On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, Steve Lamb wrote:
> The problem with that is two fold. They paint a false picture of Linux > and they also strengthen the hold of those applications have on the market by > insisting they be everywhere. I've been bitten by that misconception. I've > been asked three times now to submit my resume in Word format because the > people on the other end couldn't figure out how to print my *ASCII* resume > formated to 78 characters wide! They actually chastised me for not using a > standard format. Please, someone tell me of a format more universal than > plain ASCII! Congratulations! You've just found yourself a pointy-haired-boss filter. This reminds me that next time when I have to use a resume, it will be in plaintext ASCII, even though I could easily create a MS Word document with StarOffice 4.0. Here's my experience with MS "productivity" tools: I made a couple of reports with a perl script that I wrote and made it output tab-delimited files that can be read and processed by any decent app or script. Then I thought "well, let's be a nice guy and convert the files to MS Excel format with StarOffice, that'll cost me some time and effort extra, but it'll also save me the time and agony to explain that `yes, you can read those tab-delimited files perfectly well into your much beloved MS Excel' at least three times in a row to some of those idi^H^H^Hcow-orkers of mine." Do you think that made them happy? No! Instead they came back to haunt me with inane requests for nonessential text-formatting to be applied to the data. Like as if I have time for that (they conceeded that it would have taken me three days of mindnumbing cut-and-pasting.) Now, it's no more mister nice guy for me and I settle for explaining people that it takes me more time to convert the data I produce for them into Excel Formatted files than it takes for them to read the Universally Formatted tab-delimited files into Excel on their own pc. Even if that takes me to explain it three or more times to them. Cheers, Joost -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null
