No it really doesnt. The entire video was broadcast btw, though for some reason there is a strong urban legend to the contrary. I guess a lot of people really want to believe otherwise. King deserved to be arrested, and force was clearly justified to subdue him. I dont know anyone that ever questioned that. The cops in question went for 'ultraviolence' which at best reflects poor training but that wasnt unusual or remarkable. What was remarkable, however, was that long after the 'suspect' was effectively subdued, the beating continued. That transformed what was otherwise a case of poor but legal police work into a criminal assault.
We're talking about force used to subdue a suspect, not "punish" them. Where did you even get that idea? When a possibly drugged-up suspect with a seasoned criminal history leads you on a car chase and lunges at the cops, that's all going to factor in to whether or not force is going to have to be used to subdue him - if the guy is assaulting the police officers, you're probably going to need to use some. It has nothing to do with any kind of "justified punishment".
That is a pretty good attempt but it just doesnt cut it. You cant justify using force to subdue someone who is already subdued. At that point punishment is the kindest word for it - I would call it sadism.
No, a one-time pad is a type of cipher, while a codebook is an element of a code. Quite different categories of encryption, very dissimilar.
In a one-time pad, the pad is used as a key for a cipher process, where each letter in the message is transformed into a different letter using a different cipher, based on the corresponding letter in the key. Since each succeeding letter is encrypted with a different simple cipher, this immunizes the message from statistical analysis which otherwise allows simple ciphers to be cracked rather easily.
With a codebook no ciphers are involved. A codebook is sort of like a DNA server but with a 1:1 ratio between numbers and domain names that is preserved going either way. Each element in the codebook is a word or phrase in plane, which is represented with a specific sequence of letters and/or numbers. Individual characters are generally not encoded, just words and/or phrases. Since it is not based on a mathematical transformation of the original message it isnt vulnerable to the same attacks as a cipher.
If only we had a device capable of permutating every possible combination.
If only it were that easy. Unfortunately without knowing what kind of code or cipher this is the possible permutations are pretty much infinite. It seems very likely to me from glancing at it that this is a simple substitution cipher from a one-time pad, but I could easily be wrong. IF that is correct, then yes, a modern computer shouldnt have real difficulty calculating all the possible permutations. Unfortunately that doesnt mean you have solved it, you will be looking at a very large number of possible plaintexts. Even once you use another computer program to reject ones that are obviously wrong, you may still have quite a few possibles to review by hand. And it's quite possible that more than one of them will actually make sense, in which case you STILL have no way to tell which one is right. You cant even be sure that any of them are right, if there isnt some way to independently verify your assumptions. That sort of decryption method will produce intelligent messages when used to analyse meaningless noise.
Only one thing I see right off that is 'just wrong.' It looks like a stock sony vaio, I would not recommend operating any machine with a hard drive from a bicycle mount personally. A decent netbook with an SSD is going to be far less prone to catastrophic failure from normal use in this application.
I see a big problem with the power and tax money of the state being used to force children into a monopolistic school system which proceeds to treat them as, and condition them to accept being treated as, cattle. I really do. A school in a free society should be geared towards teaching children the exact opposite of what this is teaching them. If our schools were doing their jobs, most or all of the students would be refusing to go along with this, instead of just one.
Sorry but that is nothing but recycled propaganda. In fact the Japanese were already begging to surrender. The only thing blocking peace was that they wanted a negotiated agreement that the Emperor would be left in place ceremonially and the US demanded 'unconditional surrender.' Which was received after dropping two nukes. And the Emperor was never deposed anyway.
The real reason to drop the bombs had nothing whatsoever to do with the prostrate and exhausted Empire of Japan. It was done to send a message to the Soviet Union.
It doesnt matter what they intend. They have shipped modified kernels and they must release those, period.
Of course, they would still have to release source for the kernels they have already distributed.
Exactly what I was saying. The ones they have shipped, the ones they are now shipping, and the ones they will ship in the future. If they 'intend' to do something different later, that changes nothing and matters not at all.
It's interesting to see how fragmented the anti-science people are.
Indeed. The creationist/intelligent design nuts and the global warming/mother gaia is going to fry us all crowd dont tend to overlap at all. Unfortunately, between them, they do add up to a seriously frightening anti-science movement, however.
The thing is, the Bible really doesnt even say that. That's a fictitious creation of a particular interpretation of the Bible, not anything actually there in the text.
For whatever it's worth, I put out my resume in two forms last time I was jobsearching - a.doc file and a.pdf. I used a word processor - LibreOffice - to typeset the document. In my defense we are talking about a very short document and the tool in question, while not perfect, was adequate and crucially capable of producing both filetypes with no fuss.
So I attached both versions and indicated that the.pdf should be used for printing or viewing but the.doc was attached for automatic parsers. It worked well, the interviewer at my current job mentioned being impressed by it in fact.
Your wife, individually, would see no benefit at all in that situation. If these documents are being electronically submitted they are probably parsed by machine and no human ever really sees or cares what they look like anyway. I have had to deal with many systems like that in the past. I usually just compose the text in a text editor and paste it into a word processor moments before sending it. While muttering under my breath about the fool that made this system using completely inappropriate building blocks and thus forcing me to follow suit in order to work... anyhow.
When the time comes she does need to produce a professional document though... something truly important, that is the time she would benefit from better tools. And sadly, if she never tries to learn them before that point, she will probably just use what she knows, and produce a result that is significantly less impressive than she was really capable of.
The danger, particularly in academia, is that people get so accustomed to the lesser solution they then continue to use it even in areas where it isnt suited, and as a result the overall quality of the work produced is going down. I am sure this is not the only factor behind it but still.
There is no reason I can think of that any system that requires.doc files be submitted couldnt have been better implemented using text files.
Passive solar design is great, and if you think I am against that sort of thing remember you dont know me at all. The truth is the opposite. I put a few years of my life into that with no regrets in fact.
But it is so much more than that. Many of these 'green' technologies are pushed out immature, at great expense and no real gain, just political stunts. 'Carbon neutrality' is a very dangerous goal, if pursued with currently available technology 'retreat to the dark ages' would be a good description of the result. Smaller population sounds good until you think about how that could actually come about. We live in an energy based economy and carbon neutrality would certainly mean impoverishing ourselves globally. The thrust of technological progress for centuries has been to bring more and more wealth and opportunity to the masses. The privileged elites have grown richer as well, but for some people it isnt enough to be rich - not without an underclass to lord it over. Making energy (the true basis of our modern economy) more expensive serves nicely to impoverish the rank and file of society while leaving plenty of room for the elites to preserve their own wealth and power.
That sounds like a great idea if you dont think about it, but it's really a horrible one. The attackers would simply set the rockets up near their enemies and leave them on a timer, then wait for Israeli artillery to kill two birds for them in one counter-barrage.
The interesting thing is that apparently at least some of these longer range missiles are the same old short range ones, lightened up for longer range by the simple expedient of removing the warhead leaving nothing but a tube and motor. This appears to be a low-tech strategy against Iron Dome, considering the costs of the interceptors versus the cost of said dumb tube+motor. A rocket like that can do some property damage and might kill someone who got unlucky but it is nowhere near as destructive as one with a warhead. I bet it's a LOT cheaper than a single shot from the Iron Dome launcher as well...
Their leader, in a car, on a public street, is a legitimate military target in your mind? If Hamas hit Netanyahu or Lieberman this way you would call that a fair strike then? Even if some civilians had the bad luck to be in the blast radius, it's still a fair shot right? I doubt it. I am pretty sure if they pulled that off you would call it a terrorist attack.
If you just want to freestyle the layout, a word processor seems to be far easier and more flexible in terms of changing things on the fly.
Yes, and that is the crux of the difference. In a word processor you deal with formatting and text simultaneously, you 'freestyle the layout' as you say. Your 'freestyling' is a creative state, but it's being wasted when it gets sidetracked into unimportant layout decisions from the beginning, before you even really have a text to be laid out.
You should do your creative work in a text editor instead. Emacs and VI are great if you are comfortable with them, but any simple unformatted text editor will do in a pinch. Having no formatting buttons to play with forces you to direct your creative juices towards generating a good text instead.
You shouldnt even be thinking about what fonts to use or where the pagebreaks are going to go until you have that text pretty close to its final state. THEN pull it into LyX or whatever to tidy up your markup, apply your template, and produce a final document from a well-editted text. This is a method of producing high quality documents, both in terms of substance and style.
The Word Processor, on the other hand... it offers all kinds of layout controls that are really a trap, but fine, say we avoid those pitfalls - it's still both more and less than it should be. Even if we *are* disciplined enough to use it like a text editor early in the life of the document, these things just arent very good in the role of a text editor. It's absolutely possible to get by using WP programs to produce documents (as their popularity obviously attests!) but they are not a suitable method to produce *high quality* documents. From the initial creative efforts to the final acts of polish, the word processor seems almost designed to lead the user astray, designed to lead him to create a poorer text, and lay it out on the page poorly as well.
And no, I am not Greg. I do understand the point is slightly arcane to most people, but nonetheless I believe it's accurate. Considering how many people spend much of their time producing documents on their computer it's a bit strange to see them using such a poorly suited tool, but when you realise that for the most part they simply dont understand, are using what they are given without knowing any better, and criticially *that for most of them quality isnt so important* it actually makes perfect sense. Even assuming perfect knowledge (rather that advertising-shaped mass prejudice) many people would be happier with a word processor because they arent capable/needful/desirous of actually creating *high quality* documents to begin with. Cheap and amateurish is just fine in many cases.
No. You're putting words in my mouth, and badly.
You should be able to install whatever you want, I agree.
However when you try to install a rootkit the system should certainly do a double take and start squawking. This is one of the very few cases where second-guessing the user with redundant dialogues actually makes sense. "Are you really really sure? You sure you're sure? You cant be serious can you!? Really?" Or better yet just make sure it cant be done by default. Advanced users that really understand what they are doing and have a reason to run such a thing could still remove the checks and recompile.
Sounds like you're more concerned about the purity of the task rather than the outcome.
Sounds like you have a preconceived notion you are trying to project here. Without cause.
If Word can be used to write a thesis (completely with diagrams, tables and other elements), then it has done its job.
And if Microsoft Excel can be used to keep track of many important small business databases, then it must be doing a good job as a database, amiright?
Please. Just because it is possible to do a job with a completely unsuitable tool does NOT make that tool a good choice.
Doesn't matter if LaTeX was a better option for this sort of thing - Word is easier, more accessible and more approachable (partially due to its pervasiveness, and partly due to its interface).
Almost entirely because of its pervasiveness. It is a horrible, confusing interface and that should not be minimised. But it is still more 'approachable' in a sense, compared to learning two distinct and much more sophisticated tools, sure. For someone that actually uses it once a year or less, that would be a convincing argument in its favor. For the rest of us, however, it really isnt.
I wrote my thesis using LyX (a LaTeX GUI frontend for, well, humans) because my supervisor told me to, and said if I write it in Word he would "kill me".
Your supervisor was right. I hope one day you learn to appreciate that fact.
But... Word would still have worked. Nowadays I would have used LibreOffice just because I like FOSS, but the same point remains.
"Worked" in what sense though? Not in any sense beyond the most crude and basic. You would have produced a 'document' that didnt have the full attributes of either a full document or a text, that was no semantically parseable, that was not coherent either as a text or as a typeset document, but just barely-probably-cross-your-fingers close enough on all accounts to get your grade. Probably.
Instead, because you lucked out and got an advisor that knew of what he spoke, you produced a proper text, a document that is fully parseable, preserves all the important semantic data (not just brute formatting information) and will be easily parseable and searchable not just today but in 10 or even 20 years.
These people are as about as much of a "hunter" as a clay pigeon shooter is.
That may be more true than you realise. You see, shooting clay pidgeons is NOT hunting, but plenty of hunters DO shoot clay pidgeons for practice. Same goes for live pidgeons in the view of many.
I dont approve of what they are doing, but I sure as heck approve even less of the morons that are harassing them. Blasting the crap out of their little spy-bot is pretty darn tame compared to a lot of retaliatory tactics that would be perfectly justified in this situation. I invite these fools to bring their toy down south a little, those Penn guys arent very good shots, they let it get away. Bring it down here to my property and you wont be looking at repairs, you will have to buy a brand new unit every flight.
GTK went full retard. Distros followed like lemmings. You can still install a sane system that doesnt include GTK and install the libraries you need.
If someone hasnt written that script yet, and it would really be so much nicer to have it, why dont you write it?
The problems you describe with an old game are all solvable. Many of my older games will never run right on modern versions of windows, however.
As a general rule, these things fall into one of two categories on windows. Some things do 'just work' but many others 'just break' and for all practical purposes they are unfixable. On linux it might be more work to figure out how to make the average game go, but it's also much less likely that your old program 'just broke' and cannot be fixed.
Useful it is to a degree, because of network effects. But from a technical point of view it's just wrong from beginning to end. MSOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, WordPerfect even, it doesnt matter, Word Processing is just a poor metaphor to start with, and anything built on it is built on a rotten foundation. Text processing and desktop publishing are two very different tasks, and performing each task with a tool appropriate to the job is always going to be better than using a single mongrel tool that doesnt do either job properly.
TeX most likely. Assuming that 'document' is really the best description of the thing. Many things seem to go by that description lately that just dont fit it, however.
Slashdot Mirror
No it really doesnt. The entire video was broadcast btw, though for some reason there is a strong urban legend to the contrary. I guess a lot of people really want to believe otherwise. King deserved to be arrested, and force was clearly justified to subdue him. I dont know anyone that ever questioned that. The cops in question went for 'ultraviolence' which at best reflects poor training but that wasnt unusual or remarkable. What was remarkable, however, was that long after the 'suspect' was effectively subdued, the beating continued. That transformed what was otherwise a case of poor but legal police work into a criminal assault.
That is a pretty good attempt but it just doesnt cut it. You cant justify using force to subdue someone who is already subdued. At that point punishment is the kindest word for it - I would call it sadism.
No, a one-time pad is a type of cipher, while a codebook is an element of a code. Quite different categories of encryption, very dissimilar.
In a one-time pad, the pad is used as a key for a cipher process, where each letter in the message is transformed into a different letter using a different cipher, based on the corresponding letter in the key. Since each succeeding letter is encrypted with a different simple cipher, this immunizes the message from statistical analysis which otherwise allows simple ciphers to be cracked rather easily.
With a codebook no ciphers are involved. A codebook is sort of like a DNA server but with a 1:1 ratio between numbers and domain names that is preserved going either way. Each element in the codebook is a word or phrase in plane, which is represented with a specific sequence of letters and/or numbers. Individual characters are generally not encoded, just words and/or phrases. Since it is not based on a mathematical transformation of the original message it isnt vulnerable to the same attacks as a cipher.
If only it were that easy. Unfortunately without knowing what kind of code or cipher this is the possible permutations are pretty much infinite. It seems very likely to me from glancing at it that this is a simple substitution cipher from a one-time pad, but I could easily be wrong. IF that is correct, then yes, a modern computer shouldnt have real difficulty calculating all the possible permutations. Unfortunately that doesnt mean you have solved it, you will be looking at a very large number of possible plaintexts. Even once you use another computer program to reject ones that are obviously wrong, you may still have quite a few possibles to review by hand. And it's quite possible that more than one of them will actually make sense, in which case you STILL have no way to tell which one is right. You cant even be sure that any of them are right, if there isnt some way to independently verify your assumptions. That sort of decryption method will produce intelligent messages when used to analyse meaningless noise.
Only one thing I see right off that is 'just wrong.' It looks like a stock sony vaio, I would not recommend operating any machine with a hard drive from a bicycle mount personally. A decent netbook with an SSD is going to be far less prone to catastrophic failure from normal use in this application.
I see a big problem with the power and tax money of the state being used to force children into a monopolistic school system which proceeds to treat them as, and condition them to accept being treated as, cattle. I really do. A school in a free society should be geared towards teaching children the exact opposite of what this is teaching them. If our schools were doing their jobs, most or all of the students would be refusing to go along with this, instead of just one.
Sorry but that is nothing but recycled propaganda. In fact the Japanese were already begging to surrender. The only thing blocking peace was that they wanted a negotiated agreement that the Emperor would be left in place ceremonially and the US demanded 'unconditional surrender.' Which was received after dropping two nukes. And the Emperor was never deposed anyway.
The real reason to drop the bombs had nothing whatsoever to do with the prostrate and exhausted Empire of Japan. It was done to send a message to the Soviet Union.
It doesnt matter what they intend. They have shipped modified kernels and they must release those, period.
Exactly what I was saying. The ones they have shipped, the ones they are now shipping, and the ones they will ship in the future. If they 'intend' to do something different later, that changes nothing and matters not at all.
Indeed. The creationist/intelligent design nuts and the global warming/mother gaia is going to fry us all crowd dont tend to overlap at all. Unfortunately, between them, they do add up to a seriously frightening anti-science movement, however.
The thing is, the Bible really doesnt even say that. That's a fictitious creation of a particular interpretation of the Bible, not anything actually there in the text.
No. It doesnt matter what they intend. They still have to make their modifications public regardless.
For whatever it's worth, I put out my resume in two forms last time I was jobsearching - a .doc file and a .pdf. I used a word processor - LibreOffice - to typeset the document. In my defense we are talking about a very short document and the tool in question, while not perfect, was adequate and crucially capable of producing both filetypes with no fuss.
So I attached both versions and indicated that the .pdf should be used for printing or viewing but the .doc was attached for automatic parsers. It worked well, the interviewer at my current job mentioned being impressed by it in fact.
Your wife, individually, would see no benefit at all in that situation. If these documents are being electronically submitted they are probably parsed by machine and no human ever really sees or cares what they look like anyway. I have had to deal with many systems like that in the past. I usually just compose the text in a text editor and paste it into a word processor moments before sending it. While muttering under my breath about the fool that made this system using completely inappropriate building blocks and thus forcing me to follow suit in order to work... anyhow.
When the time comes she does need to produce a professional document though... something truly important, that is the time she would benefit from better tools. And sadly, if she never tries to learn them before that point, she will probably just use what she knows, and produce a result that is significantly less impressive than she was really capable of.
The danger, particularly in academia, is that people get so accustomed to the lesser solution they then continue to use it even in areas where it isnt suited, and as a result the overall quality of the work produced is going down. I am sure this is not the only factor behind it but still.
There is no reason I can think of that any system that requires .doc files be submitted couldnt have been better implemented using text files.
False.
Neither is Israel.
A most inhumane position. If you must apply it, you should at least do so consistently, and care nothing for what happens to either side.
Personally I am concerned for all unjustly harmed regardless of which semitic language they speak.
Why does Hamas have to do that before they hit the IDF, but the IDF doesnt have to do that before hitting Hamas?
Passive solar design is great, and if you think I am against that sort of thing remember you dont know me at all. The truth is the opposite. I put a few years of my life into that with no regrets in fact.
But it is so much more than that. Many of these 'green' technologies are pushed out immature, at great expense and no real gain, just political stunts. 'Carbon neutrality' is a very dangerous goal, if pursued with currently available technology 'retreat to the dark ages' would be a good description of the result. Smaller population sounds good until you think about how that could actually come about. We live in an energy based economy and carbon neutrality would certainly mean impoverishing ourselves globally. The thrust of technological progress for centuries has been to bring more and more wealth and opportunity to the masses. The privileged elites have grown richer as well, but for some people it isnt enough to be rich - not without an underclass to lord it over. Making energy (the true basis of our modern economy) more expensive serves nicely to impoverish the rank and file of society while leaving plenty of room for the elites to preserve their own wealth and power.
That sounds like a great idea if you dont think about it, but it's really a horrible one. The attackers would simply set the rockets up near their enemies and leave them on a timer, then wait for Israeli artillery to kill two birds for them in one counter-barrage.
The interesting thing is that apparently at least some of these longer range missiles are the same old short range ones, lightened up for longer range by the simple expedient of removing the warhead leaving nothing but a tube and motor. This appears to be a low-tech strategy against Iron Dome, considering the costs of the interceptors versus the cost of said dumb tube+motor. A rocket like that can do some property damage and might kill someone who got unlucky but it is nowhere near as destructive as one with a warhead. I bet it's a LOT cheaper than a single shot from the Iron Dome launcher as well...
Their leader, in a car, on a public street, is a legitimate military target in your mind? If Hamas hit Netanyahu or Lieberman this way you would call that a fair strike then? Even if some civilians had the bad luck to be in the blast radius, it's still a fair shot right? I doubt it. I am pretty sure if they pulled that off you would call it a terrorist attack.
Yes, and that is the crux of the difference. In a word processor you deal with formatting and text simultaneously, you 'freestyle the layout' as you say. Your 'freestyling' is a creative state, but it's being wasted when it gets sidetracked into unimportant layout decisions from the beginning, before you even really have a text to be laid out.
You should do your creative work in a text editor instead. Emacs and VI are great if you are comfortable with them, but any simple unformatted text editor will do in a pinch. Having no formatting buttons to play with forces you to direct your creative juices towards generating a good text instead.
You shouldnt even be thinking about what fonts to use or where the pagebreaks are going to go until you have that text pretty close to its final state. THEN pull it into LyX or whatever to tidy up your markup, apply your template, and produce a final document from a well-editted text. This is a method of producing high quality documents, both in terms of substance and style.
The Word Processor, on the other hand... it offers all kinds of layout controls that are really a trap, but fine, say we avoid those pitfalls - it's still both more and less than it should be. Even if we *are* disciplined enough to use it like a text editor early in the life of the document, these things just arent very good in the role of a text editor. It's absolutely possible to get by using WP programs to produce documents (as their popularity obviously attests!) but they are not a suitable method to produce *high quality* documents. From the initial creative efforts to the final acts of polish, the word processor seems almost designed to lead the user astray, designed to lead him to create a poorer text, and lay it out on the page poorly as well.
And no, I am not Greg. I do understand the point is slightly arcane to most people, but nonetheless I believe it's accurate. Considering how many people spend much of their time producing documents on their computer it's a bit strange to see them using such a poorly suited tool, but when you realise that for the most part they simply dont understand, are using what they are given without knowing any better, and criticially *that for most of them quality isnt so important* it actually makes perfect sense. Even assuming perfect knowledge (rather that advertising-shaped mass prejudice) many people would be happier with a word processor because they arent capable/needful/desirous of actually creating *high quality* documents to begin with. Cheap and amateurish is just fine in many cases.
No. You're putting words in my mouth, and badly. You should be able to install whatever you want, I agree. However when you try to install a rootkit the system should certainly do a double take and start squawking. This is one of the very few cases where second-guessing the user with redundant dialogues actually makes sense. "Are you really really sure? You sure you're sure? You cant be serious can you!? Really?" Or better yet just make sure it cant be done by default. Advanced users that really understand what they are doing and have a reason to run such a thing could still remove the checks and recompile.
Sounds like you have a preconceived notion you are trying to project here. Without cause.
And if Microsoft Excel can be used to keep track of many important small business databases, then it must be doing a good job as a database, amiright?
Please. Just because it is possible to do a job with a completely unsuitable tool does NOT make that tool a good choice.
Almost entirely because of its pervasiveness. It is a horrible, confusing interface and that should not be minimised. But it is still more 'approachable' in a sense, compared to learning two distinct and much more sophisticated tools, sure. For someone that actually uses it once a year or less, that would be a convincing argument in its favor. For the rest of us, however, it really isnt.
Your supervisor was right. I hope one day you learn to appreciate that fact.
"Worked" in what sense though? Not in any sense beyond the most crude and basic. You would have produced a 'document' that didnt have the full attributes of either a full document or a text, that was no semantically parseable, that was not coherent either as a text or as a typeset document, but just barely-probably-cross-your-fingers close enough on all accounts to get your grade. Probably.
Instead, because you lucked out and got an advisor that knew of what he spoke, you produced a proper text, a document that is fully parseable, preserves all the important semantic data (not just brute formatting information) and will be easily parseable and searchable not just today but in 10 or even 20 years.
You should appreciate him more.
That may be more true than you realise. You see, shooting clay pidgeons is NOT hunting, but plenty of hunters DO shoot clay pidgeons for practice. Same goes for live pidgeons in the view of many.
I dont approve of what they are doing, but I sure as heck approve even less of the morons that are harassing them. Blasting the crap out of their little spy-bot is pretty darn tame compared to a lot of retaliatory tactics that would be perfectly justified in this situation. I invite these fools to bring their toy down south a little, those Penn guys arent very good shots, they let it get away. Bring it down here to my property and you wont be looking at repairs, you will have to buy a brand new unit every flight.
GTK went full retard. Distros followed like lemmings. You can still install a sane system that doesnt include GTK and install the libraries you need.
If someone hasnt written that script yet, and it would really be so much nicer to have it, why dont you write it?
The problems you describe with an old game are all solvable. Many of my older games will never run right on modern versions of windows, however.
As a general rule, these things fall into one of two categories on windows. Some things do 'just work' but many others 'just break' and for all practical purposes they are unfixable. On linux it might be more work to figure out how to make the average game go, but it's also much less likely that your old program 'just broke' and cannot be fixed.
Useful it is to a degree, because of network effects. But from a technical point of view it's just wrong from beginning to end. MSOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, WordPerfect even, it doesnt matter, Word Processing is just a poor metaphor to start with, and anything built on it is built on a rotten foundation. Text processing and desktop publishing are two very different tasks, and performing each task with a tool appropriate to the job is always going to be better than using a single mongrel tool that doesnt do either job properly.
TeX most likely. Assuming that 'document' is really the best description of the thing. Many things seem to go by that description lately that just dont fit it, however.