On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 10:44 -0500, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: [snip] > That depends on how you define usable. Word might handle a 25 page > document. The experience of many of my friends has been that big > documents (25 pages is not big) are a real pain Word. One friend of > mine did his thesis (350-400 pages) in Word. Once he got past 100 or > 150 pages, he was constantly fighting with it. The TOC would get > messed up, it would screw up formatting and sectioning and lots of > other issues. Its a matter of "refreshing the TOC" (cough... cough) > Based on his experience, he advised me to use LaTeX and *not* word. > At that time, I had only recently discovered Linux (I was still using > Red Hat 8.0, which had just recently been released and I was a few > weeks away from being introduced to Debian). So, since I still had > two Windows machines and one dual-boot, I was considering working in > Word, since I didn't know what else I would use. I can only say that > I am immensely happy that I went with LaTeX. > > Now that I am doing work at a place where Word is the only option for > word processing, I realize just how much I hate working with it. Even > things that should be trivial are ridiculously complicated. It asks > me things that it should not need to ask me. It doesn't ask me things > that it should. If I copy or cut for the second time in a document, > it completely changes the layout of the screen! > The dynamic menus are a royal pain since I *always* have to click on > the stupid little icon at the bottom of each menu to get to see all > the options. That can be turned off. Its a "helpful" feature to removed those seldom used options "nobody" uses. > > and it works. (By the way, I run Debian on my servers, used Windows > > at work because that's what the company issued, and my personal > > machine is a Mac. Had an IT guy to keep the Windows machine working, > > so no stress on my part :-) > > See, even with IT people to keep the Windows machine working, it is > still a stress on me, since Windows violates so many principles of > usability, user interfaces and how things should work, it just makes > me sick. Preaching to the choir. But I should also add, that the administration of "Windows" is horrible as well. It takes someone with major insanity to actually develop a "working" sec pol for Windows. They have to know Visual Basic (for scripting) and discover why programs that are installed as a "regular user" cannot run, needing write access to a registry key or keys, just to save "state". The whole convoluted world, that is "Windows": sucks. Most people don't know they are eating cow-poo, as they have only ever had the cow-poo for meals. Once they taste something that is better and find out it works better and lasts longer and has more options (both senses of the word) they like it. > I mean, people often complain about the lack of uniformity in GUI > programs targetted at Linux. Windows is just as bad, but people > choose to overlook it for some reason or another. Then there is the > fact that Windows does not include any of the following in a base > install: > > * a decent shell > * ssh/sftp client > * a decent scripting language > > Those three things make it so that I will end up taking two or three > times as long as I should to do some basic task. Install Cygwin, its the only way to semi-fix it. -- greg@gregfolkert.net Novell's Directory Services is a competitive product to Microsoft's Active Directory in much the same way that the Saturn V is a competitive product to those dinky little model rockets that kids light off down at the playfield. -- Thane Walkup
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