i hate ms word. this stuff is like RETARDED. i am writing a paper together with a co-worker. normally i use vim+latex but of course that’s *impossible* to use for “normal” people (sigh). so now i’m using ms word and constantly banging my head on my table. it’s so stupid and buggy i can’t believe people want to pay for this. and it hurts my eyes.

sorry, i needed to vent my frustration.

@Ian @Luke the good part of ignorance is mental economy – you cannot know and learn everything, so you consciously chose what to learn. Making a good decision can be something to be proud of. The bad part is when bad decisions keep you ignorant of something you’d need to understand in order to do a good job at whatever you want to do (e.g. typesetting documents!). Worst of course is when economy becomes just an excuse for lazyness.

@Kevin Benko: My thesis defense slides were made with LaTex. ;)

Also, I see you are feeling somewhat bold today. lol

@Ian Clifton: Precisely! I hate when people are proud of their own ignorance and lack of knowledge as if it was something worth bragging about.

Excellent quote! ;) I think this post ties in with your post from today and mentioning that people don’t like to read. People also like to only excel at one thing, and they actively choose for that thing to not be technologically related. This all goes back to the anti-intellectualism that I believe you posted about quite a while ago; our society somehow thinks that being ignorant is cool. Of course, our society also believes in buying things it can’t afford and look where that has gotten us…

Luke:

I remember “Wordstar”… on CP/M !!!

I’ve been using LaTeX since 2002. Hell, I use LaTeX for everything. I’m probably one of the three people on Earth who uses the letter class. I use the beamer class to do presentation (death by “powerpoint”) slides. I even got my wife to start using LaTeX in 2004.

I totally agree with you, man.

@Peter Hilton: Great article! Wikis are indeed a good replacement – especially for collaborative documents.

@Alex: LOL! It happens. Just like all my WoW related posts have Gold Farming adds attached to them. :P

@Jake: Word!

[quote post=”2674″]By the way, for HTML editing, Dreamweaver used to follow the “Word Perfect” paradigm – parallel HTML source and rendered page view.[/quote]

What do you mean used to? I hope they didn’t remove that feature in the newer releases.

The blog we use at our company uses a variant of TinyMCE. Its WYSIWYG mode is very useful for “importing” rich text I want to post which originally came via email, from a Word document or from a web page etc: Copy & Paste into TinyMCE, switch to HTML source view (!) and clean up the mess (preferrably by copying to a syntax-aware highlighting ASCII editor and back).
By the way, for HTML editing, Dreamweaver used to follow the “Word Perfect” paradigm – parallel HTML source and rendered page view.

[quote comment=”10398″]
Man you are exactly right but I wonder why some many FOSS and OSS zealots still whine so much that they want everyone to only use OSS/FOSS and to think just like them? The fact is that not only is OSS/FOSS difficult to use but buggy especially most of the crap on Linux..[/quote]

You are making a very broad generalization. You are saying that all software that is produced a certain way is going to be buggy. In reality, some of the code that you are using is even from open source software at some point. Microsoft borrowed public domain code to make Internet Explorer and they borrowed BSD licensed code for Window’s TCP/IP stack.

Open source is simply a way of coding and releasing code. There will be some excellent, easy-to-use dependable code released under open source licenses. There will also be some code that is complete crap. I find the Linux kernel, GNU toolkit, KDE desktop environment, and so forth to be very easy to use and reliable. OpenBSD that I’m on now is also very reliable, even if it isn’t easy to use. OpenBSD is arguably the most secure OS in existence.

That’s funny, all the post is talking about the evil on WYSIWYG and at the end of the page there is advertisment for Cute Editor for ASP.Net, a WYSIWYG HTML editor.

You’re right, and so is Alphast, which is why a Wiki is my word-processor.