🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Withers (sbwwgtn@ibm.net) wrote:
|In <Dr4uyH.2so@postfix.cimpact.nl>, bo@postfix.cimpact.nl (Mailhost Master) writes:
 
> I can see it now, the night before that final paper is due, the one that
> needs the graphs and charts, italicizion and bold fonts.  What do you do?
> Microsoft Word?  No.  WordPerfect?  No.  PageMaker?  No.  You whip
> out...  vi and LaTeX!!!!!  yeah right.

 You are being  sarcastic, right? That is  what I do.  Vi and nroff or vim
 and latex or emacs and nroff. Cool stuff.

|>[flame on]

 Oh man, I am so scared now. I better run for my life.

 (...)
 
|>: >It's time Unix machines moved into the modern age of word processors.
|>
|>If  you  run  ANY  of  those  so-called  "modern  age" wordprocessors on
|>anything  less  than  a  fucking  P160, changing a font from "normal" to
|>"bold"  takes  forever.  And  it  won't get any better because all those
|>programs  are derived from earlier versions simply by adding more sloppy
|>code    to  an  already  sloppy  program.  You'll  end  up  with  a  1Gb
|>wordprocessor  that  eats  ALL  your resources while doing NOTHING. Even
|>Emacs will laugh at it. Your modern age is 20 years behind Unix.

 *nod* Thank you for the post, my invisible cyberspace friend.

 A couple of weeks ago I decided to compose my resume. 

 I went to  our Macintosh  computer lab, started  Word  Perfect or another
 word processor they have on there, forget  which.  Wanted to make certain
 words bold and/or underlined.  It took me ten minutes  to figure out how.
 No, I am not stupid, but Word Perfect is not a  user friendly program and
 I have not used it for a  long time anyway.   Typed in the resume.  Tried
 to save in on the floppy disk  and froze the machine.   Rebooted it.  Got
 frustrated, gave up and went to the Unix lab, fired  up emacs and my mind
 was like "Aahhh".  Pure editing satisfaction. Retyped the resume in about
 five minutes, formatted the file with nroff and was done.  Unix computers
 do not freeze   like Machintoshes.  They  do  a lot  of bad things,  they
 crash, but they   have never stolen my   resume  from me.   I  am not  an
 experienced Macintosh user but then Macs are not designed for experienced
 users  and do not  have  a steep  learning  curve.   I  have seen  people
 "freeze" Macs and I have done it myself a few times over the years.  Some
 of these  problems  occured entirely because  of my  errors and some were
 not.  A computer  or a software  package that freezes for whatever reason
 is absolutely unacceptable.  This is the reason I despise Macs among many
 other things in life.

 I was upset that day I lost my resume and 20 mitutes  of my life.  Little
 things like  that terribly frustrate   and upset  me, albeit  for   short
 periods  of time.   I  still use Macs  sometimes   just because  they are
 different from what  I am used  to.  They are fine, high-quality machines
 and when they perform as they should  and do not  disappoint me, they are
 great.  Eventually I retyped the resume with Word on a Mac and it decided
 to  be nice to  me and did not "freeze".    I suppose I  should thank the
 computer for it. If our Unix lab had a laser printer  like the Mac lab, I
 would certainly do it in emacs on a Sun worstation because it is the best
 combination I have ever encountered.

 Why I am posting this?

 I dunno. You figure it out.
  
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Ilya Beloozerov  Email: ibelooze@runet.edu
Public PGP key is available at http://www.cs.runet.edu/~ibelooze
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