Re: How to Educate New Users

From: rwwff (rwwff_at_cox.net)
Date: 11/15/05 

Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:50:17 -0600

On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:39:11 -0500, Realto Margarino wrote:
> rwwff wrote:
>> On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:30:52 -0500, Realto Margarino wrote:
>>>Ivan Marsh wrote:
>>>>On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 05:40:48 -0500, Realto Margarino wrote:
>>>>>Nonsense. The major "cost" of the "free" platform is that nobody writes
>>>>>any software of consequence for it.
>
>> That might have been the case last year; but with OpenOffice 2.0 out of
>> beta; that no longer is a reasonable assertion. Its fast, its powerful,
>> its internally available macro languages are easily on a par with MS's
>> offering. It reads and writes more file formats, it works on more
>> operating systems, and of course, its open source.
>>
>> Couple that with Gimp and you're in really good shape for doc production.
>
> Sorry to disappoint you but Gimp is hardly a professional graphics
> system. I have used Gimp and it doesn't come close to Adobe
> Illustrator/photoshop. It is fine for a freebie but it is not
> top-notch. The biggest problem I had with Gimp is the poor font
> resolutions. And Openoffice may be ok for a university student but it
> will hardly do in a production environment. Word and Wordperfect have a
> long history of macros that OO can't come close to matching.

I use Gimp on one machine, and Photoshop CS on another, and to be
perfectly honest, for 99% of the things people typically do in the office
with images, there is zilch difference. Again, there are certainly a
few instances where photoshop's capabilities become necessary, and so
running it on a MAC or WinOS machine makes sense if you have a need for
those capabilities. Gimp in its current incarnation, reminds me a lot
about Photoshop 4; and noone called Photoshop 4 a joke.

In most offices, and for 95% of office workers out there, they wouldn't
know a VB/Java macro if it hit them in the face. A few think they've
attained hackerhood by writing a fifty line doodad. But the number of
folks that actually use large, hard to port Microsoft Visual Basic for
Applications macro programs that do actual work is really fairly
small. And for them, certainly, the appropriate system is a Windows
machine running Office. Even then, having just recently ported a
medium size excel VB program to OO Calc basic, I have to admit that it
wasn't all that bad.

For the person putting together this weeks Bass Pro Shops catalog, or this
year's 10-K for IBM; maybe OO and gimp aren't up to the task (I'm not
positive that this is TRULY the case, but confidence trumps reality in
such settings), but for just about everyone else, they'll do just fine.

For most working environments that I've seen, WinXP + OpenOffice + Gimp is
an incredibly powerful combination of capabilities that end users in most
any professional setting will find entirely adequate. And best of all,
it keeps them nice and legal, and free from having to decide between
either pirating, using lowend apps (wordpad & paintbrush), or spending
$600 per machine on MS Office + photoshop.

Always remember, in real businesses where making and keeping money is more
important than spending it, "cutting edge" means you bleed. ie, its a bad
thing. Cheap, tested, and adequete always win over the long haul.

>>>I use a program now called Cakewalk. It is music processing software
>>>and nothing in linux compares to it. If it ran in linux, I would use
>>>linux. But it doesn't. It runs in windows. So I run windows.
>>
>> Well, there's the reason you use windows, and really the only good one for
>> any OS. You have a custom/particular piece of commercial software that
>> requires windows to run. We use Encore here to write *** music, it
>> runs on windows, and so, we have a windows computer to run it on. There
>> is, of course, lilypond, but we've used Encore for so long, and we use it
>> for such "quick hack" stuff; that making the switch doesn't make sense.
>
> Yes, Encore is another program I have. I don't know what lilypond is.

Lilypond produces sheetmusic that is really unmatched in its visual
appearance. When I look at music printed from Encore or that other
desktop one who's name escapes me at the moment (its more pop though); its
obvious that it was printed on someone's computer. But if I look at a
*** of music produced from lilypond, I start to have doubts; print it on
the right 11x17 paper, with a drawing or something on the cover, fold it
nicely, and it looks flat out commercially done.

But, like I said, Encore gets you to a *** of music you can read, and it
gets it done fast. Which, for our purposes, is way more important than
whether it looks like store bought *** music.

>>>I guess I am an idiot because I measure an OS by its ultimate
>>>productivity. You like an OS because it serves your anal cravings.
>>
>> You're not really measuring the OS though. All you are measuring is the
>> fact that your particular software runs on windows.
>
> And that is the context by which I measure the OS. By my needs.
> Windows, not linux, satisfies my needs. THat is not to say that linux
> wouldn't satisfy somebody else's needs. But I get really tired of the
> zealots who cry out, blindly of course, that windows is no good for
> anything and that linux is better in all cases.

I don't think any of those folks really spend much time on
alt.os.linux.slackware which is where I'm reading this. I dislike the
zealots on both sides of the fence though. An OS is a tool. When DOS
fits the bill, I use DOS, when slackware fits the bill, I use slackware,
and when Windows fits the bill, I use Windows.

>> TeX is a counter example of an equally arcane nature. Sure, there are
>> ways, with lots of effort, to get TeX running on a windows system.
>> Contrast that to thirty minutes with nearly any linux distribution and a
>> marginally suitable CPU (486 or better, 64 meg ram), and you've got a full
>> blown, working TeX system. No muss, no fuss, works every time.
>
> I didn't think anyone used TeX anymore.

You think wrong. It'd be impossible to prove or disprove, but I would
guess that the number of TeX (&LaTex,etc) users out there, exceeds by some
substantial margin, the number of legal Cakewalk or Encore users.

A less arcane example would be mySQL server. Yes, you can run it on
windows if you want; but the vast majority are *nixes. Apache/php/mysql
come working and installed on lots of Linux distributions. Just start'em
up, and your serving.