Sounds to me like you've been drinking the kool-aid. You say, "not the same as understanding office work well enough to design and execute a competitive office suite", which indicates you think that MS sells because of inherent quality. Design of better products has gone on, and is going on, and will continue to go on. What does matter is execution. Implementing better technology (than Microsoft) doesn't seem to be the challenge. Doing anything with that technology other than sell it to Microsoft, however, is a risk. Its rather like you are complimenting "the fastest sprinter in the world", after they've been convicted of systematically murdering everyone who could run faster.
Also note, the whole point of the linked article,
"The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world", was to offer a solution to the old methodology which MS has spent so much money studying. Specificly, these problems:
Here are just a few of the problems:
* People sometimes forget to attach the document to their email.
* The document can be too largeâ"especially long documents with lots of imagesâ"and can clog up the email server.
* Nobody knows what edits were made and by whom. Sure, you can turn "Track Changes" on, but as it transforms your document into a horrible illegible mess, most people very quickly turn it off again.
* Nobody has any idea which is the most recent version of the document. This leads to amusing email flame wars where people insist that you adopt version control for your file names, which nobody ever does because they are too busy arguing about what the syntax should be. Even if you do manage to get version control, you are still never sure if you have the most recent version.
* People save the document in some directory on their hard drive and then forget where it is. The usual solution to this is to email the author again and ask them to resend it.
* People miss the email (usually because there are far too many emails in a day) and claim to have never received the document in the first place.
Even if you somehow manage to survive all these pitfalls and your document reaches the Holy Land of $some_random_network_share, your troubles are just beginning. Now nobody knows where your document is, so they have to pester you to tell them. Once you tell them, they'll usually find that they don't have access to that network share. If they do manage to get access, they'll typically open the document and leave it open for an extended period of time, and now you can't edit your own document because it is locked for "Read Only" access. So inevitably you'll save your own modified copy on your local hard drive, and the whole agonizing dance begins again.
The author then goes on to describe a real world solution as implemented in a real world company, and how it worked. The advantages MediaWiki exhibited over MS Office, he stated, were obvious:
* Everyone was always reading the most recent version of any document.
* The entire history of changes was tracked, and anyone could revert any change, so nothing was ever lost.
* Many people could work on the same document at the same time, thanks to built-in source control and the ability to edit small chunks of a document without affecting the rest of the page.
* You could see who made which change with a single click.
* Documents could be linked together in sensible ways.
* The entire database was searchable and always fully indexed, so anyone could find any document instantly.
Sounds to me like an interesting alternative. But then again, I don't even like kool-aid.
I think that if you get what I was trying to get at, you'll see that its not that I think you are wrong that formating is useful. Rather I take issue with the context it was used within:
At issue is the statement, "properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts", which is asserting that wikis aren't (or can't be) properly formated. My comment was in regard to your statement that, "It's not just that they look better, either." You are buying in to the unfounded assertion, which is that properly formatted HTML is not formatted properly.
To summarize, we are in agreement that properly formated is better than improperly formated. I was just pointing out that you began by agreeing with a statement that certainly appears bogus, before going on to make a valid unrelated (to what I took issue with) statement.
And yet strangely enough I've seen well produced diagrams, embedded comments, and embedded graphics on Wikipedia. If you'd read the article, you'd perhaps have known that superior change tracking is one of the main reasons for migrating from MS Word to a wiki based system. Also, for consistency WYSIWYM is better than WYSIWYG. (There is no such thing as WSIWYG. )
A good text processor is going to have excellent regex support because you want to be able to specify much more complicated search and replaces than MS Word supports. A good text processor should open quickly, and open even tremendously huge files, limited only by the amount of memory you have. MS word truly sucks at this. A good text processor is going to make it easy for me to do regex search and replace across all the text files in my project. A great text processor makes it fast and easy to jump around my open files. MS Word fails.
Personally, in terms of text, I've found nothing that comes close to Vim. Vim's keybindings let me get things done in the time it would take to reach for a mouse. When I'm working with multiple files that have lots of dependencies, I find that Geany has the best and quickest project level tools. I've never seen anything show me so fast where all the locations of a given regex was in my project.
"I keep Word because I still need to format documents." Well, then, why don't you use a tool that is good at formating documents? It was pulling my hair out over trying to format technical documents with Word that made me quit. Yes, there are more convenient, faster, better looking methods. While I agree that documents require more than plain text, MS Word isn't a very good solution.
The (easy, by the way) method to achieve the sort of flexibility you are requesting is to use LyX to generate your document, then save it as PDF as well as LaTeX. You can easily bundle the source with the compiled PDF. If you or someone else wants to edit the document, you edit the LaTeX in a nice GUI, and recompile the PDF. Moving from a 2-column to 3-column format is as simple (and fast!) as changing which style sheet you use. Now this won't work if you are sent a PDF file by itself, obviously, but for all internal documents where policy can require bundling the document source with its output, it would be fantastic. The trick to making it work is realizing Acrobat isn't the only way to get a great looking PDF.
But the topic at hand is businesses which will have broadband, so that half of your argument isn't really applicable. What is, however, is the idea of breaking the model by requiring it to allow offline work. A key concept was to avoid multiple incompatible versions by having just one document. However, it would be simple to download the HTML which makes up the document, so you could work on it anywhere. Its the "sync"/edit conflict resolution that seems inappropriate. I'd rather see you first check the real (and only) document to see whats changed and then you determine the appropriateness of the changes you wish to introduce. Automating this seems like a mistake, unless nothing has changed.
Available and installed are two different things, though. I'm pretty sure that PDF readers have far, far more market penetration that MS Office. Its hard to beat free. Sometimes when you especially care about the visual presentation, you want the document to look the same everywhere. Its hard to beat PDF.
It could be I'm not understanding you, but I've always found PDFs to be far easier to edit and format (with the right tools) than MS Word documents. I guess having the right tools really matters. Then again, MS Word editing without a Word compatible editor would likewise be "a pain to edit".
There is nothing "simple" about taking up a project on this scale.
It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.
they said that writing a free C compiler and libraries just wasn't feasible. Afterwards, they said using the C compiler and associated libraries to write a free Unix clone wasn't feasible. Its been one thing after another, after another, after another... What the poster doesn't seem to understand is that the history involved indicates that geeks are especially good at tackling projects about which office mangers would say, "nothing is simple". I'd even go so far as to say that for office managers to tackle the job would be approaching the impossible.
In regard to MS Word formats, the Physics department I used to work at installed OpenOffice for the single purpose of opening older MS Word document formats. OpenOffice did a better job than the current version of Word at the time for dealing with cases that made MS Word choked.
However, the poster's real point was that if you are a writer, you need a text editor with features that support writing. Writers deal with words. If you are a publication designer (of pamphlets or magazines or even books), then you need a whole different sort of application. His point was that MS Office is unnecessary overkill for a writer, introducing problems without solving any, and yet also not sufficiently powerful for a publication designer. A writer would do better using LyX:
LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).
LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface. This results in world-class support for creation of mathematical content (via a fully integrated equation editor) and structured documents like academic articles, theses, and books. In addition, staples of scientific authoring such as reference list and index creation come standard. But you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script. A broad array of ready, well-designed document layouts are built in.
LyX is for people who want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, âoefinger paintingâ font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output â" or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced â" looks like nothing else.
MS Word is a Jack-of-all-Trades that does everything poorly. You can bend over backwards to work with it, and if you don't know anything else you'll feel like a superuser. It doesn't have to be that way, though.
Actually formating is an area where LaTex really outdoes MS Words sad implementation of a very important idea. However, more on topic, in the article consistent (and sane) formating was presented as a reason to move away from MS Word and to a Wiki based document system. To say "properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts", is like saying, "properly formatted pages look better than MS Word or plain text", i.e., it doesn't make sense. HTML is a markup language. The markup is specifically for format. No one is arguing against formating documents. Its about how to achieve a workable document system that avoids MS Word's inherent pitfalls.
I'm sorry, but its hard to take you seriously if you want to compare the power of MS Word to that of LaTex. Agreed that LaTex has a harder learning curve, but then flying a supersonic jet takes longer to learn than riding a bicycle. You don't sound like a Microsoft fanboi, but then again it seems that perhaps you don't know much of that which you speak.
I really do think that if everybody sang just for the love of singing, then we wouldn't need musicians. I'd hate to think that since no one is paying you to be a janitor, you never sweep or mop your own place. My point is that when everyone is producing for the sheer fun of doing it, then people who refuse to produce unless they get paid just won't get paid.
Video feeds of Talking Heads will require a high speed lane, perhaps. A news site or blog delivering text won't. Some of us prefer to read the transcripts even when both transcripts and video are available.
How about this model?
Create content.
Pay to post content
If you don't want to play, you don't have to pay. Oh, its not a *business* model? Maybe its not supposed to be.
"Many atheists might also be agnostic." So then, at the same time that they declare "the question is unanswerable", they also declare, "the answer is 'not A'?"
Don't you sense a contradiction?
Even wave-particle duality doesn't suggest that a particle is a wave and a particle simultaneously, but rather that it can exhibit either property, wave-property or particle-property, depending on measurement context. If they firmly believe that the existence question can't be answered, then arrival at a preference involves faith, not any sort of proof-based belief, and hence my statement: "atheists require faith".
What becomes interesting, however, is if I purchase the work legally, in a country where copyright has expired on the work. The distribution was totally legal in that case. I have the book. What is the status of that book if I return to my native country, where copyright hasn't expired yet? I obviously couldn't distribute the book there, I'd have to return to where I purchased it (or other location where no copyright infringement would take place) in order to distribute the work. But can I put it on my bookshelf? Does it matter if the bookshelf is in the living room? Or does it need to go on a bookshelf in a locked room? This is to me the crucial question.
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Also note, the whole point of the linked article, "The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world", was to offer a solution to the old methodology which MS has spent so much money studying. Specificly, these problems:
The author then goes on to describe a real world solution as implemented in a real world company, and how it worked. The advantages MediaWiki exhibited over MS Office, he stated, were obvious:
Sounds to me like an interesting alternative. But then again, I don't even like kool-aid.
I think that if you get what I was trying to get at, you'll see that its not that I think you are wrong that formating is useful. Rather I take issue with the context it was used within:
At issue is the statement, "properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts", which is asserting that wikis aren't (or can't be) properly formated. My comment was in regard to your statement that, "It's not just that they look better, either." You are buying in to the unfounded assertion, which is that properly formatted HTML is not formatted properly.
To summarize, we are in agreement that properly formated is better than improperly formated. I was just pointing out that you began by agreeing with a statement that certainly appears bogus, before going on to make a valid unrelated (to what I took issue with) statement.
You could easily teach a temp to use LyX in half an hour. Its much simpler than MS Word.
And yet strangely enough I've seen well produced diagrams, embedded comments, and embedded graphics on Wikipedia. If you'd read the article, you'd perhaps have known that superior change tracking is one of the main reasons for migrating from MS Word to a wiki based system. Also, for consistency WYSIWYM is better than WYSIWYG. (There is no such thing as WSIWYG. )
Well at least no one is advocating sed or awk!!!
A good text processor is going to have excellent regex support because you want to be able to specify much more complicated search and replaces than MS Word supports. A good text processor should open quickly, and open even tremendously huge files, limited only by the amount of memory you have. MS word truly sucks at this. A good text processor is going to make it easy for me to do regex search and replace across all the text files in my project. A great text processor makes it fast and easy to jump around my open files. MS Word fails.
Personally, in terms of text, I've found nothing that comes close to Vim. Vim's keybindings let me get things done in the time it would take to reach for a mouse. When I'm working with multiple files that have lots of dependencies, I find that Geany has the best and quickest project level tools. I've never seen anything show me so fast where all the locations of a given regex was in my project.
"I keep Word because I still need to format documents." Well, then, why don't you use a tool that is good at formating documents? It was pulling my hair out over trying to format technical documents with Word that made me quit. Yes, there are more convenient, faster, better looking methods. While I agree that documents require more than plain text, MS Word isn't a very good solution.
The (easy, by the way) method to achieve the sort of flexibility you are requesting is to use LyX to generate your document, then save it as PDF as well as LaTeX. You can easily bundle the source with the compiled PDF. If you or someone else wants to edit the document, you edit the LaTeX in a nice GUI, and recompile the PDF. Moving from a 2-column to 3-column format is as simple (and fast!) as changing which style sheet you use. Now this won't work if you are sent a PDF file by itself, obviously, but for all internal documents where policy can require bundling the document source with its output, it would be fantastic. The trick to making it work is realizing Acrobat isn't the only way to get a great looking PDF.
But the topic at hand is businesses which will have broadband, so that half of your argument isn't really applicable. What is, however, is the idea of breaking the model by requiring it to allow offline work. A key concept was to avoid multiple incompatible versions by having just one document. However, it would be simple to download the HTML which makes up the document, so you could work on it anywhere. Its the "sync"/edit conflict resolution that seems inappropriate. I'd rather see you first check the real (and only) document to see whats changed and then you determine the appropriateness of the changes you wish to introduce. Automating this seems like a mistake, unless nothing has changed.
Available and installed are two different things, though. I'm pretty sure that PDF readers have far, far more market penetration that MS Office. Its hard to beat free. Sometimes when you especially care about the visual presentation, you want the document to look the same everywhere. Its hard to beat PDF.
It could be I'm not understanding you, but I've always found PDFs to be far easier to edit and format (with the right tools) than MS Word documents. I guess having the right tools really matters. Then again, MS Word editing without a Word compatible editor would likewise be "a pain to edit".
Don't forget the current state-of-the-art for spreadsheets, Gnumeric!
they said that writing a free C compiler and libraries just wasn't feasible. Afterwards, they said using the C compiler and associated libraries to write a free Unix clone wasn't feasible. Its been one thing after another, after another, after another... What the poster doesn't seem to understand is that the history involved indicates that geeks are especially good at tackling projects about which office mangers would say, "nothing is simple". I'd even go so far as to say that for office managers to tackle the job would be approaching the impossible.
I'd say the "scales almost effortlessly" you purport is what this geek doesn't understand.
However, the poster's real point was that if you are a writer, you need a text editor with features that support writing. Writers deal with words. If you are a publication designer (of pamphlets or magazines or even books), then you need a whole different sort of application. His point was that MS Office is unnecessary overkill for a writer, introducing problems without solving any, and yet also not sufficiently powerful for a publication designer. A writer would do better using LyX
MS Word is a Jack-of-all-Trades that does everything poorly. You can bend over backwards to work with it, and if you don't know anything else you'll feel like a superuser. It doesn't have to be that way, though.
Actually formating is an area where LaTex really outdoes MS Words sad implementation of a very important idea. However, more on topic, in the article consistent (and sane) formating was presented as a reason to move away from MS Word and to a Wiki based document system. To say "properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts", is like saying, "properly formatted pages look better than MS Word or plain text", i.e., it doesn't make sense. HTML is a markup language. The markup is specifically for format. No one is arguing against formating documents. Its about how to achieve a workable document system that avoids MS Word's inherent pitfalls.
Lyx and Kile and TeXmacs (as well as extended Emacs) are all excellent tools for dealing with LaTex.
I'm sorry, but its hard to take you seriously if you want to compare the power of MS Word to that of LaTex. Agreed that LaTex has a harder learning curve, but then flying a supersonic jet takes longer to learn than riding a bicycle. You don't sound like a Microsoft fanboi, but then again it seems that perhaps you don't know much of that which you speak.
I really do think that if everybody sang just for the love of singing, then we wouldn't need musicians. I'd hate to think that since no one is paying you to be a janitor, you never sweep or mop your own place. My point is that when everyone is producing for the sheer fun of doing it, then people who refuse to produce unless they get paid just won't get paid.
Video feeds of Talking Heads will require a high speed lane, perhaps. A news site or blog delivering text won't. Some of us prefer to read the transcripts even when both transcripts and video are available.
How about this model?
Create content.
Pay to post content
If you don't want to play, you don't have to pay. Oh, its not a *business* model? Maybe its not supposed to be.
So we have another ten years left?
somebody, please, "3very p0st" is either funny or insightful!
"Many atheists might also be agnostic." So then, at the same time that they declare "the question is unanswerable", they also declare , "the answer is 'not A'?"
Don't you sense a contradiction?
Even wave-particle duality doesn't suggest that a particle is a wave and a particle simultaneously, but rather that it can exhibit either property, wave-property or particle-property, depending on measurement context. If they firmly believe that the existence question can't be answered, then arrival at a preference involves faith, not any sort of proof-based belief, and hence my statement: "atheists require faith".
What becomes interesting, however, is if I purchase the work legally, in a country where copyright has expired on the work. The distribution was totally legal in that case. I have the book. What is the status of that book if I return to my native country, where copyright hasn't expired yet? I obviously couldn't distribute the book there, I'd have to return to where I purchased it (or other location where no copyright infringement would take place) in order to distribute the work. But can I put it on my bookshelf? Does it matter if the bookshelf is in the living room? Or does it need to go on a bookshelf in a locked room? This is to me the crucial question.