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Re: OpenOffice to the rescue!

____/ Mark Kent on Monday 07 January 2008 17:56 : \____

> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> ____/ Thufir on Monday 07 January 2008 05:39 : \____
>> 
>>> On Sat, 05 Jan 2008 16:57:22 +0000, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>> 
>>>> The same goes for tin/vi/slrn and other programs with a relatively steep
>>>> learning curve (and high gains),
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Nothing is free -- there's a price to pay for those high gains.  That's
>>> the downside of a steep learning curve, in that much must be learned up
>>> front.
>> 
>> That's GNU/Linux to many people. :-)

I saw a problem with what I said after I had posted it. I should have said "to
many people who were taught Windows while they were children". The learning
curve of GNOME, for instance, is not steep at all.

> You still have the curve the wrong way around.  A steep learning curve
> means that a user will become productive very quickly, but conversely,
> can also suggest that more challenging functions might be very very
> difficult to understand.  A shallow learning curve means that it takes a
> long time to become similarly productive, but conversely, that in the
> long-run, the user is likely to be far more capable.
> 
> vi, slrn, tin, mutt and such like, along with bash, libreadline and
> similar all have very shallow learning curves indeed, whereas Visual
> Basic has a learning curve so steep you could drop rocks off it.

I used Visual Basic only once, not even on my own PCs. I just needed to compile
my C/OpenGL project for the Windows platform.

http://othellomaster.com/OM-5.html

This was very complex. I had to throw all my source and header files inside a
SINGLE file just to compile the bugger, so performance of the Windows version
of the program is about 5 times (!!!) worse compared to GNU/Linux. Some people
argued that speed of this program could have something to do with compiliation
flags and all, but I still wonder why Windows couldn't make things simple. It
couldn't make it _just work_ like GCC.

GCC learning curve: .configure (rarely needed), make. Phew! That's hard.

-- 
                ~~ Best of wishes

Roy S. Schestowitz      | Switch to GNU/Linux. < http://www.getgnulinux.org/ >
http://Schestowitz.com  |  GNU is Not UNIX  |     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
      http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine

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