Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. 'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.' Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?"

Comments

Re:Malice vs. Incompetence

[hairyfeet]

NOOOOO..it means YOU sir don't deal with the public and therefor don't have a clue what you are talking about. Sure 320K MP3s sound damned good.....know what the average bitrate for MP3s is? Its 128k. I can tell you that because i've had to back up more MP3 collections before a reinstall than you've had hot dinners and while you'll find a few going down as low as 64k, and a few 256k, the majority is at 128k and I'm sorry but 128k MP3 sucks rancid donkey dick, its VERY tinny and thin but that seems to be the size Joe Average has settled on for the most part so that is what you see.

And again WHY is it 128K? WHERE did this come from? It was decided during the Napster and Audio Galaxy days as the lowest bitrate you could use and sound "good enough" while keeping the file sizes down, since back then an 80GB HDD was the average. Oh and just FYI but for your education you might want to Wiki "loudness war" to find out why MP3 in general sucks, you are taking music that has ALREADY been compressed to its absolute max to raise the loudness and then compressing AGAIN with the MP3 compression, and double compression sounds like shit.