On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:20:35 -0400
"Moshe Goldfarb." <brick_n_straw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> It's $40.00 here because the school subsidizes it.
Alright, so they subsidize it, so it's probably the one with the EULA
prohibiting any kind of useful use, I would reckon.
> I have 3 kids in college and that is what I paid.
>
> BTW all 3 schools, specifically stated that OpenOffice is NOT
> supported.
Of course. Everyone says that; they'll only *support* what they
know (for some value of "support", anyway; my school claimed to be able
to support their servers, and they weren't even able to do that
beyond "I lost my password" type things. If the servers went down,
that they were totally confused and lost). I used OpenOffice.org the
entire time that I was in school, however, and nobody said anything
about it. They didn't even know, actually.
> Neither is Linux for that matter.
Nope, but that doesn't matter, either. Again, I used Ubuntu the entire
time that I was in school, and had no need for Windows for school
purposes. They said "Windows is required," too. Just because they
have a budget to purchase software with does not mean that everyone
else does, for starters---this is the real world. It doesn't really
matter what software _they_ run so long as you have software that can
interoperate. Good thing interoperability is quite possible these days.
> For $40 bucks why bother with freetardware?
"Freetardware"? C'mon, surely you can be less lame than that.
Some people actually value _value_. (If that sentence doesn't make
sense, read it over and over again until it does.) I am one of these
people. I want software that not only works at least half-assed, but
that is something that I can work with if it doesn't suit my needs.
I also happen to need software that will let me work as efficiently as
possible, such that I can worry about the _work_ that I am doing as
opposed to _how_ to get that work done. (It is for this reason that I
haven't so much as *touched* a word processor since I graduated from
school, but that's rather beside the point.) This is why I use what I
use, and not, say, Windows and Microsoft Office.
MS Windows/MS Office/etc. are great if you like spending money and if
you like to trust the big software vendors. They're equally great if
you don't mind the low quality of the documents they output (they can't
even get basic formatting correct with ligatures and all that jazz even
though most modern fonts support those types of things).
OpenOffice.org has the same problem when it comes to formatting, but
this is really because these tools aren't meant for publishing. There
was a day when word processors were used for what they were intended
for, small jobs for school or small personal documents such as letters
that needed to not be hand-written. Documents that were up for
publishing were put through software intended to do just that, and look
great. And no, I am not talking about personal DTP software, that was
a horrid era in the world of software.
There are two underlying problems in the way that, say, 90% of people
interface with computers. The first and perhaps the most major is that
people memorize their computer's user interfaces, instead of learning
how the underlying components work. The knowledge of how the average
system's text widgets, scroll bars, buttons, and menus work will carry
a person much farther than memorizing "Click File→Save to save the
file, click File→Save to save the file with a new filename, and click
Format→Color→OoohShiny to make my text nice and shiny." It's more
important to know how to navigate computer systems and software on a
general level, learning the conventions used (nearly every application
has a set of menus File, Edit, View, Help, etc.) and then spending a
half-second or so of your time to think about the logical place that an
option would be. Obviously in a word processor, text formatting
options are going to be in a menu that indicates that it has something
to do with formatting. In nearly any application, if you want to cut
text out entirely or copy it, you'll of course look in the Edit menu,
or something similarly worded to it. But, most people don't read and
think, they ask their friend "How do I do X?" even when the stuff is
right there on the screen in front of them. Then again, many people
will click away a modal error dialog without even reading it and try
the same thing over and over again until they call someone up... and
then when they're asked what's wrong, they'll say "I don't know, this
box comes up and it doesn't let me do it." You ask what's in the box,
and they'll say, "I don't know, let me bring it up again." Hello, why
didn't it get read the first ten times it popped up?
The second underlying problem (which wouldn't exist without the first
problem to begin with) is that people are afraid to look at things they
don't know. I can't tell you how many people I've known that are like
"Yeah, I hate Windows, but what else is there?" and when I show them,
they go, "Yeah, but that *looks* different, so I couldn't possibly use
it." Alright, so what? It looks different. Most, if not all, if not
more than, the same functionality is there, but it is organized
slightly differently. Operating systems and operating system shells
are *not* going to be identical to each other, nor should they be.
Otherwise, we'd have interfaces which are 95% similar to each other,
which has been shown to actually be rather more confusing than
interfaces that are only 5% similar to each other---if something looks
like you know it already and it has but just the slightest little
differences all the way around, a person will quickly get very
frustrated and feel that something is missing. However, if the entire
system is different, there will be no such expectation.
In any case, I digress. We all use what we use. I understand that
it's become something of an important thing in this group over the
years for everyone to shout and scream over everyone else and
degenerate everything into arguments consisting of nearly every type of
logical fallacy known to man, but really. Name calling and attacking
software you don't like or use without having something to back it up
with is really quite juvenile... and euphemisms/dysphemisms are just as
bad.
Will this group ever become about its name again, or has it actually
permanently degenerated into a series of eternal flamewars about little
that matters?
--- Mike
--
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
|
|
