I suppose I could host a copy of the source on my site, but then, I want to put the file up on the common Marathon-mod sites or other such sites too. Do I have to put copies of the application source on those sites as well?
No.
And further, even if I were just to include a note with the project saying "I will post you a copy of the source on CD if you want it", how stringent must I be over here about making absolutely sure that I've got the source still backed up somewhere? If my HD dies and I don't have backups (which it almost did just recently... starting to keep some backups now), must I then stop all distribution of the project everywhere that it's online?
Ehm, since it is a GPLed game, in a case like this you can always get another copy of the source code from the original author.
Could they even have distributed it in the first place without first taking me up on my offer to send them a copy of the source? So I couldn't even upload it to such sites unless it was included in the same package, or the site agreed to host a copy of it themselves?
They can distribute the binaries without having the source because they do not modify the software in any way.
I agree with you. Yesterday I almost hit a cyclist who was driving on a sidewalk. I was backing out of a friends driveway onto a busy street. I was watching the trafic that kept coming from my right, waiting for a gap for me to back into. Every once a while I looked to the left to check for pedestrians on the sidewalk. When a gap in the trafic finally came, I started backing into it. I didn't check the left side, as I just checked 10 seconds before and there was nobody there. I didn't realize that there was a cyclist coming at pretty high speed. I didn't expect anything coming that fast from the left on that side of the road. Luckily we both avoided the collision at the very last second.
I think that a reasonable rule should be if you move at pedestrian speed, use the sidewalk, if you go faster, use the right side of the road. I don't bike a lot, but I do a lot of walking. I used to walk 5 miles to work and 5 back just for fun, rather than using public transport. When I approach a car backing out of a driveway, I always slow down and make sure the driver sees me before crossing the driveway. When you are going fast on a bike, you can't really do that.
There is very few professors they use books thay have themselves written. Most use books written by someone else. I would love to write a textbook for most classes I teach. Not to make money on it, but to have a book that explains things the way I like to explain them, and which contains examples and exercises I think are relevant. Like most other professors, I don't have the time.
As far as publishers bribing professors to use their books, I have heard about that happening. Everyone I know (maybe with one exception, I am kind of sorry I ever met that person) considers it extremely unethical.
I presume you were an undergraduate somewhere and know the ways you are forced to buy new texts. Minor revisions marketed as new editions, rotating question sets, etc.
Acually, in some higher education systems in the world, masters degree is the undergraduate degree. I assume he or she did not have to have a BS or whatnot before getting the masters. You attend a university or techical institute for 5 or 6 years and at the end you get the masters degree. Then, if you want to continue with graduate school, you go for a doctorate.
My understanding of the process is that the publisher sends professors a free copy of the new edition during the year, the prof looks at it, decides it isn't worse than the old version and when the time comes, the prof tells the bookstore what to order for the next year.
It's sort of like that, except:
1) usually from the profs point of view, new editions are pain in the ass. They usually renumber sections, exercises, which means spending several days going over your syllabus, recommended exercises and fixing all the numbers. Then half of the class shows up with the old edition, and turn in wrong problems for homework. Sometimes the disruptions are even larger, last year a new edition of an algebra and trig book moved one important section that was covered in our algebra class into completely different chapter, one that we cover in a trig class. The trig class already has too many sections in it as it is, so now we have to decide which sections to move from the trig class to the algebra class to sort of level it off.
2) Most of the time, the bookstore automatically orders the new editions if they are not told otherwise. I have even seen the bookstore ordering the new edition without telling the profs. One year all profs in a department I was teaching at showed up for a statistics class with different book than the students. The changes in the book were prety significant, and it took twoo weeks to get instructor copies from the publisher. The publisher somehow forgot to tell us they have a new edition.
3) Even if you decide to stick with an old edition, the publisher may refuse to ship it. Definitely tehy are goint to tell you they will run out couple years down the road. It did happen to me once, I found a nice algebra textbook and I decided it would be a good book to use in a class I was teaching. I contacted the publesher and they sent me their new edition. It was horrible. They completely changed the book, for worse. I asked if they still ship the old edition. They said they don't have enough copies, and ofered me to run a special print of them, at much higher price.
At our department, every time a new edition is announced for a book we use in one of our "large" classes, we establish a committee to look at all comparable textbooks from different publishers and to decide if we should use the new edition of the same book, or order something different. It is true that we primarily used to look at the quality of the book and match with our syllabus, but lately the pricetag is becoming an increasingly important factor in our decisions.
There are several issues here. First, at a research university, a professor's primary focus is usually on research Devoting the time to develop material for an introductory course would take away from the pursuits upon which tenure, promotion, and overall status is based. Most faculty in this setting teach in a manner which does not consume too much time and lets them devote their primary energy to their research. Maybe this isn't the way it should be, but it is generally this way at most US research universities.
You certainly have a point here. One think that may help here is some sort of collaborative effort, where whole bunch of people work on a textbook together. That way no single individual needs to put that much time into it.
Of course one problem is that each of us like to teach certain things in different way, and will necessarily end up arguing what is the best way;) But at least there could be a common ground text, where different teachers can adapt certain parts the way they like them.
Second, writing a decent textbook is actually quite difficult. There are a number of gifted authors who can explain notions in a way that many students can get, giving useful explantions without outrageous/distracting amounts of detail. Those people should write texts. Other people should not. There are a huge number of terrible texts written by people who thought they could do a better job than the standard texts and do not realize how difficult it is to communicate effectively on the written page. Even very gifted teachers who excel in the classroom (which is much more interactive setting than a text, even in 300+ student lectures) often have a hard time writing a good, readable textbook.
I don't think its really that bad. Again, cooperation and peer review can help a lot. When I want to college, most of our textbooks were basically just lecture notes written by our professors and printed by the university press, and most of them were very good.
Third, a decent text is actually a significant effort on the part of the publisher. These days, for example, people expect snazzy 3d figures and a level of clarity in figures and examples that is well beyond what a typical textbook author would be able to do themselves (it's really a different skillset.)
That's true, but 1) again, with a cooperative effort, you can easilly get someone on the team who is good at this sort of things. 2) My experience tells me that less and less students actually read the textbooks, so maybe the "snazzy 3d figures" and other stuff like that is actually a total waste of effort and money.
Given how many errors there are in a typical text, it may be hard to believe but it also takes a fair amount work proofreading, working out exercises so the investment is significant. People tend to underestimate the work it takes to do thing right, which is perhaps why there are so many terrible textbooks out there.
True, and this work is usually done by seriously underpaid grad students. But again, here is an advantage of "open source" textbooks where mistakes can be corrected as the are found, without having to wait for a next edition.
I don't know if the parent is a joke, I must say that I know whole bunch of students who approach their studies in exactly such way, and I must say that most of them fail miserably.
Buying a used textbook "as a cheat sheet" is incredibly stupid. You will not be able to use the book during your exams. If it makes your homework easy, it means you will not learn as much, and you will have more trouble on the exam. If you somehow pass the class this way, you will end up suffering in the next class.
You see, I don't care what most users want. What I wrote would fix windows for me. That's what I use, and that's what I like. And that's the problem with Microsoft. They sell a system designed for masses, but there will always be bunch of people who will find serious lack of fetures.
As far as free virtual desktop programs, yes there is a few. Mostly pretty pathetic. As I wrote before, I use VirtuaWin, which is pretty good, but it still does not really have the functionality I am used to from old fvwm, not because someone neglected to program it in there, but because it seems to conflict with bunch of windows ways of doing things.
As for focus follow mouse, IMHO it's the only way of doing things, if it's done right. Of course if you couple it with raise-on-focus, you have an annoying disaster.
Is far as I am concerned, if they want to fix Windows, they have to:
1) get rid of the stupid explorer desktop and put on a decent window manager, something with focus follow mouse and multiple desktops. And X style cut and paste. I am not talking about PowerToys or whatever they call it, that's a sad joke. VirtuaWin with TXMouse are better, they almost come close to what you could do with fvwm 15 years ago. But there needs to be something well integrated with the system, instead of a hack that is slaped on and working against all odds.
2) Good shell, with a good command line, completion, history, etc. Cygwin's bash is ok, but you have to install it separately, and it still does not integrate with the system well enough, you have to set your path, find where all the applications you need to use actually are, etc. There needs to be a good built-in shell, that will integrate with the system and give you full access to it from an easy to use command line. And it needs to be installed on default, so you don't need to go hunting for it all over the net.
3) Include a full TeX distribution on the Windows DVD already!
How in the world is the majority of customers going to benefit from MS keeping their protocols secret?
Also, perhaps the reason that so many customers do not mix environments is because MS makes it difficult by not properly documenting their protocols. Wait, I see it now: the customers benefit because they are not tempted to waste their time and resources on some inferior UNIX systems, instead they are forced to stick with clearly superior MS products. That's smart!
Or perhaps you should simply stick to musicians that are happy to allow you to download their work
That's what I do. I only bought about 10 CD's in last 6 or 7 years, and all of them were bought directly from the artists. All songs in my digital music collection have been downloaded directly from the artists' web sites.
Thats is sloppy on the BBC's part, they should have put the State in there. In this case it is Minnesota.
I don't think it's sloppy. That's not like anybody really cares. When you read news from Germany, they usually don't tell you whether it is Saxony or Bavaria or whatnot.
The whole argument about suits vs. sandals really is that people without a sense of aesthetic refuse to admit it.
I am not completely sure what suits vs. sandals have to do with aesthetic. I know plenty of artists, many of them very good, some of them relatively famous, who probably don't even own a suit.
1) it is not even clear whether anything breaks. The submitter warns us that it *may* break, because it is alpha release.
2) Even if things do break, it is to be expected. This is not even an alpha release, it is some random developer build that the submitter for some unknown reason calls an "alpha release". There is no reason for it to be compatible with anything at all, or even to do anything at all.
In short, this summary is one of the most idiotic things submitted to slashdot I have ever seen.
Now Firefox may have problems with backward compatibility, but it has nothing to do with this particular article.
That may be true in some areas, but definitely not universally. Besides, its pointless, because it does not have to take 17 years to catch up a 17 years gap.
I agree with this. I have tried Gnome, KDE, fluxbox and whatnot several times, and I always end up returning to my heavily customized fvwm based desktop environment. Most "experienced" computer users would probably be lost in it (I know my wife hates it). Interestingly, my kids very quickly learned how to use it. They seem to be equally comfortable in my "personal" desktop environment as in Gnome or Windows XP.
So some people definitely will bother. I bother in such extent that when given a new Windows computer at work, I always spend couple hours installing things like TXmouse, virtuawin, bash etc so I can get a system that at least slightly resembles my environment. I found out that the time spent doing that definitely pays off for me.
Seriously, not all applications are for what you call "average user". I wouldn't advocate that our secretary learns how to use Vim, but I also wouldn't use another editor if I could avoid it. And I certainly didn't write Vim.
This is a good point. I don't have this problem most of the time, since I mostly know what equation is there (and I do have some aligns and splits that take 3/4 of a page in some of my papers). I also use backward searching feature in my dvi viewers, jumping between the source and the rendered version all the time. And I am so "addicted" to vi keybinding that I am just slow like molases in LyX. As I said, if LyX had decent vi mode, it would definitely be a viable option for me.
I agree with you on the OO.org. I use it only when I have to open a MS document somebody sent me on Linux. But then, I only use Word and Powerpoint when I need to open a MS document somebody sent me on Windows.
Out of all the "ofice suite" programs, spreadsheet is the only one I actually use on regular basis, and as you say, gnumeric does just fine for me. I wish it had well designed conditional formating, but then again, none of the other spreadsheets has it. The sorry excuses for conditional formating that are in Excel and Calc are simply pathetic and unusable.
For presentations, I use LaTeX with beamer class. I can edit it easily on any platform, and the resulting pdf file will also display well on any platform. And you can do some pteryy neat stuff with it.
And remember that not everyone is technology-savvy, telling a guy who makes an average salary (say $70k a year, about $36/hr) that "he ought to learn LaTeX" is in many cases not the smartest idea-- his time is worth more than that, especially if IT is a support function for him.
I agree, but it has a twist. I know it is possible to use Word to create quite good looking documents, almost as good as with TeX. However, the amount of stuff you have to learn to be able to do that is not that much different from what you have to learn to use TeX.
It's true that most people are casual users of Word, don't need to produce professionally looking documents, and don't need to learn all that difficult stuff. But for those people, Office 97, or OO would do just fine. They would probably do even better with something simpler, like wordpad or perhaps Abiword, provided it worked the way it's supposed to and didn't have all sorts of weird quirks.
When you know the idea of structured documents, learning to use Word well and efficiently is surprisingly easy. I never used Word much before my last job. I had to learn it, but it took me about two or three days to get to the level where I was able to produce better documents than most of my co-workers (and that was a college, where my co-workers were not exactly dumb, they just didn't know much about things like document structure, logical markup etc.) Very soon I found myself fixing other people's documents, and soon I had became the "MS Office" guy on the floor. That was really funny, because I probably had the least amount of experience with Microsoft products, and I definitely didn't enjoy using them. I think that lerning LaTeX and HTML and all that stuff prepared me for using Word better than all the crash courses my colleagues took.
I used to use LyX a lot, I think it has the only usable equation editor I have ever seen, but ever since I started using Vim with LaTeX-suite, I completely abandoned LyX, because I can type so much faster in Vim. Maybe if LyX had vi keybindings, I would give it a try again.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't actually have any problem here.
I suppose I could host a copy of the source on my site, but then, I want to put the file up on the common Marathon-mod sites or other such sites too. Do I have to put copies of the application source on those sites as well?
No.
And further, even if I were just to include a note with the project saying "I will post you a copy of the source on CD if you want it", how stringent must I be over here about making absolutely sure that I've got the source still backed up somewhere? If my HD dies and I don't have backups (which it almost did just recently... starting to keep some backups now), must I then stop all distribution of the project everywhere that it's online?
Ehm, since it is a GPLed game, in a case like this you can always get another copy of the source code from the original author.
Could they even have distributed it in the first place without first taking me up on my offer to send them a copy of the source? So I couldn't even upload it to such sites unless it was included in the same package, or the site agreed to host a copy of it themselves?
They can distribute the binaries without having the source because they do not modify the software in any way.
I agree with you. Yesterday I almost hit a cyclist who was driving on a sidewalk. I was backing out of a friends driveway onto a busy street. I was watching the trafic that kept coming from my right, waiting for a gap for me to back into. Every once a while I looked to the left to check for pedestrians on the sidewalk. When a gap in the trafic finally came, I started backing into it. I didn't check the left side, as I just checked 10 seconds before and there was nobody there. I didn't realize that there was a cyclist coming at pretty high speed. I didn't expect anything coming that fast from the left on that side of the road. Luckily we both avoided the collision at the very last second.
I think that a reasonable rule should be if you move at pedestrian speed, use the sidewalk, if you go faster, use the right side of the road. I don't bike a lot, but I do a lot of walking. I used to walk 5 miles to work and 5 back just for fun, rather than using public transport. When I approach a car backing out of a driveway, I always slow down and make sure the driver sees me before crossing the driveway. When you are going fast on a bike, you can't really do that.
There is very few professors they use books thay have themselves written. Most use books written by someone else. I would love to write a textbook for most classes I teach. Not to make money on it, but to have a book that explains things the way I like to explain them, and which contains examples and exercises I think are relevant. Like most other professors, I don't have the time.
As far as publishers bribing professors to use their books, I have heard about that happening. Everyone I know (maybe with one exception, I am kind of sorry I ever met that person) considers it extremely unethical.
I presume you were an undergraduate somewhere and know the ways you are forced to buy new texts. Minor revisions marketed as new editions, rotating question sets, etc.
Acually, in some higher education systems in the world, masters degree is the undergraduate degree. I assume he or she did not have to have a BS or whatnot before getting the masters. You attend a university or techical institute for 5 or 6 years and at the end you get the masters degree. Then, if you want to continue with graduate school, you go for a doctorate.
My understanding of the process is that the publisher sends professors a free copy of the new edition during the year, the prof looks at it, decides it isn't worse than the old version and when the time comes, the prof tells the bookstore what to order for the next year.
It's sort of like that, except:
1) usually from the profs point of view, new editions are pain in the ass. They usually renumber sections, exercises, which means spending several days going over your syllabus, recommended exercises and fixing all the numbers. Then half of the class shows up with the old edition, and turn in wrong problems for homework. Sometimes the disruptions are even larger, last year a new edition of an algebra and trig book moved one important section that was covered in our algebra class into completely different chapter, one that we cover in a trig class. The trig class already has too many sections in it as it is, so now we have to decide which sections to move from the trig class to the algebra class to sort of level it off.
2) Most of the time, the bookstore automatically orders the new editions if they are not told otherwise. I have even seen the bookstore ordering the new edition without telling the profs. One year all profs in a department I was teaching at showed up for a statistics class with different book than the students. The changes in the book were prety significant, and it took twoo weeks to get instructor copies from the publisher. The publisher somehow forgot to tell us they have a new edition.
3) Even if you decide to stick with an old edition, the publisher may refuse to ship it. Definitely tehy are goint to tell you they will run out couple years down the road. It did happen to me once, I found a nice algebra textbook and I decided it would be a good book to use in a class I was teaching. I contacted the publesher and they sent me their new edition. It was horrible. They completely changed the book, for worse. I asked if they still ship the old edition. They said they don't have enough copies, and ofered me to run a special print of them, at much higher price.
At our department, every time a new edition is announced for a book we use in one of our "large" classes, we establish a committee to look at all comparable textbooks from different publishers and to decide if we should use the new edition of the same book, or order something different. It is true that we primarily used to look at the quality of the book and match with our syllabus, but lately the pricetag is becoming an increasingly important factor in our decisions.
There are several issues here. First, at a research university, a professor's primary focus is usually on research Devoting the time to develop material for an introductory course would take away from the pursuits upon which tenure, promotion, and overall status is based. Most faculty in this setting teach in a manner which does not consume too much time and lets them devote their primary energy to their research. Maybe this isn't the way it should be, but it is generally this way at most US research universities.
;) But at least there could be a common ground text, where different teachers can adapt certain parts the way they like them.
You certainly have a point here. One think that may help here is some sort of collaborative effort, where whole bunch of people work on a textbook together. That way no single individual needs to put that much time into it.
Of course one problem is that each of us like to teach certain things in different way, and will necessarily end up arguing what is the best way
Second, writing a decent textbook is actually quite difficult. There are a number of gifted authors who can explain notions in a way that many students can get, giving useful explantions without outrageous/distracting amounts of detail. Those people should write texts. Other people should not. There are a huge number of terrible texts written by people who thought they could do a better job than the standard texts and do not realize how difficult it is to communicate effectively on the written page. Even very gifted teachers who excel in the classroom (which is much more interactive setting than a text, even in 300+ student lectures) often have a hard time writing a good, readable textbook.
I don't think its really that bad. Again, cooperation and peer review can help a lot. When I want to college, most of our textbooks were basically just lecture notes written by our professors and printed by the university press, and most of them were very good.
Third, a decent text is actually a significant effort on the part of the publisher. These days, for example, people expect snazzy 3d figures and a level of clarity in figures and examples that is well beyond what a typical textbook author would be able to do themselves (it's really a different skillset.)
That's true, but
1) again, with a cooperative effort, you can easilly get someone on the team who is good at this sort of things.
2) My experience tells me that less and less students actually read the textbooks, so maybe the "snazzy 3d figures" and other stuff like that is actually a total waste of effort and money.
Given how many errors there are in a typical text, it may be hard to believe but it also takes a fair amount work proofreading, working out exercises so the investment is significant. People tend to underestimate the work it takes to do thing right, which is perhaps why there are so many terrible textbooks out there.
True, and this work is usually done by seriously underpaid grad students. But again, here is an advantage of "open source" textbooks where mistakes can be corrected as the are found, without having to wait for a next edition.
I don't know if the parent is a joke, I must say that I know whole bunch of students who approach their studies in exactly such way, and I must say that most of them fail miserably.
Buying a used textbook "as a cheat sheet" is incredibly stupid. You will not be able to use the book during your exams. If it makes your homework easy, it means you will not learn as much, and you will have more trouble on the exam. If you somehow pass the class this way, you will end up suffering in the next class.
You see, I don't care what most users want. What I wrote would fix windows for me. That's what I use, and that's what I like. And that's the problem with Microsoft. They sell a system designed for masses, but there will always be bunch of people who will find serious lack of fetures.
As far as free virtual desktop programs, yes there is a few. Mostly pretty pathetic. As I wrote before, I use VirtuaWin, which is pretty good, but it still does not really have the functionality I am used to from old fvwm, not because someone neglected to program it in there, but because it seems to conflict with bunch of windows ways of doing things.
As for focus follow mouse, IMHO it's the only way of doing things, if it's done right. Of course if you couple it with raise-on-focus, you have an annoying disaster.
Is far as I am concerned, if they want to fix Windows, they have to:
1) get rid of the stupid explorer desktop and put on a decent window manager, something with focus follow mouse and multiple desktops. And X style cut and paste. I am not talking about PowerToys or whatever they call it, that's a sad joke. VirtuaWin with TXMouse are better, they almost come close to what you could do with fvwm 15 years ago. But there needs to be something well integrated with the system, instead of a hack that is slaped on and working against all odds.
2) Good shell, with a good command line, completion, history, etc. Cygwin's bash is ok, but you have to install it separately, and it still does not integrate with the system well enough, you have to set your path, find where all the applications you need to use actually are, etc. There needs to be a good built-in shell, that will integrate with the system and give you full access to it from an easy to use command line. And it needs to be installed on default, so you don't need to go hunting for it all over the net.
3) Include a full TeX distribution on the Windows DVD already!
Not for half the planet, it isn't. You know there is a 'Southern' hemisphere, right?
But there is nobody living there! Think about it, people there would be upside down, and they would fall off, anyway.
It's not empty, it's filled with peeps.
Cygwin
TXMouse
Virtuawin
gvim
proTeXt
How in the world is the majority of customers going to benefit from MS keeping their protocols secret?
Also, perhaps the reason that so many customers do not mix environments is because MS makes it difficult by not properly documenting their protocols. Wait, I see it now: the customers benefit because they are not tempted to waste their time and resources on some inferior UNIX systems, instead they are forced to stick with clearly superior MS products. That's smart!
Or perhaps you should simply stick to musicians that are happy to allow you to download their work
That's what I do. I only bought about 10 CD's in last 6 or 7 years, and all of them were bought directly from the artists. All songs in my digital music collection have been downloaded directly from the artists' web sites.
Thats is sloppy on the BBC's part, they should have put the State in there. In this case it is Minnesota.
I don't think it's sloppy. That's not like anybody really cares. When you read news from Germany, they usually don't tell you whether it is Saxony or Bavaria or whatnot.
The whole argument about suits vs. sandals really is that people without a sense of aesthetic refuse to admit it.
I am not completely sure what suits vs. sandals have to do with aesthetic. I know plenty of artists, many of them very good, some of them relatively famous, who probably don't even own a suit.
In this particular case:
1) it is not even clear whether anything breaks. The submitter warns us that it *may* break, because it is alpha release.
2) Even if things do break, it is to be expected. This is not even an alpha release, it is some random developer build that the submitter for some unknown reason calls an "alpha release". There is no reason for it to be compatible with anything at all, or even to do anything at all.
In short, this summary is one of the most idiotic things submitted to slashdot I have ever seen.
Now Firefox may have problems with backward compatibility, but it has nothing to do with this particular article.
That may be true in some areas, but definitely not universally. Besides, its pointless, because it does not have to take 17 years to catch up a 17 years gap.
I agree with this. I have tried Gnome, KDE, fluxbox and whatnot several times, and I always end up returning to my heavily customized fvwm based desktop environment. Most "experienced" computer users would probably be lost in it (I know my wife hates it). Interestingly, my kids very quickly learned how to use it. They seem to be equally comfortable in my "personal" desktop environment as in Gnome or Windows XP.
So some people definitely will bother. I bother in such extent that when given a new Windows computer at work, I always spend couple hours installing things like TXmouse, virtuawin, bash etc so I can get a system that at least slightly resembles my environment. I found out that the time spent doing that definitely pays off for me.
But who cares? :)
Seriously, not all applications are for what you call "average user". I wouldn't advocate that our secretary learns how to use Vim, but I also wouldn't use another editor if I could avoid it. And I certainly didn't write Vim.
This is a good point. I don't have this problem most of the time, since I mostly know what equation is there (and I do have some aligns and splits that take 3/4 of a page in some of my papers). I also use backward searching feature in my dvi viewers, jumping between the source and the rendered version all the time. And I am so "addicted" to vi keybinding that I am just slow like molases in LyX. As I said, if LyX had decent vi mode, it would definitely be a viable option for me.
I agree with you on the OO.org. I use it only when I have to open a MS document somebody sent me on Linux. But then, I only use Word and Powerpoint when I need to open a MS document somebody sent me on Windows.
Out of all the "ofice suite" programs, spreadsheet is the only one I actually use on regular basis, and as you say, gnumeric does just fine for me. I wish it had well designed conditional formating, but then again, none of the other spreadsheets has it. The sorry excuses for conditional formating that are in Excel and Calc are simply pathetic and unusable.
For presentations, I use LaTeX with beamer class. I can edit it easily on any platform, and the resulting pdf file will also display well on any platform. And you can do some pteryy neat stuff with it.
And remember that not everyone is technology-savvy, telling a guy who makes an average salary (say $70k a year, about $36/hr) that "he ought to learn LaTeX" is in many cases not the smartest idea-- his time is worth more than that, especially if IT is a support function for him.
I agree, but it has a twist. I know it is possible to use Word to create quite good looking documents, almost as good as with TeX. However, the amount of stuff you have to learn to be able to do that is not that much different from what you have to learn to use TeX.
It's true that most people are casual users of Word, don't need to produce professionally looking documents, and don't need to learn all that difficult stuff. But for those people, Office 97, or OO would do just fine. They would probably do even better with something simpler, like wordpad or perhaps Abiword, provided it worked the way it's supposed to and didn't have all sorts of weird quirks.
When you know the idea of structured documents, learning to use Word well and efficiently is surprisingly easy. I never used Word much before my last job. I had to learn it, but it took me about two or three days to get to the level where I was able to produce better documents than most of my co-workers (and that was a college, where my co-workers were not exactly dumb, they just didn't know much about things like document structure, logical markup etc.) Very soon I found myself fixing other people's documents, and soon I had became the "MS Office" guy on the floor. That was really funny, because I probably had the least amount of experience with Microsoft products, and I definitely didn't enjoy using them. I think that lerning LaTeX and HTML and all that stuff prepared me for using Word better than all the crash courses my colleagues took.
I used to use LyX a lot, I think it has the only usable equation editor I have ever seen, but ever since I started using Vim with LaTeX-suite, I completely abandoned LyX, because I can type so much faster in Vim. Maybe if LyX had vi keybindings, I would give it a try again.