Yeah, i'm a dumbass. I know it. But I trusted my ivory tower computer snobbery over my real world experiences. "Smaller res should be less data to process, ergo flawless file." I were wrong.
And to be completely honest, I did run a go of it before the comp but completely neglected to really watch it...just listened for problems in the audio. I guess that makes me even more of a dumbass.
Why the fuck should we leave tariffs behind? Tariffs kept countries competetive and level for YEARS. All free trade has done is increase the disparity between the rich countries and the poor ones, increase the disparity between rich people and poor people in both countries, and decrease the general quality of goods and services.
Free trade is killing american prosperity and isn't helping other countries catch up so much as it is giving outsourcers an excuse to allay the morality of dangerously antisocial labor practices. "It helps the world economy." Riiiiight. It's certainly help keep demand high...for case overseers in the unemployment office.
I come from the world of PC video editing. I intended to do everything on my mac now, because the workflow is better, but the PC world boasts greater speed and until FCP 3, greater software. I mean not just the speed of the software, but the staggering options at every level from beginner to superpro. Some of the advanced intermediate apps, like Vegas Video or Ulead, have about as many options as Premiere. And Premiere has a lot of features that extend from Adobe's still image editors. Basically, it allows you to use your different frame tracks like layers in a photoshop document, and apply these changes over time...a very complex but incredibly awesome feature that I used all the time.
I'm just getting into FCP, and have noticed that things are done quite differently. You can't just switch in a day like you can with the OS. However, what I have noticed is the excessive quality of the output of FCP. Premiere had all sorts of bugs, the root of which seems to be a heavy reliance on source data integrity. Some of my captures never worked right in Premiere and I ended up having to reencode things, which took a long time. And FCP's audio track syncronization is perfect...Premiere's again relies heavily on the output format, I think, because a lot of time different formats would have completely different sync. I do a lot of music video work and this was just ridiculous...I went to a video competion with a fresh "print" of a precisely synced video track and discovered that adobe had somehow offset the whole thing by 200 ms, or about 6 frames. The only difference between that print and the test AVIs I run was the frame resolution -- the print was in lower res to ensure it ran at full speed. It made the whole project look amaturish, when I spent a lot of time making sure it would look great, and needless to say I didn't win.
I carry about a 25 cm of duct tape in my wallet, wrapped around my credit card. Besides being useful in the case of an automotive hose burst or embarrassing pants-split (on the inside of the fabric, dum dum), it also discourages me from using my credit card. Which is a good thing.
Well, you don't know. You first need to find out if I measured it using degrees, radians, or some scale of my own design. Like how many turtles I can stack underneath a board at three feet out to reach this angle.
Aren't those units? Sure, they have no physical substance, but then neither does a second, or an inch for that matter, and you NEED to know them to properly reproduce my measurement.
If you want to reproduce the colour "red," you'd need a frame of reference to do so. A scale. The variations in this scale are units. Sherwin Williams has my house colour as 65Y16R4 or some such gibberish. I don't know what the fuck it means, but every time I go there I give them a slip of paper with that number on it, and their machine produces pretty much the same colour.
What we care about for a created object is NOT what it the number is on Taco's colour calculator, but what it looks like on his monitor.
He/they like THAT COLOUR in their logo. I'd like to know what THAT COLOUR is. I don't know Taco's monitor settings, ergo I don't know what COLOUR that number represents.
Yeah, I could make a logo with those numbers, but any contrasting colour I used could look completely different on his screen. If I used a pantone value, I could be sure that the contrast between the two was constant.
That's why we use Pantone. So there's no confusion based on contrast or brightness, or simple "shitty monitor" syndrome.
Well, we only have four other colours to work with. So you'll want to use colours that have nice contrast with the one's you're using. Unfortunately, unless you know what a colour looks like in your output medium, all you really know is RELATIVE color.
It's not about Green 006666. It's about "what colour will look good with whatever colour Green 006666 is when it goes to print." As I mentioned in the parent, whether slashdot's green is dark and shadowy or brilliant and nicely contrasted depends on what your profile is -- what the gamma is, what the brightness is, what the contrast is. Other colours in the logo will have similar subtleties -- I've had website layouts that looked fan fucking TASTIC on the mac that were illegible on a PC, due to the difference in default gammas (Windows PCs love to brighten up dark colours, so a yellow on a burgundy can turn into cream on red). Hence, Pantone -- so that even if the colours are off, the contrast will still be on.
Um, duh. But that doesn't mean we should just give up. Pantone isn't about perfection...it's an attempt at uniformity, cross medium, and using electronic eyes to create the best case. It does this by reducing the billion whatever tones that the eye can discern and cuts them down to about 1100, with good contrast between them. Two objects with a particular logo in a pantone green and a pantone white may have slightly different hues due to the finish or the type of dye, but they'll still look like what they're supposed to look like.
In the same light, with the same eyes, blah blah, two Pantone colours should look alike enough that it doesn't matter. And they do. I happen to have a shirt and a mug from my college, which has a particular silver and creamish white logo, and they're nearly identical, even though one was made in Korea and the other in a Pittsburg print shop. Why? Because somebody cared enough to get the pantone numbers right, instead of just saying "Make it 37.5% cyan."
http://pantone.com/aboutus/aboutus.asp?idArticle =4 9 -- in case you care to find out more about what you can do to make colours look like other colours, regardless of how perfect your eyes aren't.
Yeah, um, no. See, my laptop is calibrated pretty damn well to the output on our printer. Since I use it to print things out, that's the way to go. My PC only has the basic software that comes with Win2k and a crummy ATI Rage LT. I just can't make the colours look right, no matter what I do. I didn't buy the monitor, nor do I pay for the software, so I can't complain. And I know enough to print from the machine that looks right, so I also don't really care.
Either way, the whole point here is that I have NO idea whatsoever what Taco's monitor is calibrated to. I don't know what video card or monitor he's using. So if he lists off colour codes, well, who knows what THAT means? It's meaningless information, like any measurement without units.
You *DO* know that "computer colours" aren't very accurate, right? As in, not at all accurate, due to everybody on the planet having different contrast, brightness and gamma settings on their monitors?
Hell, the green is different from my laptop to my pc. By a longshot. On the mac, it's nearly the intensity of a grass green and blends into white nicely. On the PC, it's more subdued and hides the shadow on the logo.
Get a pantone book and tell us the colour that most closely matches what YOU think the green should look like. Otherwise, you're telling us you want to see the world through our eyes.
Who does it cost money? Only people who overreact. Most defacers tell you how they got in and save your data. Patch it, shame yourself, and resurrect your site. This isn't fucking rocket science.
Of course, if you believe the pundits, every second a popular website is down they lose millions. Bullshit. My supermarket closes for an hour at midnight every night for computer inventory. If I want to eat, this doesn't make me any less hungry. I wait until 1:15, then bike over.
In downtown albany, there's a horrendous screeching noise that scared the hell out of me the first time I heard it. Sounded like some electronic fucking bird klaxon.
It's the DO NOT WALK sign, telling blind people it's time for them to pick up the pace because traffic's coming soon. It makes this noise so that it won't sound anything like the other noises you may hear in traffic.
Scared the hell out of me though. And stupidly, the only thing I could think to say to my wife was "Why is there no sign?"
Um, in my experience (with massive mailings, ebay stuff in crazy packages, maintaining a PO box, and other X-treme Postal Services), it'd go more like this:
Me: I'd like a digital ID.
Them: Ok -- can I see your driver's license? Alright, good enough. Smile. *Click!* There you go, that'll be (insert some sum that is aproximately 50% of comparable service from anybody else). Would you like stamps with that?
Me: God, no, this is awesome.
You must be thinking of the Clerk's office, DMV or one of the copious other shitty State agencies that make me glad the Republicans never got around to giving power back to the states this time around...
Not to mention a lot of places are wary of big amounts of cash, and it's trouble for the cashier, who has to check each bill for authenticity.
I paid for my iPod in cash because, you know, I thought it'd be cool to whip out $538.92. Perfect change makes a perfect person and all. But it was just a hassle. Guy had to go looking for a cash pen, had to get his manager to accept it. Everybody was staring at me with this huge wad of bills in my hand. At least three people in the register over from mine got their 'pods on credit before my sale was done. Not exactly low-key.
When they ask for your zip code, or telephone code, I say give it to them. Generally the parent company uses this info to figure out the general area their customers are coming from and decide where they should build new branches. So if it's something I have to drive far for...like the only pool supply store in my area, 30 miles from my house...it's in my best interest to let them know, and it's not really going to hurt me to give up this information.
Of course, when it's Wal-mart, i give them somebody else's zipcode.
no, i mean a "dead line" has tons of current going through it. I wish I had a multimeter to tell how much, but I know that it's enough to have given me a pretty nasty shock when i was young, dumb and apt to strip wires with my braces.
The same thing I do if they raid my trash and get my bank statement. Soon as I find out about it:
1) Call my bank, place a hold on my accounts. I have 100% fraud protection, so that's not a problem. I just tell them the date of the first awry purchase and they go to it. Either way, by freezing my assets I discourage the theives from using my info again, which is important. I don't have dozens of revolving credit accounts like some of the idiots on 20/20 who've had their identities stolen...the max on most of my credit cards is $1000, and i get an email if an attempt is made to charge over the limit.
2) Contact the FBI. They'll work with my bank to find out who took my ID.
3) Call up my mom. She has my original birth certificate and other information that'll be important to prove I'm me. Not that it will be too hard...my fingerprints are on hard file with the state from a job I did with the DCJS.
4) Pat myself on the back for having spare cash around. It might be a while before everything's resolved.
To be honest, I'm less freightened of ID theft then I am of physical burglary. Thanks to my fraud protection (from my credit union. love your credit union...they're far less likely to screw you then an investment bank) I'm guaranteed not to lose anything. If a guy breaks in and steal my grandfather's watch, I'll probably never see it again.
My personal favorite was the "phone bomb," designed to use the current from phone to ignite the explosives when it was answered.
Problem is, as any Phreak worth his salt knows, there's more current going through the standard telephone BEFORE it rings than after a call has been connected.
If anybody had ever tried this device, they'd have surely killed themselves on install. If they ever even got that far.
Actually, I think this is all the more reason to USE EBAY. I'm selling things honestly, I have nothing to hide, and I want people to feel secure that they can get retribution if I try and weasel out on them. Ebay knows this and they don't want cheats any more than people want to be cheated. They're spending millions to increase their usage and don't want to get any more bad press.
I'm not too worried about people getting my "sensitive info," because i'm not stupid enough to GIVE ebay or paypal any more info then they need. My address, buyers can already look up. My "real name" i have to give to everybody who sends a check. My financial records with paypal are reported to the IRS and pretty boring anyway..."1000 in, ebay taks 4%, 1000*.96 out." Yeah, they have my bank account routing number, but you can get that by faxing my bank as well.
Now, if my other option is to use a fly by night auction site...where they strongly protect my user info and never let anybody have it...i'm shooting myself in the foot. Fewer people will trust my info, meaning bids will be lower, and more people will expect me to split costly escrow fees with them. I consider THAT a much bigger deal. But then again, I'm not selling warez CDs or placebo weight loss pills.
I think so. I fucking LOVE CE. Linux has a lot of catching up to do to reach the functionality of CE 4...specifically, 7 years worth of catching up.
Still, Win CE was pretty good, and quite useful, in its 1.0 incarnation, and i'm sure with that many people developing for it, Linux will do pretty wee for itCELF (ah, bad puns).
No. But I saw it all over the place at my high school. Along with WordPerfect 4.0, Crystal Writer, Bank Street Writer...and this was WELL into the late 1990s.
You see, the school had a very SMALL budget. They could only afford to get maybe 20 new computers every two to four years for 1200 students. So they kept machines around forever. I'm sure there's still a Techtronics (with that cool octagonal touchpad) or IIgs or Mac SE cooking in some of the student lounges and labs. If you were a smart student, you adapted yourself to use the older programs (and kept a couple discs formatted for each) and could get more typing time without having to resort to the sign up sheet.
In fact, we (the unwashed computer geeks in the long trenchcoats which have been SINCE banned by the school) used to train people to use WordPerfect when they griped about the long line in the library for the two MS Word machines.
"Drop to dos, type wp, if you need help press F3."
It was pretty easy for them to figure it out from there. "I want to save. F3, type s, a -- ok, it says here that Ctrl-F2 saves, Ctrl-Shift-F2 saves new," etc.
You know the old addage about the man and the fish? Well, it's a bit like that. If you teach a man to use a program, he'll be good at using that program. But if you teach a man how to FIGURE OUT how to use a program, he'll be good at using ANY program. (And if you do it for him, he won't learn shit...but it will get him out of your hair until next time)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, i'm a dumbass. I know it. But I trusted my ivory tower computer snobbery over my real world experiences. "Smaller res should be less data to process, ergo flawless file." I were wrong.
And to be completely honest, I did run a go of it before the comp but completely neglected to really watch it...just listened for problems in the audio. I guess that makes me even more of a dumbass.
Why the fuck should we leave tariffs behind? Tariffs kept countries competetive and level for YEARS. All free trade has done is increase the disparity between the rich countries and the poor ones, increase the disparity between rich people and poor people in both countries, and decrease the general quality of goods and services.
Free trade is killing american prosperity and isn't helping other countries catch up so much as it is giving outsourcers an excuse to allay the morality of dangerously antisocial labor practices. "It helps the world economy." Riiiiight. It's certainly help keep demand high...for case overseers in the unemployment office.
I come from the world of PC video editing. I intended to do everything on my mac now, because the workflow is better, but the PC world boasts greater speed and until FCP 3, greater software. I mean not just the speed of the software, but the staggering options at every level from beginner to superpro. Some of the advanced intermediate apps, like Vegas Video or Ulead, have about as many options as Premiere. And Premiere has a lot of features that extend from Adobe's still image editors. Basically, it allows you to use your different frame tracks like layers in a photoshop document, and apply these changes over time...a very complex but incredibly awesome feature that I used all the time.
I'm just getting into FCP, and have noticed that things are done quite differently. You can't just switch in a day like you can with the OS. However, what I have noticed is the excessive quality of the output of FCP. Premiere had all sorts of bugs, the root of which seems to be a heavy reliance on source data integrity. Some of my captures never worked right in Premiere and I ended up having to reencode things, which took a long time. And FCP's audio track syncronization is perfect...Premiere's again relies heavily on the output format, I think, because a lot of time different formats would have completely different sync. I do a lot of music video work and this was just ridiculous...I went to a video competion with a fresh "print" of a precisely synced video track and discovered that adobe had somehow offset the whole thing by 200 ms, or about 6 frames. The only difference between that print and the test AVIs I run was the frame resolution -- the print was in lower res to ensure it ran at full speed. It made the whole project look amaturish, when I spent a lot of time making sure it would look great, and needless to say I didn't win.
I carry about a 25 cm of duct tape in my wallet, wrapped around my credit card. Besides being useful in the case of an automotive hose burst or embarrassing pants-split (on the inside of the fabric, dum dum), it also discourages me from using my credit card. Which is a good thing.
Which is why we need a bureau of Printer Ink, Natural Viagra Supplements, Genital Enlargement, Nigerian Banks and Obscure Domain Name Registrars.
Okay. I have an angle of 2. What's it look like?
Well, you don't know. You first need to find out if I measured it using degrees, radians, or some scale of my own design. Like how many turtles I can stack underneath a board at three feet out to reach this angle.
Aren't those units? Sure, they have no physical substance, but then neither does a second, or an inch for that matter, and you NEED to know them to properly reproduce my measurement.
If you want to reproduce the colour "red," you'd need a frame of reference to do so. A scale. The variations in this scale are units. Sherwin Williams has my house colour as 65Y16R4 or some such gibberish. I don't know what the fuck it means, but every time I go there I give them a slip of paper with that number on it, and their machine produces pretty much the same colour.
Wrong.
What we care about for a created object is NOT what it the number is on Taco's colour calculator, but what it looks like on his monitor.
He/they like THAT COLOUR in their logo. I'd like to know what THAT COLOUR is. I don't know Taco's monitor settings, ergo I don't know what COLOUR that number represents.
Yeah, I could make a logo with those numbers, but any contrasting colour I used could look completely different on his screen. If I used a pantone value, I could be sure that the contrast between the two was constant.
That's why we use Pantone. So there's no confusion based on contrast or brightness, or simple "shitty monitor" syndrome.
Well, we only have four other colours to work with. So you'll want to use colours that have nice contrast with the one's you're using. Unfortunately, unless you know what a colour looks like in your output medium, all you really know is RELATIVE color.
It's not about Green 006666. It's about "what colour will look good with whatever colour Green 006666 is when it goes to print." As I mentioned in the parent, whether slashdot's green is dark and shadowy or brilliant and nicely contrasted depends on what your profile is -- what the gamma is, what the brightness is, what the contrast is. Other colours in the logo will have similar subtleties -- I've had website layouts that looked fan fucking TASTIC on the mac that were illegible on a PC, due to the difference in default gammas (Windows PCs love to brighten up dark colours, so a yellow on a burgundy can turn into cream on red). Hence, Pantone -- so that even if the colours are off, the contrast will still be on.
Um, duh. But that doesn't mean we should just give up. Pantone isn't about perfection...it's an attempt at uniformity, cross medium, and using electronic eyes to create the best case. It does this by reducing the billion whatever tones that the eye can discern and cuts them down to about 1100, with good contrast between them. Two objects with a particular logo in a pantone green and a pantone white may have slightly different hues due to the finish or the type of dye, but they'll still look like what they're supposed to look like.
e =4 9 -- in case you care to find out more about what you can do to make colours look like other colours, regardless of how perfect your eyes aren't.
In the same light, with the same eyes, blah blah, two Pantone colours should look alike enough that it doesn't matter. And they do. I happen to have a shirt and a mug from my college, which has a particular silver and creamish white logo, and they're nearly identical, even though one was made in Korea and the other in a Pittsburg print shop. Why? Because somebody cared enough to get the pantone numbers right, instead of just saying "Make it 37.5% cyan."
http://pantone.com/aboutus/aboutus.asp?idArticl
Yeah, um, no. See, my laptop is calibrated pretty damn well to the output on our printer. Since I use it to print things out, that's the way to go. My PC only has the basic software that comes with Win2k and a crummy ATI Rage LT. I just can't make the colours look right, no matter what I do. I didn't buy the monitor, nor do I pay for the software, so I can't complain. And I know enough to print from the machine that looks right, so I also don't really care.
Either way, the whole point here is that I have NO idea whatsoever what Taco's monitor is calibrated to. I don't know what video card or monitor he's using. So if he lists off colour codes, well, who knows what THAT means? It's meaningless information, like any measurement without units.
You *DO* know that "computer colours" aren't very accurate, right? As in, not at all accurate, due to everybody on the planet having different contrast, brightness and gamma settings on their monitors?
Hell, the green is different from my laptop to my pc. By a longshot. On the mac, it's nearly the intensity of a grass green and blends into white nicely. On the PC, it's more subdued and hides the shadow on the logo.
Get a pantone book and tell us the colour that most closely matches what YOU think the green should look like. Otherwise, you're telling us you want to see the world through our eyes.
Who does it cost money? Only people who overreact. Most defacers tell you how they got in and save your data. Patch it, shame yourself, and resurrect your site. This isn't fucking rocket science.
Of course, if you believe the pundits, every second a popular website is down they lose millions. Bullshit. My supermarket closes for an hour at midnight every night for computer inventory. If I want to eat, this doesn't make me any less hungry. I wait until 1:15, then bike over.
In downtown albany, there's a horrendous screeching noise that scared the hell out of me the first time I heard it. Sounded like some electronic fucking bird klaxon.
It's the DO NOT WALK sign, telling blind people it's time for them to pick up the pace because traffic's coming soon. It makes this noise so that it won't sound anything like the other noises you may hear in traffic.
Scared the hell out of me though. And stupidly, the only thing I could think to say to my wife was "Why is there no sign?"
Um, in my experience (with massive mailings, ebay stuff in crazy packages, maintaining a PO box, and other X-treme Postal Services), it'd go more like this:
Me: I'd like a digital ID.
Them: Ok -- can I see your driver's license? Alright, good enough. Smile. *Click!* There you go, that'll be (insert some sum that is aproximately 50% of comparable service from anybody else). Would you like stamps with that?
Me: God, no, this is awesome.
You must be thinking of the Clerk's office, DMV or one of the copious other shitty State agencies that make me glad the Republicans never got around to giving power back to the states this time around...
Huh. And to think all these years I've been eating totally unencrypted danishes.
Got anything to help with my cleartext pop-tart situation?
Must've been it then. It was a bad one.
Not to mention a lot of places are wary of big amounts of cash, and it's trouble for the cashier, who has to check each bill for authenticity.
I paid for my iPod in cash because, you know, I thought it'd be cool to whip out $538.92. Perfect change makes a perfect person and all. But it was just a hassle. Guy had to go looking for a cash pen, had to get his manager to accept it. Everybody was staring at me with this huge wad of bills in my hand. At least three people in the register over from mine got their 'pods on credit before my sale was done. Not exactly low-key.
When they ask for your zip code, or telephone code, I say give it to them. Generally the parent company uses this info to figure out the general area their customers are coming from and decide where they should build new branches. So if it's something I have to drive far for...like the only pool supply store in my area, 30 miles from my house...it's in my best interest to let them know, and it's not really going to hurt me to give up this information.
Of course, when it's Wal-mart, i give them somebody else's zipcode.
no, i mean a "dead line" has tons of current going through it. I wish I had a multimeter to tell how much, but I know that it's enough to have given me a pretty nasty shock when i was young, dumb and apt to strip wires with my braces.
The same thing I do if they raid my trash and get my bank statement. Soon as I find out about it:
1) Call my bank, place a hold on my accounts. I have 100% fraud protection, so that's not a problem. I just tell them the date of the first awry purchase and they go to it. Either way, by freezing my assets I discourage the theives from using my info again, which is important. I don't have dozens of revolving credit accounts like some of the idiots on 20/20 who've had their identities stolen...the max on most of my credit cards is $1000, and i get an email if an attempt is made to charge over the limit.
2) Contact the FBI. They'll work with my bank to find out who took my ID.
3) Call up my mom. She has my original birth certificate and other information that'll be important to prove I'm me. Not that it will be too hard...my fingerprints are on hard file with the state from a job I did with the DCJS.
4) Pat myself on the back for having spare cash around. It might be a while before everything's resolved.
To be honest, I'm less freightened of ID theft then I am of physical burglary. Thanks to my fraud protection (from my credit union. love your credit union...they're far less likely to screw you then an investment bank) I'm guaranteed not to lose anything. If a guy breaks in and steal my grandfather's watch, I'll probably never see it again.
My personal favorite was the "phone bomb," designed to use the current from phone to ignite the explosives when it was answered.
Problem is, as any Phreak worth his salt knows, there's more current going through the standard telephone BEFORE it rings than after a call has been connected.
If anybody had ever tried this device, they'd have surely killed themselves on install. If they ever even got that far.
Actually, I think this is all the more reason to USE EBAY. I'm selling things honestly, I have nothing to hide, and I want people to feel secure that they can get retribution if I try and weasel out on them. Ebay knows this and they don't want cheats any more than people want to be cheated. They're spending millions to increase their usage and don't want to get any more bad press.
I'm not too worried about people getting my "sensitive info," because i'm not stupid enough to GIVE ebay or paypal any more info then they need. My address, buyers can already look up. My "real name" i have to give to everybody who sends a check. My financial records with paypal are reported to the IRS and pretty boring anyway..."1000 in, ebay taks 4%, 1000*.96 out." Yeah, they have my bank account routing number, but you can get that by faxing my bank as well.
Now, if my other option is to use a fly by night auction site...where they strongly protect my user info and never let anybody have it...i'm shooting myself in the foot. Fewer people will trust my info, meaning bids will be lower, and more people will expect me to split costly escrow fees with them. I consider THAT a much bigger deal. But then again, I'm not selling warez CDs or placebo weight loss pills.
I think so. I fucking LOVE CE. Linux has a lot of catching up to do to reach the functionality of CE 4...specifically, 7 years worth of catching up.
Still, Win CE was pretty good, and quite useful, in its 1.0 incarnation, and i'm sure with that many people developing for it, Linux will do pretty wee for itCELF (ah, bad puns).
This is Unix. What's a carriage return?
No. But I saw it all over the place at my high school. Along with WordPerfect 4.0, Crystal Writer, Bank Street Writer...and this was WELL into the late 1990s.
You see, the school had a very SMALL budget. They could only afford to get maybe 20 new computers every two to four years for 1200 students. So they kept machines around forever. I'm sure there's still a Techtronics (with that cool octagonal touchpad) or IIgs or Mac SE cooking in some of the student lounges and labs. If you were a smart student, you adapted yourself to use the older programs (and kept a couple discs formatted for each) and could get more typing time without having to resort to the sign up sheet.
In fact, we (the unwashed computer geeks in the long trenchcoats which have been SINCE banned by the school) used to train people to use WordPerfect when they griped about the long line in the library for the two MS Word machines.
"Drop to dos, type wp, if you need help press F3."
It was pretty easy for them to figure it out from there. "I want to save. F3, type s, a -- ok, it says here that Ctrl-F2 saves, Ctrl-Shift-F2 saves new," etc.
You know the old addage about the man and the fish? Well, it's a bit like that. If you teach a man to use a program, he'll be good at using that program. But if you teach a man how to FIGURE OUT how to use a program, he'll be good at using ANY program. (And if you do it for him, he won't learn shit...but it will get him out of your hair until next time)