK, which Starbucks Cafe in Seattle?)
I suspect that $60K is not a good salary in Seattle. Am I in error?
"official Microsoft virus and worm family"
Where can I buy a Linux version of this popular application suite?
(I don't want to be left out of the crowd.)
Slashdot Mirror
For gentoo users, everyday is National Upgrade Day
except when you forget to pay your electric, cable or DSL bill.
Although I have not looked at O'Reilly books from this perspective, I can imagine a "how to" book for Linux which your grandmother could use. I can imagine a support service which could help her find drivers (e.g. send a driver as an email attachment or mail a CD) if she has trouble with new hardware. Why should this be so hard? She could learn to type "emerge sync", "emerge -u world", etc. I believe someone will make money from support for "grandmas" and this support will be cheaper for grandmas than the sum of the MS tax + the anti-virus tax + the cost of recovering from spyware/virus/worm/etc.
What about this?
Houses are built in unsuitable places (e.g. in Florida). Nature points out this error using hurricanes. In many cases, the people who lost everything were living in places which were known to be unsafe and yet they built/bought/rebuilt homes there. In light of this, I find this comment of yours difficult to support.
Feeding and clothing millions of displaced families who may have lost everything they own is a little different than funding public schools.
The kids in Florida whose families lost their homes are not responsible for living in an unsuitable location. The kids anywhere in the U.S. whose families live in (educationally) poor school districts are not responsible for living in an unsuitable location. In each case, however, their parents are responsible. How do you justify supporting families in one situation but not another?
I am really impressed with the knowledge which /. moderators bring to the table. The parent of this post corresponds to the opinion of the majority of mathematicians, which is that Mandelbrot has done some good work but is a self-promoter, does not always acknowledge the work of others and probably is not considered a Math Legend by most mathematician.
I am a peon with a Ph.D. in math who has been doing research for less than 30 years; I have only one paper which received a
Featured Review and I consider myself to be a fairly ordinary person with three kids.
Slashdot moderators know much more than do I about contributions to geometric measure theory, Hausdorff measures, self-similar sets, fractals, etc. and I accept that my previous post was flamebait since I am ignorant. However, lots of other people deserve credit for their work on fractals. I will just mention two, John Hutchinson and Michael Barnsley. I just met John when I visited ANU recently; I believe I also saw Michael. I do not think they invented fractals or claim to be the smartest people in the world but they did some interesting work. Since our slashdot moderators are so smart, they can even tell you about this research. (Just in case they are too busy, here are some recent papers.)
Considering Sun's opinion of FOSS (... What is Sun's opinion of open source? It is not 100% support of FOSS; maybe 30% support?? ...), I have trouble trusting anything related to Sun. What patents do they hold? When will they spring something on "us"?
I would just as soon see Sun die. (If I could trade DEC for Sun, I would do so in a nanosecond. I don't know how far out of date is Alpha development, but with Intel, etc. hitting the wall w.r.t. single cores, I wonder if smart, rather than just fast and dumb (e.g. P4), CPU design would still be better.) HP is probably on a five year death march; they will missuse their DEC assets, milk COMPAQ over the short run, follow their great LEADER's instructions and die in front of all of us.
I'm pink, therefore I'm spam. :-)
Hormel loves you. So does the "pink embassy". Also you are loved by the Pink States and the red-to-pink states.
I just checked here and found that my salary would be equivalent to $167,364 in San Jose, CA. I would need to double my salary to live in San Jose as I live now.
The twin cities probably distort the overall picture for the state. You'd probably see the same for Missouri and Kansas if you removed Kansas City and St. Louis from consideration. ...
... Kansas if you removed Kansas City
I would generally agree with you. Each of these states has a top 50 city, Minneapolis, Minnesota and Wichita, Kansas. The two largest privately held companies in the U.S. are located in MN (Cargill) and KS (Koch) with revenues of $48B and $40B respectively. However,
The twin cities probably distort the overall picture
Hormel has its headquarters and R&D in Austin, Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic is headquartered in Rochester, Minnesota, Cargill started in Austin, Minnesota and is headquartered in Minnesota, etc. Of course, Minnesota has large companies in the twin cities (e.g. 3M is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota.)
see the same for
The largest city in Kansas is Wichita (not Kansas City). The aircraft industry in Wichita (e.g. Boeing, Raytheon (Beech), Cessna & Learjet) is a big employer in Wichita and Koch is headquartered there.
My guess is that the rural areas in MN and KS are seeing a population decline; I am too lazy to actually check. Other than "spillover" from large urban areas (e.g. Las Vegas), I suspect rural areas are losing population all over the U.S.; does anyone know if this is true in upstate NY?
When a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Indiana came back here, the first thing she did was force me to take her out to eat because she hadn't been able to find Thai food for six months.
Is Bloomington that bad?
You cannot get real Thai food in the U.S. like that in Thailand; however, around here there are several good Thai restaurants.
Local Population Mix: White: 75%; Black: 11.5%; American Indian and Alaska Native: 1%; Asian: 4%; Other race: 5%; Two or more races: 3%; Hispanic/Latino: 9.5%.
Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and even French, German, Lebanese restaurants are available here, even though I do not live in the urban paradise which is San Jose. (Does Milpitas have its city hall in a shopping mall? It did when I was last there but I guess the elected officials decided it was too hard to park far away and walk to the office.) It is not necessary to live in CA (or even on a coast) to enjoy different cultures. Your comment:
There are certainly immigrant communities elsewhere in the US, but only on the coasts, and pretty much only in the major urban areas on the coasts, do you find such a varied mix of people from all over the place, all getting along just fine most of the time.
sounds like a California comment; I say this as a person who lived in California for the first 21 years of his life (and returns fairly often). I realize how provincial ("Limited in perspective; narrow and self-centered.") are (many of) the people in my birth state. (I was at LAX a week ago and the "natives" from LA were very funny.) I have students and colleagues from all over the world. I suspect that I have been to more foreign countries than have you, even though I do not live in San Jose (motto: world's greatest parking lot after Mesa, AZ.).
Why only consider small (100,000 - 200,000) sized cities in rural states?
Here are profiles of the fifty largest cities, which vary in size from 350,000 to 8,000,000. I was going to attempt to pick out the cities which might be considered to be inexpensive and located in rural states; I realized that this was very subjective and just provide the complete list:
Albuquerque, N.M., Atlanta, Ga., Austin, Tex., Baltimore, Md., Boston, Mass., Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Ill., Cleveland, Ohio, Colorado Springs, Colo., Columbus, Ohio, Dallas, Tex., Denver, Colo., Detroit, Mich., El Paso, Tex., Fort Worth, Tex., Fresno, Calif., Honolulu, Hawaii, Houston, Tex., Indianapolis, Ind., Jacksonville, Fla., Kansas City, Mo., Las Vegas, Nev., Long Beach, Calif., Los Angeles, Calif., Memphis, Tenn., Mesa, Ariz., Miami, Fla., Milwaukee, Wis., Minneapolis, Minn., Nashville-Davidson, Tenn., New Orleans, La., New York, N.Y., Oakland, Calif., Oklahoma City, Okla., Omaha, Neb., Philadelphia, Pa., Phoenix, Ariz., Portland, Ore., Sacramento, Calif., St. Louis, Mo., San Antonio, Tex., San Diego, Calif., San Francisco, Calif., San Jose, Calif., Seattle, Wash., Tucson, Ariz., Tulsa, Okla., Virginia Beach, Va., Washington, DC, and Wichita, Kans. .
For many of these cities, housing prices are reduced because rural land is available nearby and more housing can easily be added. (Try that in Seattle.) All (almost all?) of these cities have a national or international airport nearby. These advantages means workers can live well on lower salaries and companies can conduct business conveniently and inexpensively.
Consider a post following this one:
"Here's the top 20 from the latest US census.
3. Colorado - 35.7%
9. Minnesota - 30.5%
13. Kansas - 29.1%
17. Illinois - 27.3%
18. Nebraska - 27.1%"
I have included all of the states which might claim to be part of the "midwest" and fail to see either Iowa or North Dakota. Of farming states which might be like Iowa or ND, Minnesota, Kansas and Nebraska (although this may not correctly characterize MN or KS, which have large industrial sectors) do make the list while Iowa and ND fail to do so. Why?
U. Iowa and Iowa State U. are good universities; Iowa also has some good private universities. I am surprised to find that Iowa is not in the top 20.
lifestyle items (cars, DVDs, even most food products) cost about the same all over the country
Local and state sales taxes vary and are often higher in more urban states. For this reason (plus vehicle regestration, auto insurance, etc.), cars may not cost about the same all over the country.
I have found food costs to vary widely (within the US and in foreign countries). Food in Germany is very reasonable (wrt cost). Food costs in CA are fairly high compared with those in the middle of the country (i.e. the red states - I hate the fact that the state in which I live is a red state; I thought we got rid of those commies a long time age).
Mandelbrot is not as smart as he claims to be. As I recall, fractal compression was developed by mathematicians at ANU (Canberra). Mandelbrot made some contributions but so did other people. It is unfortunate but, as with all disciplines, there are "mathematicians" who have huge egos and little regard for the contributions of others (and "no", I have never done any research on fractals and am not one of the people whose contribution is usually ignored by Mandelbrot - I have no personal ax to grind).
This isn't MS being hypocrites, it is an employee breaking company policy and bringing in outside sofware.
How do you know this? Posters have mentioned other examples of MS products with this kind of problem. Do you work at MS and have knowledge of this specific instance?
Another list is here.
Do you think either or both of the midwestern states mentioned previously (MN, KS) is a "dead end" area like Toledo? Reasons? (What about Boise?)
Granted some of these jobs are not in what I consider desirable locations (like Minnesota, Maine, Kansas or Miami), but others may love these locations.
My guess is that housing and food are much cheaper in Minnesota and Kansas while Miami might be more expensive. I have no idea of how expensive Maine might be. Anyway, a lower salary in the midwest will go a longer way than a "high" salary in CA. For example, I would guess that an apartment in Palo Alto goes for at least $2000 per month; I have not lived in the Bay Area for some time. The same apartment in a midwestern city might be only $600 or $700. (Someone who knows might correct my figures.)
Anyway, did you mention these states (+ Miami) at random or are these places with jobs? What types of jobs? (What about Idaho? Can we blame Canada?)
I just got back from Canberra last Saturday. The prices (for food and normal items) were very high, sometimes four times as high as in the US. Some things were reasonable and I was told that lamb was very inexpensive. Of course, gas (petrol) was about twice as high as in the US. Overall, Australia seems expensive.
Can you imagine Thai food with no (hot) spices? Vietnamese food was really mild. The same was true of Indian (Inda) and other food from Asian countries. It was a joke. I am told Sydney is better. Who knows?
If you are single and your employer pays for your health insurance (as do most universities), health care in the US is not too bad. If I did not have kids, I might pay $40 per month for my share of the health insurance; the kids jack this up to $450 per month for health insurance. If I were in (most of) the EU, I would save a lot of money (which I might be spending on taxes).
I was never sick while visiting the EU (UK, Germany, Italy, France) but dentists in Germany (for a friend) are very cheap compared to the US. (You can easily get a quick appointment with a dentist in Germany and a filling might cost 20 Euros.)
Taxes are generally lower in the US. Services (e.g. health care) are better (w.r.t. price) in the UK. I do not think I have been to Berkshire, where is it? (Near London?) Seattle can be rather expensive; do you have a place yet?
No one knows who anyone else is on slashdot (at least in theory) and therefore all information (e.g. salary) posted here is anonymous. I believe that if I ask someone about salary, I should be prepared to give the same information. (So ask if you care; don't if you do not).
I do not consider the $60K figure to be very important. There are probably programmers who make $200,000 and others who make $10,000 (e.g. low level programmers in game design). Comparing any salary to the average over the entire "industry" is fairly silly. If you can live on your salary and live in a different country, more power to you.
"there's not much." Unfortunately, the best university in Australia is there. A friend (& coauthor) is driving from Melbourne to meet me in Canberra and she might be willing to take me around to see some of the sights. She would be my ride to Wollongong if I go there; I plan to meet an old "friend" (i.e. correspondent) I have never met but he may want to get out of Wollongong for a few days. I may end up in Canberra for all three weeks.
If I sneak down (up ?) to Sydney, would this be worthwhile? (E.G. Can one get opera tickets? Reasonable price?)
How do the financial aspects compare?
UK salary? (In USD?)
US salary?
City in UK? (e.g. Edinburgh is cheaper than London)
City in US? (OK, which Starbucks Cafe in Seattle?)
I suspect that $60K is not a good salary in Seattle. Am I in error?
No, it is Leland Stanford Junior University.
"official Microsoft virus and worm family"
Where can I buy a Linux version of this popular application suite? (I don't want to be left out of the crowd.)