Is this about doing good for the users, promoting their freedom to run software on whatever platform they happen to be using?
Or is this about confining users by forcing them to use proprietary software just because their OS is proprietary, in the name of the ongoing battle between free and proprietary software?
If so, this reeks of exactly the same thing as the DMCA, geek profiling, and dozens of other violations of our rights. You have to be very careful when fighting the enemy that you don't become the enemy.
Philosophically, this is the question of, "Does the end justify the means?" I don't have the space to get into that whole debate here, but the short answer is that before you squish a project like this, you better be damn sure it does.
"And it occurs to me that Garriott is standing here on 19th and Mission, a street corner caked with garbage and human poo, as one more refugee of that receding tide."
What an inspiring read. I mean, if I had a chance to interview one of the premiere game designers around, poop is obviously what I'd talk about.
And gender exploration by pretending to be a burly male warrior or a female wizard with 3 foot long breasts. I mean, having a picture like that and saying it's me teaches me exactly what it is like to be a woman. Oh, those lousy androgenous graphics are going to squish my budding transexuality.
Come on, you've got a good subject, and some interesting dirt (what is this Tabula Rasa of which you speak?). Why can't you make something good of it????
The overhead for operating a mobile network here is much higher because you need a lot more towers to reach the same number of people. That extra cost prohibits attractive pricing of most of the handheld mobile devices.
and then the question becomes:
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
If you've got bike lanes, and bikes cost one tenth as much, and you can carry much more stuff on a bicycle, and bicycles go faster, and bicycles give you exercise, and they still won't let you ride it inside the store, why not just use a bicycle?
Unless they do let you ride it inside the store. Then it would be cool.
Demining, for example the Canadian International Demining Corps is an excellent opportunity. It combines knowledge, skills, unique environments, and an element of danger, all with the chance to help people recover from conflicts and rebuild. It's demanding, and there is a lot of way to go to finish it. One hot spot is Afghanistan; imagine going there to help the place recover. You can bet that the most recent conflict there hasn't reduced the number of mines, but it has led to a suspension of demining activity. When it is safe on the ground again, it will start back again.
I have tremendous respect for Linux & co. with regards to software development, and it is always nice to see people who are not philosophers (or biologists) discussing philosophy (and biology).
However with respect to their opinions on philosophy (and biology), they are, as a previous poster commented, quite undergraduate. Actually I might be inclined to say worse about them, as I am self educated beyond High School, and I am aware of a much broader world of philosophy (and biology) than they seem to be.
Actually, it reminds me of nothing so much as Alan Cox' posturing on the DMCA, where my opinion was that people who do not understand such issues at all should refrain from making lawyerly or political comments in a broader public form where they have respect that is not meritted for the comments they are making.
While it is nice to see these people expressing interest in broader topics, I feel that they should keep their public discussions to the issues of which they have some understanding, namely software development. All that can come of their ponderings otherwise is to spread their ignorance further than they already have.
Just add the support for the advanced hardware features of the E15k and you're ready to go. Get the enterprise level reliability and management features that it needs, and you'll see Solaris floundering on every single bit of Sun's hardware.
It is an integrated chipset, and the performance is excellent considering that, but it is not as good as high-end non-integrated boards, and as a result of the extravagent design, it is very expensive.
The OEM market doesn't want it because it is more expensive than other integrated chipsets. They don't care that the performance is much better. If it is $5 more, they will ditch it in a minute.
So the other market to target is the performance market. Unfortunately, the GeForce2MX and regular DDR memory don't provide good enough performance for that segment, and the performance lags high-end boards sporting other chipsets even with an offboard video card.
By targetting two very different market segments with the same chipset, NVIDIA has put themselves in the position of having an excellent compromise product that is suitable for neither camp. I hope they get a P4 license, because the extra memory bandwidth might actually mean something there, whereas with the FSB limitations of Athlon processors it does nothing for them. That way, with an external video card, the NFORCE might actually roar, instead of being dead in the water as it is right now.
Actually, your views aren't so bad to me as a programmer. I know exactly what I'd do under your utopia. I'd set myself up as a service provider, and charge a nice fee for anyone to use my service at my facilities.
Life goes on. The Taliban weren't able to destroy every television, and neither will you be able to shut down my enterprising spirit.
Re:Advice to the Not Listening
on
Good to Great
·
· Score: 2
It sounds like really bad advice to me. It describes a million dot coms, most of which are dead by now. VA Whatever is a great example of a company that acquired good people then got them to direct its operations. They have changed focus, and are on the fast track to bankruptcy.
It makes complete sense. Different people do different things well, and if you have a potpurri of good people, you'll be a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. To excel, finding the right people to execute the plan is the right thing to do. Get the people who can think about what your business needs, not about what they would focus on if they were running your business.
What if had to ask myself before viewing any page, "Is this likely to be worth one cent?". It's a tough question, especially on/., with so much garbage among the good stuff.
Currently, I probably view several hundred pages per day. By my value criteria, I would have to cut that to probably twenty or thirty. It sure wouldn't be worth it to read all the responses to an interesting post. Most of the time, I wouldn't even consider it worth three cents or more to post a response.
More likely, though, I just wouldn't bother. It takes time to answer the question, and it seems silly to waste that time over just one cent. I'd make a static decision about what I would view (probably just news and weather, once per day), and stick to that. Slashdot, with all its interesting and otherwise branches would just leave my habits altogether.
In short, I think any site implementing this will immediately lose almost all of its readers.
I'm not the first to mention it, but this bears repeating: this isn't a sign of VA * abandoning their ideals; they are doing the best under the circumstances. It's really a sign of them struggling for their lives in a hostile environment.
The recently posted their quarterly income statement, and my analysis is that it looks very bad. They posted a net profit of negative $290 million. Most of that is imaginary money, so let's look at the rest of the figures to get an idea what is actually going on.
To project the long term viability of the company, we will look at the burn rate, and try to extend that against their short term assets, accounting for any factors that will change their revenues or expenses.
The balance sheet shows that their current assets continue to drop. Particularly disturbing is the continued drop in cash and equivalents and short term investments. These have gone down by about $17 million, indicating that as their burn rate. Inventory has also decreased, presumably as they sell off what remains from their hardware business. This provides a revenue stream that has basically finished this quarter. Since the $8 million drop there is about half of the total revenue, we can expect revenue next quarter to be about half of what it was this quarter.
Long term assets are also dropping. Reductions in long term capital are likely due to exiting the hardware business and getting rid of associated facilities. They are also writing off huge amounts of goodwill and intangibles. Neither of these is important, since the money was already spent and does not affect their long term viability. The only thing to note is that the poor economy now means that the money spent acquiring these assets is not giving much of a return, and they would have been better just sticking it in the bank.
Although their liabilities are increasing, they do not explain why, categorizing the increase as "other liabilities". We can't factor this into any calculations directly.
It appears that the current burn rate is $17 million per quarter, against reserves of about $97 million. With revenues expected to fall to half of the $16 million they are now once the remaining hardware inventory is sold, we expect the burn rate to increase to $25 million. At this rate we can expect the company to survive four quarters, just one year.
In that time frame, there really isn't anything that we can expect to make them viable. Revenues from SourceForge On Site will likely ramp up, but that will be a slow process that can not offset much of the projected loss. Further, aggressive cost cutting measures will reduce the burn rate, but it is unlikely they can cut it enough to survive long, particularly with the conflicting goal of building the SourceForge brand and ramping development and sales.
I really don't see a future for VA. Look for them to sell off unprofitable assets (likely including Slashdot, unless the changes Rob discussed can make it profitable). Developers with projects on SourceForge should make offsite backups just in case they remove it suddenly and don't give developers sufficient time to withdraw their code. Think also what the rush on the site will be when they announce its closing and everybody tries to checkout their projects at the same time.
ICC doesn't even attempt SSE optimizations at the optimization level tested (-xMi; that's PPRO and MMX instructions; you need to -xMiKW to get SSE and SSE2 as well). The big wins that gcc could get would come from rewriting the scheduler and register allocator. The difference for gcc probably comes from extra loads and stores, and possibly more code in loop bodies. Function inlining may also play a part, as gcc doesn't do that very well.
You may also be right that gcc doesn't play with the x87 stack very well, but that is likely a minor difference in comparison.
Wow, this car continues the Toyota Tradition of making the ugliest vehicles on the road. Seriously, I wouldn't drive that thing unless it had some SERIOUS advantages, and crying at me and taking my picture isn't one. My girlfriend does that already, and she looks good doing it.
Re:Comprehensive, but contains a spurious assertio
on
Linux on the Desktop
·
· Score: 2
Heh.
My old room mate ran win2k on a P200 with 32 megs. It took forever to start and paged constantly when loading an application, but it ran ok once a program was started, so long as you didn't try to switch tasks.
We did try linux on the machine (fvwm + mozilla), but it was unusably slow with the ten thousand ton monster running. xterms were fine, but really, a terminal program on windows provided all the needed functionality (as in it was faster to run programs remotely over a cable modem).
As of three months ago, the unpageable kernel of windows 2000 was smaller than the unpageable kernel of linux, and Internet explorer had a smaller memory footprint than mozilla. Using an embedded configuration may change the first, and the mozilla team is constantly working on the second, but my guess is that both of those will continue to hold in the forseeable future for a desktop configuration.
I'd really have to recommend windows 2000 as the environment for memory constrained computing if a graphical environment is necessary. Linux is really an option in this situation only if you can ditch the web browser and office programs.
Mozilla Project Success; Mozilla Browser Failure
on
Mozilla Relicensing
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
The Mozilla project is a great success of the Open Source Community. It has spawned so many good projects like Bugzilla and Tinderbox. It has also ushered in a new era of cooperation between commercial entities and the community with the release of both Mozilla and the proprietary Netscape browser based on the same source code. The resources required to organize a project of this size and complexity were until recently thought to be beyond the range of Open Source.
Even though the browser itself is a technical failure, being slower and more buggy than Opera and Konqueror, and even Internet Exploder, the project is one of the great successes of our Community. This relicensing is a further ambitious step for the good of the community that hasn't been tried on a project of this scale before. I wish the best of luck to the Mozilla people, and may your name live on long after your browser has died!
One thing that is painfully obvious from the other countries that have to deal with the constant threat of terrorism is that some liberties do have to be surrendered. More government knowledge and control of what we do is something that we have to accept.
Really, if we continue with our current system there is no doubt that this could happen again. To all the people who say, "Give me freedom or give me death," this is the time to make your choice. Stand on the side of continued complete freedom and invite the terrorists in with open arms. Or give up a few freedoms and help stop the next attack before it starts.
We haven't dealt with this before, but other countries like UK and Israel have, and their experience is clear: the choice really is between death and loss of freedom. I'm firmly in the camp of living, and I hope that people like Richard Stallman realize their folley and join me before we get hit again!
If we remove the Taliban from Afghanistan this will all be worth it. They have caused far more suffering on their own people than this attack has caused, or any of Bin Laden's (other?) attacks.
I tried to give blood, but they don't want it because I am diabetic. I wish I could do something, but I'm persona non grata in this situation.
Come on, the impact will be minimal or not at all. Although theoretically you COULD run this email attachment if you receive it, how many Linux users are stupid enough to do that? Technically Linux is just as susceptible to these things as M$ Windows, but we have one big advantage: the majority of Linux users are not morons around computers.
I believe that some of the URL resolvers in Slashcode are Turing complete, and by typing in the correct URL you can make Slashcode perform arbitrary calculations (albeit in a very inefficient manner). I'd love to see an entry that worked by taking advantage of that!
Uranium is a heavy metal. In its most common isotope (U-238, the one used for depleted uranium) it is not significantly radioactive (ie. it poses no health risks for that reason at any exposure levels). Uranium is always toxic, though, since it is a heavy metal in all of its isotopes, radioactive or not.
Handling depleted uranium isn't inherently dangerous; you treat it just like lead. Shooting huge quantities of it could well be a bad thing, as that leaves it all over the place, and it may give off dust that could cause poisoning in sufficient quantities. I'm not aware of any studies on exposure when shooting it in quantites such as would be done in combat.
You're making some very dumb assumptions. I spent fifteen minutes to determine that SO had no automation of this feature whatsoever built in. I could have created a macro to do it, I suppose, but I had little interest in doing that for something that was built into MSO. In point of fact, I did later replace it with Corel Wordperfect (first 8 for Windows, and now 2000 for Linux). That is acceptable to me because it has automation of the features I want, even though it is different from the way that MS does it. I'm still annoyed by WPO2000 constantly crashing on Linux, but luckily as a software developer I don't often have any desire to use office products anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to meet one of those. (=
Is this about doing good for the users, promoting their freedom to run software on whatever platform they happen to be using?
Or is this about confining users by forcing them to use proprietary software just because their OS is proprietary, in the name of the ongoing battle between free and proprietary software?
If so, this reeks of exactly the same thing as the DMCA, geek profiling, and dozens of other violations of our rights. You have to be very careful when fighting the enemy that you don't become the enemy.
Philosophically, this is the question of, "Does the end justify the means?" I don't have the space to get into that whole debate here, but the short answer is that before you squish a project like this, you better be damn sure it does.
Which of Microsoft's products has failed? Why, wouldn't it be the most user friendly interface ever developed?
Given the catchy and informative moniker, "Bob."
"And it occurs to me that Garriott is standing here on 19th and Mission, a street corner caked with garbage and human poo, as one more refugee of that receding tide."
What an inspiring read. I mean, if I had a chance to interview one of the premiere game designers around, poop is obviously what I'd talk about.
And gender exploration by pretending to be a burly male warrior or a female wizard with 3 foot long breasts. I mean, having a picture like that and saying it's me teaches me exactly what it is like to be a woman. Oh, those lousy androgenous graphics are going to squish my budding transexuality.
Come on, you've got a good subject, and some interesting dirt (what is this Tabula Rasa of which you speak?). Why can't you make something good of it????
Oh, I forgot. It's on Salon.com.
The overhead for operating a mobile network here is much higher because you need a lot more towers to reach the same number of people. That extra cost prohibits attractive pricing of most of the handheld mobile devices.
If you've got bike lanes, and bikes cost one tenth as much, and you can carry much more stuff on a bicycle, and bicycles go faster, and bicycles give you exercise, and they still won't let you ride it inside the store, why not just use a bicycle?
Unless they do let you ride it inside the store. Then it would be cool.
Demining, for example the Canadian International Demining Corps is an excellent opportunity. It combines knowledge, skills, unique environments, and an element of danger, all with the chance to help people recover from conflicts and rebuild. It's demanding, and there is a lot of way to go to finish it. One hot spot is Afghanistan; imagine going there to help the place recover. You can bet that the most recent conflict there hasn't reduced the number of mines, but it has led to a suspension of demining activity. When it is safe on the ground again, it will start back again.
I have tremendous respect for Linux & co. with regards to software development, and it is always nice to see people who are not philosophers (or biologists) discussing philosophy (and biology).
However with respect to their opinions on philosophy (and biology), they are, as a previous poster commented, quite undergraduate. Actually I might be inclined to say worse about them, as I am self educated beyond High School, and I am aware of a much broader world of philosophy (and biology) than they seem to be.
Actually, it reminds me of nothing so much as Alan Cox' posturing on the DMCA, where my opinion was that people who do not understand such issues at all should refrain from making lawyerly or political comments in a broader public form where they have respect that is not meritted for the comments they are making.
While it is nice to see these people expressing interest in broader topics, I feel that they should keep their public discussions to the issues of which they have some understanding, namely software development. All that can come of their ponderings otherwise is to spread their ignorance further than they already have.
But don't take my word for it.
Just add the support for the advanced hardware features of the E15k and you're ready to go. Get the enterprise level reliability and management features that it needs, and you'll see Solaris floundering on every single bit of Sun's hardware.
That's what I thought, too. I have a thing for little Japanese girls, but she's about as good as a Real Doll that you can't take the clothes off of.
It is an integrated chipset, and the performance is excellent considering that, but it is not as good as high-end non-integrated boards, and as a result of the extravagent design, it is very expensive.
The OEM market doesn't want it because it is more expensive than other integrated chipsets. They don't care that the performance is much better. If it is $5 more, they will ditch it in a minute.
So the other market to target is the performance market. Unfortunately, the GeForce2MX and regular DDR memory don't provide good enough performance for that segment, and the performance lags high-end boards sporting other chipsets even with an offboard video card.
By targetting two very different market segments with the same chipset, NVIDIA has put themselves in the position of having an excellent compromise product that is suitable for neither camp. I hope they get a P4 license, because the extra memory bandwidth might actually mean something there, whereas with the FSB limitations of Athlon processors it does nothing for them. That way, with an external video card, the NFORCE might actually roar, instead of being dead in the water as it is right now.
Actually, your views aren't so bad to me as a programmer. I know exactly what I'd do under your utopia. I'd set myself up as a service provider, and charge a nice fee for anyone to use my service at my facilities.
Life goes on. The Taliban weren't able to destroy every television, and neither will you be able to shut down my enterprising spirit.
It sounds like really bad advice to me. It describes a million dot coms, most of which are dead by now. VA Whatever is a great example of a company that acquired good people then got them to direct its operations. They have changed focus, and are on the fast track to bankruptcy.
It makes complete sense. Different people do different things well, and if you have a potpurri of good people, you'll be a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. To excel, finding the right people to execute the plan is the right thing to do. Get the people who can think about what your business needs, not about what they would focus on if they were running your business.
What if had to ask myself before viewing any page, "Is this likely to be worth one cent?". It's a tough question, especially on /., with so much garbage among the good stuff.
Currently, I probably view several hundred pages per day. By my value criteria, I would have to cut that to probably twenty or thirty. It sure wouldn't be worth it to read all the responses to an interesting post. Most of the time, I wouldn't even consider it worth three cents or more to post a response.
More likely, though, I just wouldn't bother. It takes time to answer the question, and it seems silly to waste that time over just one cent. I'd make a static decision about what I would view (probably just news and weather, once per day), and stick to that. Slashdot, with all its interesting and otherwise branches would just leave my habits altogether.
In short, I think any site implementing this will immediately lose almost all of its readers.
I'm not the first to mention it, but this bears repeating: this isn't a sign of VA * abandoning their ideals; they are doing the best under the circumstances. It's really a sign of them struggling for their lives in a hostile environment.
The recently posted their quarterly income statement, and my analysis is that it looks very bad. They posted a net profit of negative $290 million. Most of that is imaginary money, so let's look at the rest of the figures to get an idea what is actually going on.
To project the long term viability of the company, we will look at the burn rate, and try to extend that against their short term assets, accounting for any factors that will change their revenues or expenses.
The balance sheet shows that their current assets continue to drop. Particularly disturbing is the continued drop in cash and equivalents and short term investments. These have gone down by about $17 million, indicating that as their burn rate. Inventory has also decreased, presumably as they sell off what remains from their hardware business. This provides a revenue stream that has basically finished this quarter. Since the $8 million drop there is about half of the total revenue, we can expect revenue next quarter to be about half of what it was this quarter.
Long term assets are also dropping. Reductions in long term capital are likely due to exiting the hardware business and getting rid of associated facilities. They are also writing off huge amounts of goodwill and intangibles. Neither of these is important, since the money was already spent and does not affect their long term viability. The only thing to note is that the poor economy now means that the money spent acquiring these assets is not giving much of a return, and they would have been better just sticking it in the bank.
Although their liabilities are increasing, they do not explain why, categorizing the increase as "other liabilities". We can't factor this into any calculations directly.
It appears that the current burn rate is $17 million per quarter, against reserves of about $97 million. With revenues expected to fall to half of the $16 million they are now once the remaining hardware inventory is sold, we expect the burn rate to increase to $25 million. At this rate we can expect the company to survive four quarters, just one year.
In that time frame, there really isn't anything that we can expect to make them viable. Revenues from SourceForge On Site will likely ramp up, but that will be a slow process that can not offset much of the projected loss. Further, aggressive cost cutting measures will reduce the burn rate, but it is unlikely they can cut it enough to survive long, particularly with the conflicting goal of building the SourceForge brand and ramping development and sales.
I really don't see a future for VA. Look for them to sell off unprofitable assets (likely including Slashdot, unless the changes Rob discussed can make it profitable). Developers with projects on SourceForge should make offsite backups just in case they remove it suddenly and don't give developers sufficient time to withdraw their code. Think also what the rush on the site will be when they announce its closing and everybody tries to checkout their projects at the same time.
ICC doesn't even attempt SSE optimizations at the optimization level tested (-xMi; that's PPRO and MMX instructions; you need to -xMiKW to get SSE and SSE2 as well). The big wins that gcc could get would come from rewriting the scheduler and register allocator. The difference for gcc probably comes from extra loads and stores, and possibly more code in loop bodies. Function inlining may also play a part, as gcc doesn't do that very well.
You may also be right that gcc doesn't play with the x87 stack very well, but that is likely a minor difference in comparison.
Wow, this car continues the Toyota Tradition of making the ugliest vehicles on the road. Seriously, I wouldn't drive that thing unless it had some SERIOUS advantages, and crying at me and taking my picture isn't one. My girlfriend does that already, and she looks good doing it.
Heh.
My old room mate ran win2k on a P200 with 32 megs. It took forever to start and paged constantly when loading an application, but it ran ok once a program was started, so long as you didn't try to switch tasks.
We did try linux on the machine (fvwm + mozilla), but it was unusably slow with the ten thousand ton monster running. xterms were fine, but really, a terminal program on windows provided all the needed functionality (as in it was faster to run programs remotely over a cable modem).
As of three months ago, the unpageable kernel of windows 2000 was smaller than the unpageable kernel of linux, and Internet explorer had a smaller memory footprint than mozilla. Using an embedded configuration may change the first, and the mozilla team is constantly working on the second, but my guess is that both of those will continue to hold in the forseeable future for a desktop configuration.
I'd really have to recommend windows 2000 as the environment for memory constrained computing if a graphical environment is necessary. Linux is really an option in this situation only if you can ditch the web browser and office programs.
The Mozilla project is a great success of the Open Source Community. It has spawned so many good projects like Bugzilla and Tinderbox. It has also ushered in a new era of cooperation between commercial entities and the community with the release of both Mozilla and the proprietary Netscape browser based on the same source code. The resources required to organize a project of this size and complexity were until recently thought to be beyond the range of Open Source.
Even though the browser itself is a technical failure, being slower and more buggy than Opera and Konqueror, and even Internet Exploder, the project is one of the great successes of our Community. This relicensing is a further ambitious step for the good of the community that hasn't been tried on a project of this scale before. I wish the best of luck to the Mozilla people, and may your name live on long after your browser has died!
One thing that is painfully obvious from the other countries that have to deal with the constant threat of terrorism is that some liberties do have to be surrendered. More government knowledge and control of what we do is something that we have to accept.
Really, if we continue with our current system there is no doubt that this could happen again. To all the people who say, "Give me freedom or give me death," this is the time to make your choice. Stand on the side of continued complete freedom and invite the terrorists in with open arms. Or give up a few freedoms and help stop the next attack before it starts.
We haven't dealt with this before, but other countries like UK and Israel have, and their experience is clear: the choice really is between death and loss of freedom. I'm firmly in the camp of living, and I hope that people like Richard Stallman realize their folley and join me before we get hit again!
If we remove the Taliban from Afghanistan this will all be worth it. They have caused far more suffering on their own people than this attack has caused, or any of Bin Laden's (other?) attacks.
I tried to give blood, but they don't want it because I am diabetic. I wish I could do something, but I'm persona non grata in this situation.
Come on, the impact will be minimal or not at all. Although theoretically you COULD run this email attachment if you receive it, how many Linux users are stupid enough to do that? Technically Linux is just as susceptible to these things as M$ Windows, but we have one big advantage: the majority of Linux users are not morons around computers.
I believe that some of the URL resolvers in Slashcode are Turing complete, and by typing in the correct URL you can make Slashcode perform arbitrary calculations (albeit in a very inefficient manner). I'd love to see an entry that worked by taking advantage of that!
Uranium is a heavy metal. In its most common isotope (U-238, the one used for depleted uranium) it is not significantly radioactive (ie. it poses no health risks for that reason at any exposure levels). Uranium is always toxic, though, since it is a heavy metal in all of its isotopes, radioactive or not.
Handling depleted uranium isn't inherently dangerous; you treat it just like lead. Shooting huge quantities of it could well be a bad thing, as that leaves it all over the place, and it may give off dust that could cause poisoning in sufficient quantities. I'm not aware of any studies on exposure when shooting it in quantites such as would be done in combat.
You're making some very dumb assumptions. I spent fifteen minutes to determine that SO had no automation of this feature whatsoever built in. I could have created a macro to do it, I suppose, but I had little interest in doing that for something that was built into MSO. In point of fact, I did later replace it with Corel Wordperfect (first 8 for Windows, and now 2000 for Linux). That is acceptable to me because it has automation of the features I want, even though it is different from the way that MS does it. I'm still annoyed by WPO2000 constantly crashing on Linux, but luckily as a software developer I don't often have any desire to use office products anyway.