Are you even aware of the multitude of amateur radio digital modes that are in use these days? No. Care to enlighten me?
Someday your ass might be saved in an emergency by a ham who is capable of getting a signal through when the communications infrastructure goes down. Any emergency that would take down our entire communications infrastructure would also seem likely to disable BPL. Problem solved.
Also, in that sort of global catastrophe, what are the odds of finding an actual Ham, and what are the odds of there being somebody on the other end to respond? Sounds like a first-aid course might be a better investment....
I know my hypothetical situation is ridiculous. However, so is yours.
There is indeed a place for decentralized civilian and military communications. However, I think we can safely begin to move away from analogue amateur radio. (I'm not sure how decentralized it is, but Iridium also strikes me as being as robust as you could ever wish for)
However, to me, Hams always came across as a bunch of condescending nutters clutching on to a technological relic, with a side of cold-war paranoia. I'd love to be proven wrong, but statements like "who will save your ass when..." certainly don't help their case.
The small-federal-government-big-state-government folks have been around for as long as the US has.
It was tried. It didn't work. The US isn't divided culturally, economically, racially, etc... according to state borders. There's barely enough interest in the democratic process to keep the federal government going, let alone the states.
Ron Paul's not a bad man, but you've got to realize why he voted against all of those things in your sig.... If it were the state of Texas proposing any of them, he (by his own admission) would have voted 'Yes' to virtually all of them. Reading his campaign platform was eerily similar to my 17th-century American history class in high school. I mean.... the guy wants to abolish the federal reserve and go back to the gold standard. Does this mean we'll see a resurgence of the Whig party to oppose him?
Have you honestly tried Ubuntu in the past year or two?
I used to say the same thing about Linux, and even found it a bit flaky for my own tastes. However, Ubuntu seems to finally made the pieces click.
The user interface is solid, and coherent the whole way through. Nothing terribly flashy, but certainly professional all around. The command-line certainly is there, but a normal user never has to rely upon it.
More amazing, the Debian-based back-end fits together nicely, and lacks most of the small quirks have that tended to plague other distributions in the past.
Maybe we've reached an evolutionary critical mass, or maybe Ubuntu got lucky. Maybe they're really organized.... Whatever it is, Ubuntu is the real deal. As long as the applications are there (Oo.O needs a bit of help), the underlying system is definitely ready for general consumption.
From the perspective of a new computer user, I'd actually say that Ubuntu trumps both Windows and OS X in terms of user-friendliness and intuitiveness. I don't say this lightly, or with a grain of salt.
Although high oil prices will force us to live more frugally and locally (probably a good thing in terms of the environment), the US has the small problem that its transportation infrastructure is designed based around the roads. Cars specifically.
A coherent bus network simply doesn't exist, Amtrak is a pathetic mess, and Americans (white people, specifically*) hate the concept of public transport.
*I hate to bring race into this, but for whatever reason, it's more or less a heavily recurring trend that, outside of big cities, white Americans don't use public transportation. I'm white, in my 20s, and take the bus to work every day. It's an extremely rare situation to spot somebody from my own demographic on the bus that isn't also homeless.
That's funny, because most of the banks by me have about 12 hours of downtime every day (24 on sundays and holidays...and if something goes wrong on a normal day, it's simply declared a "local bank holiday")
This is pretty much the way that grant money works in many disciplines. Don't budget for maintenance or "upgrades," or else the original bid is going to come in far too high to ever be approved in the first place.
Physicists often blame the cancellation of the SSC on the fact that it was realistically priced when it was canceled (and $2bn had already been thrown down the toilet).
That is sort of odd, considering that gas turbines and wind power fill two separate niches.
Wind power provides good support to base-load power, while gas turbines can fill demands during "peak" periods.
Also, there are fairly extensive atmospheric/climatic studies performed before sites are selected for wind farms. Given the height of the turbines, it's probably a pretty safe bet that there'll be some wind virtually all the time.
How *much* smaller are these TIFFs anyway? TIFF is actually a container format, and can support all sorts of compression, some of them proprietary, some of them common. Not all of them are lossless either (TIFF-Jpeg is a perfectly valid combination, and was used before the days of Exif to add metadata to jpegs). TIFFs can also include vectorized data. It's not all that much less complicated than a PDF.
PDFs are also a container format to an extent. You could very well have a TIFF embedded in a PDF. Fortunately for us, the PDF specification is a bit more stringent on what is supported and what isn't, and PDFs tend to work just about everywhere (especially if all that you've got is an image). You can also apply all sorts of compression to PDFs to reduce their file size... these might not be quite as well supported.
Both formats are extremely common, and it's extremely unlikely that you'll ever have to do any sort of conversion to display them. If I had to place money on it, I'd wager that PDF will be in widespread use for longer than TIFF, though neither format seems to be going anywhere anytime soon. You're more likely to have to worry about the storage devices you're using and the longevity of the media.
If you just need to store lossless raster images, PNG might be a good bet. It's a "Free" format, and is officially endorsed as an ISO/IEC standard. TIFF is copyrighted by adobe. It also has the advantage of being a complete image format, rather than just a container, which means that any software that can open a PNG image should be able to open *any* PNG. Because of its open-sourceness and widespread adoption, PNG will be around for a long time to come as well. Once again, the storage medium and filesystem that you use to store the images is very likely going to become obsolete before the file format itself.
Granted, PNG's compression algorithm isn't optimized for photographic data, though the image formats that *are* optimized for this purpose are neither common nor free.
In summary, there's no reason that a PDF needs to be terribly larger than a PDF (the overhead should be especially negligible if you've got lots of images at a high-resolution). Neither format is going away anytime soon, but both have quirks that can hurt you in the future (Multi-page TIFFs are even somewhat of an oddity today). If you really want small files and future-proofing, go with PNG. Otherwise, it's more or less a non-issue.
I'm confused about how the "or later" wording doesn't allow the GPL maintainers to arbitrarily change the terms of the license to their liking by releasing it under a new version.
If the FSF decide to start taking drugs, and include a clause in GPLv4 that allows closed-source derivatives of GPLv4 software to be sold for profit, the same would seem to retroactively apply to all GPLv3 software. This would be bad.
Frankly, if Java's released under a free license, its irrelevant what other licenses you use with it. That depends on what you consider a "free" license. If we're talking about BSD, then your statement is indeed true. You can do anything with BSD code, as long as you credit the original authors and bundle a copy of the license.
On the other hand, the GPL has some very specific restrictions on how code may be modified or re-licensed. It's also got that fantastic clause that RMS may retroactively change the terms of your license at any time (Linus ignores that one).
Try auditing Visual Basic 6 for comparison. I don't need to see the source to know that VB6 is completely insecure. The documentation is more than sufficient to prove that the entire language was fundamentally flawed.
Because the GPL doesn't acknowledge that free and non-free software can coexist.
Honestly, the fact that the Flash Player isn't free is less than ideal, but the fact that the GPL prohibits Ubuntu from distributing it in their main repositories seems a bit silly.
In the end, many are left feeling like an ideology is being forced on them. This has a somewhat negative effect upon the adoption of open-source in the business world. The code-sharing requirement is scary to many corporations, and introduces additional responsibilities, legal liabilities, and costs. Also, if said corporation is using one scrap of proprietary licensed code, things get 100x more complicated.
Although the GPL was created around the fear that corporations wouldn't contribute their code back (which they're not obligated to do with the BSD license), the end result is that companies simply don't use GPL code at all.
BSD-style licenses are nice, because they historically haven't impeded community development, but also don't scare off corporate users.
LGPL is a halfway-decent compromise, and has done a lot to help projects like KHTML/WebKit.
Obama is seriously the closest thing to an inscrutable candidate that we've had in a long, long time.
Although I generally don't like to give too much credit to anecdotes that happened 20 years ago, the fact that the press and the conservatives haven't been able to dig up anything substantial from his past is absolutely remarkable.
There are a lot of people trying to dig up dirt on this guy, and you can see their frustration in not finding anything substantive, as evidenced by the hilariously tenuous allegations made against him -- flag pins, "terrorist fist jabs," and his name have been the only things that the right has been able to stir up controversy with.
Now, a lot of this has to do with his age and relatively short political career, but in this day and age of such a sensationalistic media, it's absolutely remarkable that they've been able to dig up less dirt on a politician than they could on your average joe...
Like I've said, "dirt" tends to be a fairly poor indicator of political aptitude, as some of our best politicians in history have been absolute dirtbags, while major war criminals (eg. Hitler) have lived relatively straight-laced personal lives. There were some fairly serious allegations made against George Bush immediately before the 2000 election that, though true, didn't seem to have a huge effect on his presidency.
Personally, for me, I like to judge candidates based upon their voting record from their current political career.
Hulu seems like an awfully nice compromise between watching "regular TV," and sifting through piles of low-quality crap on sidreel.
The general scheme is that you get excellent quality full episodes in a legal manner endorsed by the content producers (for which they get paid!).
In return, you have to watch a 10-30 second ad in each slot that would normally have a 4-5 minute commercial break on TV. In the end, this works out to about 2-3 minutes PER HOUR. For free and legal content, this seems like a fantastic compromise that mostly benefits the consumer.
Of course, if they increase the ads, my approval will be somewhat diminished, but in its current form, Hulu rocks.
If you're OK with that, I suggest you campaign for him. I'm not OK with that. I'm most certainly not okay with this.
However, comparing Obama's and McCain's senate records as a whole, I'm a whole lot more comfortable with the idea of Obama in office.
Never, ever vote on a single issue. Always look at the big picture. Telecom immunity is certainly a bad idea, although on the other hand, McCain's remarks last week on the Supreme Court's restoration of Habeas Corpus seems equally troubling.
There's also McCain's seeming approval of the past 8 years' foreign policy, along with his "Iraq in 100 years" comments, which scare the crap out of me.
Yes, but Ron Paul's interpretation of the constitution also seeks to overturn certain "norms" that have been around since the time of Alexander Hamilton (200+ years ago).
Ron Paul is on the fringe, and always will be. There's no way on earth he's actually going to be able to convince the senate, and the rest of the US that the gold standard is a good idea.
For a geeky point of comparison, Paul's a bit like RMS. He seems to have his heart in the right place, but is far too extreme to win over the hearts of the masses.
As a sidenote, he's not even an ardent supporter of small government. He supports a small federal government, and huge overbearing state governments. Small groups of Texans have been blowing this horn for as long as Texas has been a part of the union.
I hate to say it, but users like yourself make up an infinitesimally small fraction of total users. A company needs to market/design their products for the masses, not the outliers.
That's true. It's also true that this group is the group that ultimately defines what the rest of use, because they are the ones who produce the most documents, the most important documents, and use the high-end features that force the rest of us to use MS Office instead of, say, OpenOffice.org, for compatibility's sake.
Then why aren't we all using Linux?
Don't think that the business world operates in a logical or sane manner. It doesn't by a long shot.
Well, if you only want to cite personal anecdotal evidence, I'll counter your argument by stating that I quite like it.
Commonly used functions have been moved to the toolbar, rather than buried in menus. The toolbars are also based around more of a task-oriented approach, which better suits the habits and mindset of most users. (The contents of the Format -> Cell window in Excel being the most egregious example).
Most people have never even heard of the functions you described, let alone learned their keystrokes. Those features aren't terribly high up on Microsoft's list of priorities. If you took the time to learn the keyboard shortcut to the obscure document properties dialog, odds are that you're perfectly capable of learning the new ones, or to assign a custom keystroke with the old combination (virtually everything in office can be assigned a custom keystroke).
I hate to say it, but users like yourself make up an infinitesimally small fraction of total users. A company needs to market/design their products for the masses, not the outliers.
IE6 was horrible, slow, insecure, and rendered HTML poorly.
Once Firefox got good enough for general consumption, many web developers stopped putting up with IE, and coded their sites to be mostly-standards compliant.
Users switched to Firefox to gain access to the cutting edge features, and found that it was easy to use, offered a few simple innovative features (tabs), and to be an overall improvement over IE.
In response, IE7 was vastly improved, and is seen as being reasonably on-par with Firefox in terms of supporting the "important" standards properly. There's still a ton of room for improvement, but the days of designing sites specifically around IE are over. The EEE cycle was broken.
Office, on the other hand, has the distinction of actually being better than anything else out there. Its decently fast, offers the features that people care about, and has an interface that most find familiar and easy to use (once they got used to it, people also quite liked the 2007 interface).
OOo, on the other hand stinks. Its slow, ugly, not terribly easy to use, and offers virtually nothing in the way of improvements or new & useful features. It's not quite as bad as early versions of The GIMP, but isn't much better. Apart from the price, there's very little reason for users to switch.
Apple's iWork does do many of these things, but isn't a fantastic candidate due to its platform dependence. Cost is also an issue, though at a fraction of the cost of Office, it remains fairly competitive.
Make an office suite that can legitimately compete with Microsoft, and the EEE cycle will have break in order for Microsoft to maintain their market share. It doesn't have to be Oo.o, and I honestly doubt that they will ever turn out a product that can compete with Microsoft. That doesn't mean that others can't, however!
Third, did you ever stop to think about where the vast majority of the available resources are? From energy to precious metals to useful chemical to just plain space the overwhelming majority of the resources we know about are out in space. Isn't that a little redundant? Sure, the universe contains most of our resources, because by definition, the universe contains everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, in that sort of global catastrophe, what are the odds of finding an actual Ham, and what are the odds of there being somebody on the other end to respond? Sounds like a first-aid course might be a better investment....
I know my hypothetical situation is ridiculous. However, so is yours.
There is indeed a place for decentralized civilian and military communications. However, I think we can safely begin to move away from analogue amateur radio. (I'm not sure how decentralized it is, but Iridium also strikes me as being as robust as you could ever wish for)
However, to me, Hams always came across as a bunch of condescending nutters clutching on to a technological relic, with a side of cold-war paranoia. I'd love to be proven wrong, but statements like "who will save your ass when..." certainly don't help their case.
Keep on blowing that states-rights horn.
The small-federal-government-big-state-government folks have been around for as long as the US has.
It was tried. It didn't work. The US isn't divided culturally, economically, racially, etc... according to state borders. There's barely enough interest in the democratic process to keep the federal government going, let alone the states.
Ron Paul's not a bad man, but you've got to realize why he voted against all of those things in your sig.... If it were the state of Texas proposing any of them, he (by his own admission) would have voted 'Yes' to virtually all of them. Reading his campaign platform was eerily similar to my 17th-century American history class in high school. I mean.... the guy wants to abolish the federal reserve and go back to the gold standard. Does this mean we'll see a resurgence of the Whig party to oppose him?
Have you honestly tried Ubuntu in the past year or two?
I used to say the same thing about Linux, and even found it a bit flaky for my own tastes. However, Ubuntu seems to finally made the pieces click.
The user interface is solid, and coherent the whole way through. Nothing terribly flashy, but certainly professional all around. The command-line certainly is there, but a normal user never has to rely upon it.
More amazing, the Debian-based back-end fits together nicely, and lacks most of the small quirks have that tended to plague other distributions in the past.
Maybe we've reached an evolutionary critical mass, or maybe Ubuntu got lucky. Maybe they're really organized.... Whatever it is, Ubuntu is the real deal. As long as the applications are there (Oo.O needs a bit of help), the underlying system is definitely ready for general consumption.
From the perspective of a new computer user, I'd actually say that Ubuntu trumps both Windows and OS X in terms of user-friendliness and intuitiveness. I don't say this lightly, or with a grain of salt.
Although high oil prices will force us to live more frugally and locally (probably a good thing in terms of the environment), the US has the small problem that its transportation infrastructure is designed based around the roads. Cars specifically.
A coherent bus network simply doesn't exist, Amtrak is a pathetic mess, and Americans (white people, specifically*) hate the concept of public transport.
*I hate to bring race into this, but for whatever reason, it's more or less a heavily recurring trend that, outside of big cities, white Americans don't use public transportation. I'm white, in my 20s, and take the bus to work every day. It's an extremely rare situation to spot somebody from my own demographic on the bus that isn't also homeless.
Personally, I think it's something about the diners.
(and all of the sudden, I'm having a craving for Taylor Ham and cheese on a bagel......)
That's funny, because most of the banks by me have about 12 hours of downtime every day (24 on sundays and holidays...and if something goes wrong on a normal day, it's simply declared a "local bank holiday")
This is pretty much the way that grant money works in many disciplines. Don't budget for maintenance or "upgrades," or else the original bid is going to come in far too high to ever be approved in the first place.
Physicists often blame the cancellation of the SSC on the fact that it was realistically priced when it was canceled (and $2bn had already been thrown down the toilet).
That is sort of odd, considering that gas turbines and wind power fill two separate niches.
Wind power provides good support to base-load power, while gas turbines can fill demands during "peak" periods.
Also, there are fairly extensive atmospheric/climatic studies performed before sites are selected for wind farms. Given the height of the turbines, it's probably a pretty safe bet that there'll be some wind virtually all the time.
But that only begs the question...who would go to Delaware for a vacation?
If you're from New Jersey, just about anyplace else seems like paradise.....How *much* smaller are these TIFFs anyway? TIFF is actually a container format, and can support all sorts of compression, some of them proprietary, some of them common. Not all of them are lossless either (TIFF-Jpeg is a perfectly valid combination, and was used before the days of Exif to add metadata to jpegs). TIFFs can also include vectorized data. It's not all that much less complicated than a PDF.
PDFs are also a container format to an extent. You could very well have a TIFF embedded in a PDF. Fortunately for us, the PDF specification is a bit more stringent on what is supported and what isn't, and PDFs tend to work just about everywhere (especially if all that you've got is an image). You can also apply all sorts of compression to PDFs to reduce their file size... these might not be quite as well supported.
Both formats are extremely common, and it's extremely unlikely that you'll ever have to do any sort of conversion to display them. If I had to place money on it, I'd wager that PDF will be in widespread use for longer than TIFF, though neither format seems to be going anywhere anytime soon. You're more likely to have to worry about the storage devices you're using and the longevity of the media.
If you just need to store lossless raster images, PNG might be a good bet. It's a "Free" format, and is officially endorsed as an ISO/IEC standard. TIFF is copyrighted by adobe. It also has the advantage of being a complete image format, rather than just a container, which means that any software that can open a PNG image should be able to open *any* PNG. Because of its open-sourceness and widespread adoption, PNG will be around for a long time to come as well. Once again, the storage medium and filesystem that you use to store the images is very likely going to become obsolete before the file format itself.
Granted, PNG's compression algorithm isn't optimized for photographic data, though the image formats that *are* optimized for this purpose are neither common nor free.
In summary, there's no reason that a PDF needs to be terribly larger than a PDF (the overhead should be especially negligible if you've got lots of images at a high-resolution). Neither format is going away anytime soon, but both have quirks that can hurt you in the future (Multi-page TIFFs are even somewhat of an oddity today). If you really want small files and future-proofing, go with PNG. Otherwise, it's more or less a non-issue.
WebKit and Firefox have their own share of proprietary functions that are supposedly intended for internal/embedded use only.
I'm confused about how the "or later" wording doesn't allow the GPL maintainers to arbitrarily change the terms of the license to their liking by releasing it under a new version.
If the FSF decide to start taking drugs, and include a clause in GPLv4 that allows closed-source derivatives of GPLv4 software to be sold for profit, the same would seem to retroactively apply to all GPLv3 software. This would be bad.
On the other hand, the GPL has some very specific restrictions on how code may be modified or re-licensed. It's also got that fantastic clause that RMS may retroactively change the terms of your license at any time (Linus ignores that one).
Because the GPL doesn't acknowledge that free and non-free software can coexist.
Honestly, the fact that the Flash Player isn't free is less than ideal, but the fact that the GPL prohibits Ubuntu from distributing it in their main repositories seems a bit silly.
In the end, many are left feeling like an ideology is being forced on them. This has a somewhat negative effect upon the adoption of open-source in the business world. The code-sharing requirement is scary to many corporations, and introduces additional responsibilities, legal liabilities, and costs. Also, if said corporation is using one scrap of proprietary licensed code, things get 100x more complicated.
Although the GPL was created around the fear that corporations wouldn't contribute their code back (which they're not obligated to do with the BSD license), the end result is that companies simply don't use GPL code at all.
BSD-style licenses are nice, because they historically haven't impeded community development, but also don't scare off corporate users.
LGPL is a halfway-decent compromise, and has done a lot to help projects like KHTML/WebKit.
Obama is seriously the closest thing to an inscrutable candidate that we've had in a long, long time.
Although I generally don't like to give too much credit to anecdotes that happened 20 years ago, the fact that the press and the conservatives haven't been able to dig up anything substantial from his past is absolutely remarkable.
There are a lot of people trying to dig up dirt on this guy, and you can see their frustration in not finding anything substantive, as evidenced by the hilariously tenuous allegations made against him -- flag pins, "terrorist fist jabs," and his name have been the only things that the right has been able to stir up controversy with.
Now, a lot of this has to do with his age and relatively short political career, but in this day and age of such a sensationalistic media, it's absolutely remarkable that they've been able to dig up less dirt on a politician than they could on your average joe...
Like I've said, "dirt" tends to be a fairly poor indicator of political aptitude, as some of our best politicians in history have been absolute dirtbags, while major war criminals (eg. Hitler) have lived relatively straight-laced personal lives. There were some fairly serious allegations made against George Bush immediately before the 2000 election that, though true, didn't seem to have a huge effect on his presidency.
Personally, for me, I like to judge candidates based upon their voting record from their current political career.
You forgot the obligatory Ron Paul mention...
Really?
Hulu seems like an awfully nice compromise between watching "regular TV," and sifting through piles of low-quality crap on sidreel.
The general scheme is that you get excellent quality full episodes in a legal manner endorsed by the content producers (for which they get paid!).
In return, you have to watch a 10-30 second ad in each slot that would normally have a 4-5 minute commercial break on TV. In the end, this works out to about 2-3 minutes PER HOUR. For free and legal content, this seems like a fantastic compromise that mostly benefits the consumer.
Of course, if they increase the ads, my approval will be somewhat diminished, but in its current form, Hulu rocks.
However, comparing Obama's and McCain's senate records as a whole, I'm a whole lot more comfortable with the idea of Obama in office.
Never, ever vote on a single issue. Always look at the big picture. Telecom immunity is certainly a bad idea, although on the other hand, McCain's remarks last week on the Supreme Court's restoration of Habeas Corpus seems equally troubling.
There's also McCain's seeming approval of the past 8 years' foreign policy, along with his "Iraq in 100 years" comments, which scare the crap out of me.
Yes, but Ron Paul's interpretation of the constitution also seeks to overturn certain "norms" that have been around since the time of Alexander Hamilton (200+ years ago).
Ron Paul is on the fringe, and always will be. There's no way on earth he's actually going to be able to convince the senate, and the rest of the US that the gold standard is a good idea.
For a geeky point of comparison, Paul's a bit like RMS. He seems to have his heart in the right place, but is far too extreme to win over the hearts of the masses.
As a sidenote, he's not even an ardent supporter of small government. He supports a small federal government, and huge overbearing state governments. Small groups of Texans have been blowing this horn for as long as Texas has been a part of the union.
That's true. It's also true that this group is the group that ultimately defines what the rest of use, because they are the ones who produce the most documents, the most important documents, and use the high-end features that force the rest of us to use MS Office instead of, say, OpenOffice.org, for compatibility's sake.
Then why aren't we all using Linux?Don't think that the business world operates in a logical or sane manner. It doesn't by a long shot.
Well, if you only want to cite personal anecdotal evidence, I'll counter your argument by stating that I quite like it.
Commonly used functions have been moved to the toolbar, rather than buried in menus. The toolbars are also based around more of a task-oriented approach, which better suits the habits and mindset of most users. (The contents of the Format -> Cell window in Excel being the most egregious example).
Most people have never even heard of the functions you described, let alone learned their keystrokes. Those features aren't terribly high up on Microsoft's list of priorities. If you took the time to learn the keyboard shortcut to the obscure document properties dialog, odds are that you're perfectly capable of learning the new ones, or to assign a custom keystroke with the old combination (virtually everything in office can be assigned a custom keystroke).
I hate to say it, but users like yourself make up an infinitesimally small fraction of total users. A company needs to market/design their products for the masses, not the outliers.
There's a way around this.
IE6 was horrible, slow, insecure, and rendered HTML poorly.
Once Firefox got good enough for general consumption, many web developers stopped putting up with IE, and coded their sites to be mostly-standards compliant.
Users switched to Firefox to gain access to the cutting edge features, and found that it was easy to use, offered a few simple innovative features (tabs), and to be an overall improvement over IE.
In response, IE7 was vastly improved, and is seen as being reasonably on-par with Firefox in terms of supporting the "important" standards properly. There's still a ton of room for improvement, but the days of designing sites specifically around IE are over. The EEE cycle was broken.
Office, on the other hand, has the distinction of actually being better than anything else out there. Its decently fast, offers the features that people care about, and has an interface that most find familiar and easy to use (once they got used to it, people also quite liked the 2007 interface).
OOo, on the other hand stinks. Its slow, ugly, not terribly easy to use, and offers virtually nothing in the way of improvements or new & useful features. It's not quite as bad as early versions of The GIMP, but isn't much better. Apart from the price, there's very little reason for users to switch.
Apple's iWork does do many of these things, but isn't a fantastic candidate due to its platform dependence. Cost is also an issue, though at a fraction of the cost of Office, it remains fairly competitive.
Make an office suite that can legitimately compete with Microsoft, and the EEE cycle will have break in order for Microsoft to maintain their market share. It doesn't have to be Oo.o, and I honestly doubt that they will ever turn out a product that can compete with Microsoft. That doesn't mean that others can't, however!
5) Profit
Sure, the universe contains most of our resources, because by definition, the universe contains everything.