Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:36:17 +0200 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com> Cc: FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Any working SIP-phone on FreeBSD? Message-ID: <20110620133617.48643fbc.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <20110619173046.GB84720@guilt.hydra> References: <4DFCDE25.2050203@rawbw.com> <20110618180326.GA21890@orange.esperance-linux.co.uk> <4DFD01B9.5010807@rawbw.com> <20110618212315.GB21890@orange.esperance-linux.co.uk> <20110619072518.2115dffb@scorpio> <BANLkTikaYJMSrGXynurtRmnqB%2BJLDLBjYA@mail.gmail.com> <20110619112248.7c879c1f@scorpio> <20110619154949.GA84264@guilt.hydra> <20110619123451.4a392bec@scorpio> <20110619173046.GB84720@guilt.hydra>
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On Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:30:46 -0600, Chad Perrin wrote: > It's not "prejudice". That assumes I prejudge. My judgment is based on > years of fighting with the BS features of office suites of all > descriptions for years, and loathing every minute of it. I don't care > whether they're open source, closed source, or blue-green algae source. I think you're fully right, I also made comparable observations during many years. Allow me to point you to the following document: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html As an "old man", also allow me to point to history. In the past, german users did use text mode word processors in english language. They were able to learn how to use them, and they produced better- looking results with them (on the printers of that time!) than they do today with their "wonderful" programs. Why? Because they can't handle them. It's no use how much effort programmers and UI designers put into creating a text processing program. People are just too stupid to _properly_ use it. I'm sure you know that there are templates for designing text attributes, just as you use CSS to configure what certain HTML tagged text should look like. Users don't use them. They think: "This is a headline. According to my counting, it is 3.1.2., and it should be *click* bold face and *click* *click* *click* 15 points, ah, and I want another *click-many-times* font for that." You can easily deduct what happens when the table of contents changes, or when the font size changes. Hell, I've even seen people doing two column documents with spaces. SPACEs!!! > Office suites are basically just featuritis sores growing on the faces of > our computer working environments. Feature creep has gotten so out of > control in MS Office that the "ribbon" was invented to deal with the fact > that it had far more features than the interface could reasonably manage. > The "ribbon" is, in fact, basically a very clever, well-designed answer > to a problem that should never have existed in the first place, and as > such the "ribbon" ends up being little more than one more feature in > something that has far too many features in the first place. About the "Ribbon", read (and see) more here: http://toastytech.com/guis/win72.html It's page 2 of the "Windows 7" GUI demonstration, lower part. > People actually open MS Word or OO.o Writer to do nothing but make > simple, unformatted notes to themselves. > Have you people never heard of > a damned text editor? No, because "Word" is everything that exists. This demonstrates the main reason of the presence of MICROS~1 products: Their "education" of users. It begins in school and continues in work environments. They put a lot of money into their advertising programs. Furthermore, today's users can't concentrate on what text _is_, they can just think in terms of what text _looks like_. The new standard HTML 5 will be a real pain for them. :-) > For all the document merging and management features of these things, in > the end one is usually better off not using any of them; just cut and > paste instead. Cut and paste takes less than a minute, but I've seen > "expert" MS Office users spend half an hour screwing around with document > merging to do what could as easily have been done with a simple cut and > paste. It can be even worse, when documents get faxed and retyped and corrected many times. Yes, that really happens, I frequently see this "professional" stuff in action. :-) > For actual content merging, despite all the derogatory noises MS Office > users will typically make about the evils of the command line and how > difficult it is to use, what might take an hour in MS Office can often be > accomplished in roughly equivalent fashion using simpler file formats and > a couple of command line tools like grep and cat in under five minutes. Actual content? WHO creates actual content? Business? Haha! :-) Honestly: I've build a working environment in the past where multi-platform operations are essentially needed, for creation of technical documentation. I had my kids... erm user, users! :-) learning CVS and LaTeX, a bit of GNUplot, and one of them can also write scripts (shell, awk, sed, perl and so on). They now do fully function and produce high quality documents, used for web publication and printing. They were coming from a MICROS~1 environment, and they had never believed me that investing a little time into learning could make them that productive. Productivity. Do I need to say more? -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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