🚀 go-pugleaf

rsjohnso@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu (Richard Scot Johnson) writes:

>All these posts about users needing to know source code of their OS
>and having the sophistication of a Unix administrator is ridiculous.
>It's like a comment made by a friend of mine (a linux fanatic) who
>claimed that all artist should know the chemical composition and    
>properties of the paint they were using.  Otherwise they couldn't be
>considered "competent enough" to use their tools.  

There is a difference between "needing" and "needing to have access to". The
artist usually is just fine painting and mixing his blues, yellows and
oranges. However, imagine your artist wanting to get a very specific shade
of green, and whenever he mixes the colours that should get him that shade
of green, he gets a flaming red. 
Now, one way is to settle for another green, but that would mean
compromising the artictic idea of the drawing. The other way is to find out
why the f*ck this blua and that yellow yield red instead of green. Which
probably means taking a list of the ingredients and pigments to someone
knowledgeable in chemistry, and asking "What's going on? And what can be
done against it?".

In computer terms, the green coming out as red is something that should work
not working. Like expecting "DEL *.TXT" to delete all the files and only the
files "DIR *.TXT" will show you. Saying "what the heck, I'll just use Norton
Commander" is settling for the other green. Sadly, going to the chemist is
not a possibility, because there is no access to the list of ingredients.

The above problem was just annoying --- but there are real show-stoppers out
there you cannot do anything about other than to complain to the software
company. When a friend of mine wrote her diploma thesis, she did the charts
and diagrams in Harvard graphics for Windows. I had promised her to import
the stuff into her LaTeX document, and when the day for the large
integration came, I had all my tools for the LaTeX side ready. So I ask HGW
to export the stuff as a BMP file, import it into LaTeX --- and it looks
absolutely horrible. I played around with the parameters of my tools, but no
go. Finally, I looked at the BMP file directly --- and sure enough, it was
absolute crap. I then tried every other pixel based export filter, and none
of them got the width of characters right, and every single one of them had
a number of pixels randomly set or unset.
Now apart from it being an insult to release such a version, I was
particularly annoyed that I could not even try to figure out the problem. No
way, no how. So all I could do was to find a workaround. In the end, we
installed a PostScript printer driver, printed all the diagrams to the
harddisk, the fired up linux and converted them to bitmaps using
ghostscript, and because we already had it running, used it to do the
integration into LaTeX as well. Of course, we had to use another computer
for that (hers didn't have linux on it), so we spent quite some time
carrying around disks, waiting for that other computer to be available and
after all getting used to that computer's setup. I am pretty positive I
could have fixed the export bug in that time.

So, nobody normally _needs_ the source, but when th un-normal situation of
needing it occurs, it should be available.

Bernie
 
-- 
==============================================================================
Anybody out there who knows how to connect a Wyse terminal keyboard to a PC
_without_ the terminal in between? Current keyboard lses chracters evr so
oftn.............  Getng wrs al te im. Hp!