@ Lily:

It only takes a few seconds to copy and paste a paper into word, format it appropriately and submit. There is really no reason to keep it in the bloated Word format. Good on ya!

I’ve got into the habit of saving most things as text files. Especially notes and so on. I just don’t need all that bloat (I imagine Word WYSIWYG editing is rather like the HTML you get out of applications like Dreamweaver – it sort of works, but the code’s ugly as hell). Ironically, I keep getting told by teachers at school etc not to do so even when a document requires no formatting, Just Because. I’m gonna stick to .txt anyway, because the amount of space students are allocated to save files in is ridiculously small and it can always be copied and pasted in to a Word document if absolutely necessary.

[…] Sigh… This is going to be a short post, because something just died inside of me and I need to go bang my head against the brick wall to relieve the pain. It’s also vaguely related to my post from Tuesday. Related in topic matter, but not circumstances. […]

A few years ago I was doing customer support for one of the major mobile/cell phone companies here in the UK. The names and addresses of the companies around the country that could service the phones were kept in HTML documents accessible over the internal network. I couldn’t figure out why every time I loaded this page it took *so* darned long to load (> 10 seconds). During a lull in the calls I investigated and found that this ‘simple’ html document which only contained one large table with no styling had been saved out from MS Word – filesize? 1.2Mb!! I promptly rewrote the page in plain hand-written HTML – filesize? 38Kb. My new version loaded pretty much instantaneously over the network, and me and my team were able to drop valuable seconds off each call we received simply because we didn’t have to wait those 10 odd seconds for the page to load (whilst saying to the customer, ‘just waiting for that information to come up…’). Of course big companies being big companies we weren’t allowed to let everyone use the new smaller filesize document, the original MS bloatware version had been prepared *personally* by one of the bosses…

I don’t.
Linux has become a part of a staples magazine.
Open-source is a known term and will come to be more so.

Proprietary will become ‘obvious’ to the average user.
When the benefits outweigh the consequences, the ten-minute user will find it worthwhile to step out of the boxed protection of closed source monogamy.