I'm actually somewhat surprised that Apple hasn't been supportive of a native scripting platform or programming tool. I can understand that there would be more work involved in developing the SDK, but the utility of having this feature would be tremendous. At the very least, it would inflate the number of apps in the App Store.
I know Android has this capability from third-party support; has anyone played around with this?
A big problem with scripting, at least from my limited experience, is that a lot of IT folks (or at least a lot of Windows IT folks) correlate it to programming...the last thing they want to do. Windows has tons of GUI interactivity and easiness, which suits those folks well. The fact that you can do reasonably complicated work solely off the GUI available speaks for how much Microsoft had this down with Windows. Hence, less people choose to learn VBscript (or, god forbid, PowerShell), both of which are considerably easier syntactically than Perl or bash, and, instead, rely on clickety-click for everything.
This author is dead-on. The problem really begins when companies put out infrastructural products with NO CLI or scripting options. This is fine for those that like GUI, but is HELL for automation. Worse, a lot of those products have really shitty UIs.
Linux has had the technical capability for grabbing a significant foothold in the consumer desktop market for a while now. However, as long as companies continue pushing Windows-only hardware and the communities that actually continue encouraging the dichotomies that exist amongst them (like with the UI, the one thing that should be a unified effort), Linux will continue fighting an uphill battle. It also doesn't help that Windows is so much easier to deploy and administer company-wide than Linux is.
Autopilot landing is EASY. You have a stationary runway, known wind, ground velocity, altitude, weather conditions,etc. Also the airplane is in the air, surrounded by nothing for miles unless the air traffic controller messes up. Even autopilot landing a fighter jet on a carrier in choppy seas is more predictable than driving a car in traffic.
Wouldn't autopilot landing be easier to do after taking hundreds of hours of mandated training in becoming familiarised with understanding and using the controls in a plane's cockpit? This just made me think: becoming a train engineer or pilot is considerably more difficult than operating a car, but a bad pilot or engineer can kill considerably more people than a bad driver.
Granted, some people will fail more difficult driving exams, and I'm ok with that even if I fail myself. They lack the hand-eye coordination required to be in control of a multi tonne vehicle, and should not be on the road. They can ride the bus, take a cab or walk. I'm not being facetious, I truly mean it. The day I fail a driving exam is the day I stop driving, at least until I can successfully retake it (and there should be a limit on retests too).:)))
I agree with this. Any skill that can cause loss of lives usually needs to undergo years of training and testing before it's deemed acceptable for public use. Doctors have to study for over 10 years to become certified for public practise. Medical equipment is scrutinised with countless hours of rigorous testing before it appears in hospitals and homes. Yet, driving school is optional in the US and getting a driver's license is as easy as studying a handbook and showing up for a comparatively soft driving test. I remember mine pretty clearly: I used my mom's jeep (my DMV didn't have a car dedicated for testing) and had trouble doing a three-point turn with it. The instructor was okay with this; his reasoning was that SUVs and jeeps are more difficult to turn than cars are. Though I was happy that he let this slide, this makes me wonder if there are other instructors out there whose criteria for passing are much more lax.
This is similar to the fate of automated trains in New York City during the 1960s. GE and Westinghouse rolled out a two-car consist and demoed the technology on the 42nd Street shuttle. It worked for about four years (with passengers not noticing much difference other than harder braking), but a fire near a switch on the line (that wasn't caused by the cars) caused a huge uproar against the project, forcing the MTA to scrap the idea completely. The closest concepts we have to this today are one-person train operation, which the elevated's in Chicago have been doing for years. See here for a better read.
I would imagine that the same issues apply here, even more so considering that cars cause way more deaths than trains/planes/etc do.
This would be extremely useful in increasing the quality of search results if people could '+1' search results anonymously. Instead, Google's using this EXACTLY like the "Like" button on Facebook, which relies on having friends on Google already to be useful.
I think it's the right idea, but wrong implementation. Then again, I'm not a creative.
That's perfectly understandable for advertisements that will be used for public consumption. However, to use that same trick for conference material is a bit suspicious...
Data and voice plans will go up at least $10 more per month.
T-Mobile was the only carrier that had truly unlimited tethering. (You paid for 5GB buckets; they capped your bandwidth after that.) That will go away.
The only major GSM provider in the US will be AT&T, unless Verizon switches to GSM and forces millions to migrate. (Unlikely to be the opposite case.)
Positives:
We'll finally have massive 3G/4G coverage.
T-Mobile annually won awards for their incredible customer service. Hopefully AT&T adopts their paradigms.
With AT&T being the only GSM carrier in the US, manufacturer agreements will be way easier and, thus, we'll finally be getting a vast selection of high-end phones. (T-Mobile has been steadily improving in this front.)
HOPEFULLY AT&T customers will get UMA (GAN), probably one of T-Mobile's best and most exclusive features. They would be incredibly short-sighted to throw that technology away.
One could argue that smartphone handsets might be more "locked down" over time, but I never saw AT&T handsets being more locked down in any way than their T-Mo counterparts. They might throw more crapware in (can't believe I'm using that term for my phone), but as long as rooting exists, there will be ways of removing them.
While I'm making armchair predictions, Verizon will buy Sprint within the next two years. Sprint has been losing customers for a while now and their WiMAX technology isn't taking off fast enough. I hope the FCC does something to control the monopolies that will ensue when that happens. This should get interesting really quickly.
I'm normally not one to comment on the editorial quality of the site, particularly since I understand that many of the articles published nowadays are meant to "get eyeballs" and keep the traffic coming. However, this is unacceptable. 2007?? How could an editor miss this?
I don't care much about the dupes or "summarised" headlines, but this is pure laziness and journalistic carelessness. Sorry, Slashdot folks; you guys missed the mark here.
Sure, Lexis-Nexus made document research much easier for the layman to do. However, they still need highly intelligent software engineers to design it and highly capable web designers/developers to keep the site going. Automation and workflow improvements have always been in-demand, even outside of IT (the industrial revolution being one prominent example); jobs being cut/simplified have always been a consequence. It's part of the workflow cycle.
Of course he won't mention names: his argument is false. I've been to *many* small, "indie" coffee shops around the city and only *one* discouraged the use of laptops because of their size (I used my laptop there anyway and nobody seemed to care). I worked on a significant part of my senior design project at a far-removed coffee bar in Brooklyn that shared space with a music studio, and they offered free wi-fi and tons of outlets!
This is a good personal piece...too bad it's wrong.
I frequent XDA a lot and the warnings were clear. If you're not buying a Nexus device (Nexus One/Nexus S), you will most likely be left in the dark for an official upgrade path. The G1 and the original, slower Galaxy, for example, never received an official upgrade past 1.6.
Personally, I don't think carriers/OEMs have a lot of demand from most of their consumer base to engineer upgrades. This news might gain much more attention since it's blatantly obvious that Samsung was gunning for obsoleting one of their flagship phones so quickly, but unless video calling really takes off (doesn't seem to have done so yet), it's not the biggest deal for many.
From a technical standpoint, it's completely irrelevant. Save for the upgraded modem and the front-facing camera, it's the original Vibrant. (They probably added more tricks in the hardware to make rooting harder, though.) Additionally, it's pretty trivial to add a front-facing camera to the current Vibrant and there is an unofficial carrier-engineered version of Froyo for it floating around on the Internet. For starters, it has Wifi Calling natively bundled into it. It's also somewhat faster. I flashed my Dad's Vibrant with it before I gave it to him as a Christmas gift and it works amazingly for him.
Just the mere existence of that ROM suggests that an update might be around the corner. The question, though, is how wide T-Mobile and Samsung is making that corner for people.
The snaps in the article make it clear that you have to really dig to find what you're after. I was hoping for a full picture of someone. Either way, it's amazing how far we've come in terms of photography (and technology in general).
We can afford to throw away shots. Compared to the film days, that's a big deal.
It's all my sisters know how to use, unfortunately. Similar case with lots and lots of people. I've thought of teaching them the art of Google + BitTorrent (honestly, I find almost all of my music from searching Google), but it seems too complicated for them (and they'll still get their computers infected, possibly easier).
Never understood why torrents didn't catch on as well. First mover advantage, perhaps?
Millions of computers in China are running pirated versions of Windows/Office/Microsoft software and the country itself maintains its own nationalized version of Linux. They, along with Russia, are the major contributors of malware and viruses, and are the one of the bastions of cyberterrorism today. With this kind of a status quo, they would clearly have no issues with a device that, by default, doesn't even let the user install apps from third-party vendors.
I can see that, but how about they fix the audio? The 2.2 release deployed to my Nexus One had shitty, shitty sound while streaming because they used a codec that wasn't ready. There isn't a universal volume control, nor is there an officially supported equalizer. Sound still completely stops when a notification comes in instead of dimming down like the iPhone does. Worse, sounds will play on top of each other if multiple resources are streaming (iOS will turn off a stream to allow another). Of course, the big one is that I'd be lucky to get more than 10 hours of listening time on my N1 before it dies; I had it die in 5 with everything off!
I love my N1 and I love using Android, but its weaknesses with the sound (which aren't that minor) make me miss my iPhone sometimes. On top of that, there really isn't a good keyboard for Android...
I second this. The first real collaborative messaging server I administered ran on Zimbra and Debian. It was a bit of a rocky start at first (not enough RAM), but it worked like a charm on an upgraded box. What's more important for you, though, is that it has an Activesync client that will allow you to use any phone you choose. It doesn't have MAPI, but that won't apply to you since you're already using Evolution. It's also much closer to its internals, so you'll probably learn a thing or two about calendar protocols, email routing and delivery, etc. It's not as friendly to administer as Exchange, though (which is so easy you can sort of administer it without knowing anything about how e-mail, calendaring, LDAP or DAV protocols work...which is good and bad).
The only reason why I gave it up is because they don't have any student pricing (the edition that comes with Activesync and all that isn't free) while Microsoft was giving my any version of Exchange I wanted for free.
The place I work at is (mostly) a Dell shop with some IBMs and HPs on the side. While their server hardware is pretty much solid, most of their desktops are not. Despite this, it's really their warranties that shine. Having a technician on-site with parts in four hours or less (usually less; I've had technicians ready in an hour) and knowledgeable and extremely-clear technicians/engineers over the phone for the entire life of our products mitigates most of the flaws they have, especially considering that they work pretty well as advertised to begin with.
From a personal standpoint, I bought a Dell Latitude E6500 for myself a year ago to upgrade from my HP nw8240. It's a really well-spec'ed and nice-looking laptop, but it seems to be a bit of a lemon. I had to replace the motherboard about 3/4 year in, and again just a few days ago, because of a booting issue it's been experiencing. Two motherboard replacements didn't seem to do it, so a system exchange is in order. Every single experience was coordinated by an equally-clear technician who delivered the parts overnight almost every time; keep in mind that this is personal warranty. If I experienced the same problems with a white-box build (or one from a less service-friendly vendor), I'd probably have to wait until I could afford an upgrade. Terrible solution.
As for the original inquiry, it's a terrible idea. It's "cheap" to do initially, but will become a bear to support (and more expensive to maintain) when parts go out of stock. You'll need staff to build on demand, so that's extra short-term spending already. The biggest thing, though, is that warranty from most of those vendors SUCKS; just try getting a motherboard replacement in acceptable time from, say, ASUS or Creative; won't happen.
You do realize that (a) T-Mobile hasn't complained about any of the other IM apps that are out there (Nimbuzz, Fring, IM+, the official AIM client, etc.) because (b) these apps are more considerate with network usage, partly because (c) more network usage equals lesser battery life?
Something like a Google Search Appliance would have probably taken care of this with much more of a guarantee, though I'm sure the boys at Cornell looked into that.
Office 2010 doesn't have an option for restoring the Classic menu. Office 2011 for Mac switched to the ribbon too (but restored VBA --- huge plus!). The past ain't coming back.
I'll probably get marked as a troll for the headline, but I've got karma to burn.
Let's put the interface aside for a minute. (That's mostly a matter of preference; the research that drives their designs seems to indicate this.) Writer is pretty good for typing up simple documents. However, my biggest problem is that it's been very unreliable in opening Word 2003-2007 documents and even more so with documents from Word (Mac). Sometimes, it'll open up just fine; most of the time, it blows up. In fact, my lab partner yesterday had this exact experience when he tried to print his lab; he typed it up in OpenOffice, but had issues printing it on the machines that use Word 2003 (or maybe they use 2007; I forget). Furthermore, the equation editor is not very intuitive (where are the keyboard shortcuts?!), nor is it as pretty as the equations I get from Word. Now, I won't lie; the Equation Editor built-in with Office isn't much better...but at least they have MathType.
Like Writer, Calc has good for simple stuff like maintaining budgets and recording simple data. However, it dies with larger and more complex datasets that Excel handles really easily...and its support for VBAs is limited at the moment. I'm glad to see that it's improving, though!
Last time I tried Impress, it didn't have nearly as many animations and presentation options as PowerPoint did. This could've changed now, though.
For a free office suite, it's decent, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft Office. The only problem is that it's not that hard to get a *legitimate* copy of Office for free or cheap; university students and corporate employees usually get heavily discounted or free licenses. Competition is always good, though, so any improvements to Open(Libre)Office will be good for everyone.
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I'm actually somewhat surprised that Apple hasn't been supportive of a native scripting platform or programming tool. I can understand that there would be more work involved in developing the SDK, but the utility of having this feature would be tremendous. At the very least, it would inflate the number of apps in the App Store.
I know Android has this capability from third-party support; has anyone played around with this?
A big problem with scripting, at least from my limited experience, is that a lot of IT folks (or at least a lot of Windows IT folks) correlate it to programming...the last thing they want to do. Windows has tons of GUI interactivity and easiness, which suits those folks well. The fact that you can do reasonably complicated work solely off the GUI available speaks for how much Microsoft had this down with Windows. Hence, less people choose to learn VBscript (or, god forbid, PowerShell), both of which are considerably easier syntactically than Perl or bash, and, instead, rely on clickety-click for everything.
This author is dead-on. The problem really begins when companies put out infrastructural products with NO CLI or scripting options. This is fine for those that like GUI, but is HELL for automation. Worse, a lot of those products have really shitty UIs.
Linux has had the technical capability for grabbing a significant foothold in the consumer desktop market for a while now. However, as long as companies continue pushing Windows-only hardware and the communities that actually continue encouraging the dichotomies that exist amongst them (like with the UI, the one thing that should be a unified effort), Linux will continue fighting an uphill battle. It also doesn't help that Windows is so much easier to deploy and administer company-wide than Linux is.
Autopilot landing is EASY. You have a stationary runway, known wind, ground velocity, altitude, weather conditions,etc. Also the airplane is in the air, surrounded by nothing for miles unless the air traffic controller messes up. Even autopilot landing a fighter jet on a carrier in choppy seas is more predictable than driving a car in traffic.
Wouldn't autopilot landing be easier to do after taking hundreds of hours of mandated training in becoming familiarised with understanding and using the controls in a plane's cockpit? This just made me think: becoming a train engineer or pilot is considerably more difficult than operating a car, but a bad pilot or engineer can kill considerably more people than a bad driver.
Granted, some people will fail more difficult driving exams, and I'm ok with that even if I fail myself. They lack the hand-eye coordination required to be in control of a multi tonne vehicle, and should not be on the road. They can ride the bus, take a cab or walk. I'm not being facetious, I truly mean it. The day I fail a driving exam is the day I stop driving, at least until I can successfully retake it (and there should be a limit on retests too). :)))
I agree with this. Any skill that can cause loss of lives usually needs to undergo years of training and testing before it's deemed acceptable for public use. Doctors have to study for over 10 years to become certified for public practise. Medical equipment is scrutinised with countless hours of rigorous testing before it appears in hospitals and homes. Yet, driving school is optional in the US and getting a driver's license is as easy as studying a handbook and showing up for a comparatively soft driving test. I remember mine pretty clearly: I used my mom's jeep (my DMV didn't have a car dedicated for testing) and had trouble doing a three-point turn with it. The instructor was okay with this; his reasoning was that SUVs and jeeps are more difficult to turn than cars are. Though I was happy that he let this slide, this makes me wonder if there are other instructors out there whose criteria for passing are much more lax.
This is similar to the fate of automated trains in New York City during the 1960s. GE and Westinghouse rolled out a two-car consist and demoed the technology on the 42nd Street shuttle. It worked for about four years (with passengers not noticing much difference other than harder braking), but a fire near a switch on the line (that wasn't caused by the cars) caused a huge uproar against the project, forcing the MTA to scrap the idea completely. The closest concepts we have to this today are one-person train operation, which the elevated's in Chicago have been doing for years. See here for a better read.
I would imagine that the same issues apply here, even more so considering that cars cause way more deaths than trains/planes/etc do.
This would be extremely useful in increasing the quality of search results if people could '+1' search results anonymously. Instead, Google's using this EXACTLY like the "Like" button on Facebook, which relies on having friends on Google already to be useful.
I think it's the right idea, but wrong implementation. Then again, I'm not a creative.
That's perfectly understandable for advertisements that will be used for public consumption. However, to use that same trick for conference material is a bit suspicious...
Positives:
One could argue that smartphone handsets might be more "locked down" over time, but I never saw AT&T handsets being more locked down in any way than their T-Mo counterparts. They might throw more crapware in (can't believe I'm using that term for my phone), but as long as rooting exists, there will be ways of removing them.
While I'm making armchair predictions, Verizon will buy Sprint within the next two years. Sprint has been losing customers for a while now and their WiMAX technology isn't taking off fast enough. I hope the FCC does something to control the monopolies that will ensue when that happens. This should get interesting really quickly.
I'm normally not one to comment on the editorial quality of the site, particularly since I understand that many of the articles published nowadays are meant to "get eyeballs" and keep the traffic coming. However, this is unacceptable. 2007?? How could an editor miss this?
I don't care much about the dupes or "summarised" headlines, but this is pure laziness and journalistic carelessness. Sorry, Slashdot folks; you guys missed the mark here.
But you seem to keep doing things that way...?
Sure, Lexis-Nexus made document research much easier for the layman to do. However, they still need highly intelligent software engineers to design it and highly capable web designers/developers to keep the site going. Automation and workflow improvements have always been in-demand, even outside of IT (the industrial revolution being one prominent example); jobs being cut/simplified have always been a consequence. It's part of the workflow cycle.
Of course he won't mention names: his argument is false. I've been to *many* small, "indie" coffee shops around the city and only *one* discouraged the use of laptops because of their size (I used my laptop there anyway and nobody seemed to care). I worked on a significant part of my senior design project at a far-removed coffee bar in Brooklyn that shared space with a music studio, and they offered free wi-fi and tons of outlets!
This is a good personal piece...too bad it's wrong.
I frequent XDA a lot and the warnings were clear. If you're not buying a Nexus device (Nexus One/Nexus S), you will most likely be left in the dark for an official upgrade path. The G1 and the original, slower Galaxy, for example, never received an official upgrade past 1.6. Personally, I don't think carriers/OEMs have a lot of demand from most of their consumer base to engineer upgrades. This news might gain much more attention since it's blatantly obvious that Samsung was gunning for obsoleting one of their flagship phones so quickly, but unless video calling really takes off (doesn't seem to have done so yet), it's not the biggest deal for many.
From a technical standpoint, it's completely irrelevant. Save for the upgraded modem and the front-facing camera, it's the original Vibrant. (They probably added more tricks in the hardware to make rooting harder, though.) Additionally, it's pretty trivial to add a front-facing camera to the current Vibrant and there is an unofficial carrier-engineered version of Froyo for it floating around on the Internet. For starters, it has Wifi Calling natively bundled into it. It's also somewhat faster. I flashed my Dad's Vibrant with it before I gave it to him as a Christmas gift and it works amazingly for him.
Just the mere existence of that ROM suggests that an update might be around the corner. The question, though, is how wide T-Mobile and Samsung is making that corner for people.
Nah, this could'nt have possibly been an inevitably of a locked-down operating system in the world of jailbroken iPhones and rooted Android devices...
The snaps in the article make it clear that you have to really dig to find what you're after. I was hoping for a full picture of someone. Either way, it's amazing how far we've come in terms of photography (and technology in general).
We can afford to throw away shots. Compared to the film days, that's a big deal.
WinMX still works?! I quit using it because I saw the number of peers decreasing steadily every year...
Does it still have that Matrix-y interface?
It's all my sisters know how to use, unfortunately. Similar case with lots and lots of people. I've thought of teaching them the art of Google + BitTorrent (honestly, I find almost all of my music from searching Google), but it seems too complicated for them (and they'll still get their computers infected, possibly easier).
Never understood why torrents didn't catch on as well. First mover advantage, perhaps?
Millions of computers in China are running pirated versions of Windows/Office/Microsoft software and the country itself maintains its own nationalized version of Linux. They, along with Russia, are the major contributors of malware and viruses, and are the one of the bastions of cyberterrorism today. With this kind of a status quo, they would clearly have no issues with a device that, by default, doesn't even let the user install apps from third-party vendors.
LOL
I can see that, but how about they fix the audio? The 2.2 release deployed to my Nexus One had shitty, shitty sound while streaming because they used a codec that wasn't ready. There isn't a universal volume control, nor is there an officially supported equalizer. Sound still completely stops when a notification comes in instead of dimming down like the iPhone does. Worse, sounds will play on top of each other if multiple resources are streaming (iOS will turn off a stream to allow another). Of course, the big one is that I'd be lucky to get more than 10 hours of listening time on my N1 before it dies; I had it die in 5 with everything off! I love my N1 and I love using Android, but its weaknesses with the sound (which aren't that minor) make me miss my iPhone sometimes. On top of that, there really isn't a good keyboard for Android...
I second this. The first real collaborative messaging server I administered ran on Zimbra and Debian. It was a bit of a rocky start at first (not enough RAM), but it worked like a charm on an upgraded box. What's more important for you, though, is that it has an Activesync client that will allow you to use any phone you choose. It doesn't have MAPI, but that won't apply to you since you're already using Evolution. It's also much closer to its internals, so you'll probably learn a thing or two about calendar protocols, email routing and delivery, etc. It's not as friendly to administer as Exchange, though (which is so easy you can sort of administer it without knowing anything about how e-mail, calendaring, LDAP or DAV protocols work...which is good and bad).
The only reason why I gave it up is because they don't have any student pricing (the edition that comes with Activesync and all that isn't free) while Microsoft was giving my any version of Exchange I wanted for free.
I'll second this. Two examples:
The place I work at is (mostly) a Dell shop with some IBMs and HPs on the side. While their server hardware is pretty much solid, most of their desktops are not. Despite this, it's really their warranties that shine. Having a technician on-site with parts in four hours or less (usually less; I've had technicians ready in an hour) and knowledgeable and extremely-clear technicians/engineers over the phone for the entire life of our products mitigates most of the flaws they have, especially considering that they work pretty well as advertised to begin with.
From a personal standpoint, I bought a Dell Latitude E6500 for myself a year ago to upgrade from my HP nw8240. It's a really well-spec'ed and nice-looking laptop, but it seems to be a bit of a lemon. I had to replace the motherboard about 3/4 year in, and again just a few days ago, because of a booting issue it's been experiencing. Two motherboard replacements didn't seem to do it, so a system exchange is in order. Every single experience was coordinated by an equally-clear technician who delivered the parts overnight almost every time; keep in mind that this is personal warranty. If I experienced the same problems with a white-box build (or one from a less service-friendly vendor), I'd probably have to wait until I could afford an upgrade. Terrible solution.
As for the original inquiry, it's a terrible idea. It's "cheap" to do initially, but will become a bear to support (and more expensive to maintain) when parts go out of stock. You'll need staff to build on demand, so that's extra short-term spending already. The biggest thing, though, is that warranty from most of those vendors SUCKS; just try getting a motherboard replacement in acceptable time from, say, ASUS or Creative; won't happen.
You do realize that (a) T-Mobile hasn't complained about any of the other IM apps that are out there (Nimbuzz, Fring, IM+, the official AIM client, etc.) because (b) these apps are more considerate with network usage, partly because (c) more network usage equals lesser battery life?
Something like a Google Search Appliance would have probably taken care of this with much more of a guarantee, though I'm sure the boys at Cornell looked into that.
Office 2010 doesn't have an option for restoring the Classic menu. Office 2011 for Mac switched to the ribbon too (but restored VBA --- huge plus!). The past ain't coming back.
I'll probably get marked as a troll for the headline, but I've got karma to burn.
Let's put the interface aside for a minute. (That's mostly a matter of preference; the research that drives their designs seems to indicate this.) Writer is pretty good for typing up simple documents. However, my biggest problem is that it's been very unreliable in opening Word 2003-2007 documents and even more so with documents from Word (Mac). Sometimes, it'll open up just fine; most of the time, it blows up. In fact, my lab partner yesterday had this exact experience when he tried to print his lab; he typed it up in OpenOffice, but had issues printing it on the machines that use Word 2003 (or maybe they use 2007; I forget). Furthermore, the equation editor is not very intuitive (where are the keyboard shortcuts?!), nor is it as pretty as the equations I get from Word. Now, I won't lie; the Equation Editor built-in with Office isn't much better...but at least they have MathType.
Like Writer, Calc has good for simple stuff like maintaining budgets and recording simple data. However, it dies with larger and more complex datasets that Excel handles really easily...and its support for VBAs is limited at the moment. I'm glad to see that it's improving, though!
Last time I tried Impress, it didn't have nearly as many animations and presentation options as PowerPoint did. This could've changed now, though.
For a free office suite, it's decent, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft Office. The only problem is that it's not that hard to get a *legitimate* copy of Office for free or cheap; university students and corporate employees usually get heavily discounted or free licenses. Competition is always good, though, so any improvements to Open(Libre)Office will be good for everyone.