On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 17:22 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote: > Les Mikesell wrote: > > On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 15:22, Mike McCarty wrote: > > > > > >>Why should I follow around after OO when I can just boot Windows in > >>about a minute and a half, and be assured that the doc is ok? If OO > >>knows there is a problem, then it should tell me. If there is no > >>problem, it shouldn't frighten me. If it doesn't know, then why should > >>I use it? > > > > > > If you don't save it in a portable format yourself, you are > > participating in forcing others to join the same proprietary > > This statement is on the face of it ridiculous. > > I needed to write a resume a couple of years ago. I asked my > girlfriend, who is very familiar with Word, to take my text > version and wite it up, because the fellow I wanted to send > my resume to specifically asked for Word format. She did that, > and I have a copy of my resume in Word format. > > I then decided recently to update my resume. I'm not a documentation > expert, and don't want to become one. I loaded up my resume, and > edited it with OO. OO didn't say anything when it loaded my > resume, and it seemed to edit my resume just fine. When I went > to save my resume, it said "WARNING WILL ROBINSON! DANGER! > ALERT! YOU MAY BE LOSING IMPORTANT INFORMATION! ARE YOU *REALLY* > *REALLY* _*REALLLY*_ SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?" (Or words to that > effect.) > > So I decided that I didn't really really want to use OO. I rebooted > under Windows, used Word to edit the document, saved it, and > e-mailed it away. > > And so now I'm part of a vast conspiracy, a contributor to monopoly, > tyranny, and other evil practices intended to subjugate the peoples > of the third world, because I saved my resume in Word format instead > of OO format, when OO itself warned me that it might not be a good > idea. > > Grow up and give me a break. > > If there *was* a problem, OO should have told me, WHEN IT LOADED > THE DOCUMENT, that the document contained things that it > couldn't or wouldn't preserve if I saved it. If there *wasn't* > a problem, it should have said NOTHING. If the document contained > things that it could preserve, but only by changing file format, > then it should have warned me WHEN IT LOADED THE DOCUMENT. And the > messages should have been specific enough that I could, at that > moment, made an informed decision about whether to continue. > > It appears that OO is simply remembering what the format it loaded > was, and noticing that it is different from the format it is > going to use to save in, and then issuing a lazy-bones message > which MAY OR MAY NOT MEAN ANYTHING. > > The only way to describe this is LAZY, SLOPPY PROGRAMMING. > > > lock-in. Its a battle you can't win every time and not worth > > fighting if you don't have a chance of winning. But, now that > > an open standard exists the chances of winning sometimes just > > got better. There is no way that OO can guarantee that everything > > will be correct when saved to a format that had to be reverse > > engineered and is in fact not consistent across the proprietary > > programs using it. Remember that when you play the game, you > > don't just boot windows and run word, you have to run approximately > > the same versions as all the other players. > > Oh bull. It read the document. If it found something it didn't > understand, then it *knows* that and can say something. > > I'll never ever understand people defending crappy poorly written > software just because it's not MicroSoft. > > NB: I'm not complaining that OO is gerally crappy and poorly written. > I'm complaining that this one aspect of it is crappy and poorly written. ---- of course you are ignoring the fact that if you use Word and save the file in a foreign format, you get the same type of warnings. I guess I don't see the distinction except that the warnings in OO only come when you save files in .DOC format and in Word, when you don't save in .DOC format. Craig -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
