But there's a reason we all put "BS required" in those ads, and it is because it's a filter. It's not a have/not have filter. It's an asshole/not asshole filter.

You really think not using outlook makes me fit the asshole category!

But there's a reason we all put "BS required" in those ads, and it is because it's a filter. ?It's not a have/not have filter. ?It's an asshole/not asshole filter. This proves the job seekers view of HR, The complexity of a machines repair here is required as a primary skill, some thing as simple as mail program can be learned or taught, it is far to trivial to be mentioned in any job specification.

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 8:12 AM, Simon Fryer <fryers at gmail.com> wrote: It is a trivial requirement but cuts me out from applying at all, it trumps skills I do have.

Like I said it would be a dream job but being in the wrong country for me I cannot apply.

> It is a trivial requirement but cuts me out from applying at all, it > trumps skills I do have.

Given that the job isn't for a MS Exchange / helpdesk role, I would interpret that requirement as, "you are expected to be able to use email, and we use outlook." Personally, I would pay token note to this

but wouldn't read too much into this requirement. If I was addressing the requirement, while being a happy gmail / eudora / insert graphical mail application of choice user, I would refer to the fact that I

I am in Australia so I don't qualify either. Aside, when reviewing or writing job specifications I have never bothered to list MS Office or a specific email client. I take it for granted that everyone knows MS Office and can pick up an email client

quickly enough. And before anyone commits fingers to keyboards over MS Office, I hate it too and would much rather use LaTeX. However, in my 15 years of working history through a number of different jobs and fields, all my company supplied PC's have had Office installed and the expectation is that any documentation will be produced in Word. As for software packages in general, I find it is more useful to concentrate on underlying skills that can be applied rather than an ability to use a software package without the underlying knowledge.

of people have seen fit to publicly argue over the employer's parameters or express their shock that a company run and paid for by a Microsoft co-founder might (gasp!) want the prospective employee to be capable of using Microsoft communication tools. For what it's worth, I'm sure these

Are you kidding me? It's a stupid email program. Any drooling monkey can learn how to use it in 10 minutes. Go download it, install it and mess around with it for a day to see all the spiffy calendar features, etc. Uninstall and add it to your resume'. :)

So why do you care if they require Outlook or not? Seriously? :)

I think the point and the reader failed to converge.

>>>

You really think not using outlook makes me fit the asshole category!

On Oct 4, 2011, at 2:43 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: While reading your message, I somehow became confused and thought I was at the Scary Devil Monastery?

Of late the negativity in CCTALK has reached somewhat epic proportions - and people are coming across in a rather poor light. Many posters seem to be permanently stuck in the stone age and appear to hate anything produced in the last 30 years. This post is a perfect example : "Outhouse" and "Weird" - hate to tell you but both of those particular products have been the business standard for quite a few years now and a lot of roles are advertised that require the applicants to be proficient in their uses.

Nor should users of the products be denigrated as useless or idiots because they use them - claiming such only proves that YOU are the foolish one.

These are the tools of the trade now (and despite the haters who seem to think they are "rubbish") are rather powerful ones - especially Outlook.

This smacks of the exact same credibility-smashing crap that Richard spewed a few hours ago when he suggested that anyone who doesn't use Outlook is an "asshole".

Love is in the air...

I wonder how may business types have ever seriosuly evaluated what's actually available rahter than just buying soemthing because it's from Microsoft (or whoever).

On 4 October 2011 21:48, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: It *is* true. No, and he didn't say that. They are not clean, or elegant, or entirely reliable. But they do work and millions of businesses do trillions of dollars' worth of business using them. They /are/ fit for purpose. He's not suggesting that either. However, you cannot simply dismiss them as useless. They are not; their tens of millions of users refute that. Frankly, Dave, no, *your* attitude is. Utter tosh. Businesspeople run MS because businesses run MS. Because MS' are the standard file formats, tools, because the staff you hire /will/ know MS, because the files you exchange with your clients and suppliers will be MS files carried on MS systems, and most of all, because the techies you hire will be MS techies. Why? Because MS techies are cheap and plentiful and all other kinds are scarce, hard to retain, tend to be prima donnas with their own strong views on how to run things, and they are extremely expensive into the deal. MS is cheap commodity software that runs on cheap commodity hardware and can be both used and maintained by cheap commodity staff. There /are/ no really credible alternatives any more. This is because of MS' decades of illegal anti-competitive manouvreing in the 1980s and 1990s, but it's too late to cry over that spilled milk now. Sadly, the vast majority of techies, from menials to directors, all know MS and nothing else now. Yes, that means they're inferior techies, but they are all you can get. Outlook is only half the solution. It's part of a system, and the other half is Exchange. For all its faults, nothing else does what Exchange does and nothing ever has. It is not an email server. It is a groupware and workflow server. It does *push* delivery, it does shared calendaring and shared company directories, and whereas there are lots of other fine email servers out there and a handful of calendaring or group-directory servers, they're single-function tools which have to be assembled by skilful experts, and those experts are very very expensive, and you're utterly dependent on them. Get rid of one, you're screwed, because any replacement will immediately suggest ripping out his predecessor's solution and implementing his own. As for Word - actually, for all its faults and weirdnesses, Word was a very fine high-end wordprocessor until the Fluent interface came in and ruined it. Excel - well, it's the most polished spreadsheet there's ever been. Other did some things better, but Excel does everything you could ever need. Powerpoint? Workable. Access? Pile of crap. But Approach died and Filemaker never really broke out on Windows. Outlook is the crown jewel, though. I hate it but it is bloody good at what it does. Nightmare when it fails, but if you're on an Exchange server, it hardly matters. Utterly untrue. Total bollocks, in fact. I can point to hundreds I know or have worked with personally in the last 5y alone. No there isn't, because it's not the case. Idiots may have been how MS got established, although undercutting the competition and shrewdly forcing upgrades and so on have more to do with it. But not now. You don't seem to have any idea of how the real world of business actually operates, Dave. I'm sorry, but both bigotry and utterly unrealistic beliefs shine out of this. That's just crap, actually, I agree. Dave, you have to try to get a handle on the hatred. I too hate Microsoft and the majority of its products, I hate the illegal tactics that it's used to gain its monopoly position and much more besides. I prefer Macs, but I'm not too happy about that company's tactics and commercial methods either. So I run Linux, but it sucks. Ubuntu sucks less than any other Linux, and Linux sucks less than any other Unix I've ever seen, but they're still crap. I am nostalgic for the performance and responsiveness of Acorn RISC OS and the way BeOS felt like it liberated the power of x86 PCs, for the command line flexibility of VMS, for the simplicity of MS-DOS, for the completeness of the classic Mac OS Finder. But they're all gone. However, I have to earn a living, and, conservatively, 98% of the business world revolves around MS and nothing but MS. A few big back-end systems run Oracle and things, but the front-ends are /all/ MS. When MS sells 20,000 licences, it's a small deal. Nothing worth reporting. When SUSE sells 20,000 licences, it's front-page news in the IT press all over the world. And most of those sales have gone back within a year or two, sadly. Linux in business is bodged-together servers that the bosses don't know about and people's ad hoc recovery disks, monitoring boxes and so on. Even the commercial-grade routers don't run it - that's home stuff. Macs are stuck in a niche and while they are growing that's in large part because modern Macs can run Windows and Windows apps in a VM. The desktop and laptop world, the corporare world, is a Microsoft world. Everything else amounts for 5-10%, if that, on a good day with a following wind. It's shitty and it was achieved illegally but *it is the case* and no amount of shouting invective will change that. Gates is a lying, cheating, scheming thief who is buying himself a good name by giving away his obscenely-massive ill-gotten gains to charity. He hasn't even got the imagination of a Paul Allen or Elon Musk, who do good, creative things with their money. He's a nasty venal small-minded little nerd who stabbed in the back every business that came close to him and climbed high on the dead bodies. But he is still atop that mound. Anyone who came close is a bleeding corpse under his feet - Netscape, Sun, WordPerfect, Lotus, even mighty IBM's PC hardware and software businesses. Oracle and Apple have only lived by staying the hell out of the way, and Microsoft is still shooting big guns at both of them. There is no point denying it. You can help it, but not by calling people liars and idiots, but by in a measured and friendly and supportive fashion showing them how they can use non-Microsoft tools to their advantage and save time and money in so doing. But in business, it's almost a lost cause. Businesses don't care how much it costs - it's a fraction of the staff costs, and non-MS staff are vastly expensive. Anything has to be instantly familiar to MS-only staff and it has to be deployable off ActiveDirectory using a Group Policy and stable and supported for the lifetime of the hardware, which you just can't do with Mozilla anything or Chrome or OpenOffice or LibreOffice or *any* of the rival tools. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

Flame away if you like, but bear in mind that it makes you look stupid and seem immature.

*I* dislike it because it sucks, too. Our opinions have little bearing on the continents-full of people using it, though.

I work in the field every day and have watched the rise of MICROS~1 since my getting into the industry in 1988; before that, I watched from the sidelines from around the time of the introduction of the IBM PC, which is, coincidentally, about the time I got interested in computers and computing.

[Shrug] No skin off my nose, but I'm working in the business computing world still and I know what it's like. You don't seem to.

Great way to grow and learn, that. Block out anyone who corrects you. Let us know how you get on with that, won't you?

No, not at all. I assert that it's unprofessional to go around calling people arseholes and liars and idiots.

Or swearing all the time.

Or claiming that tools used by more people than live in your entire country are useless rubbish.

Or claiming that the former richest corporation in the world, owned and run by the former richest man in the world, are incompetents.

So tell me, top-quoting boy, how do you feel this enhances your reputation for professionalism, skill and knowledge? :?)

I'm not offended and it doesn't really matter to me if you read this or don't, but man, you really need to "take a chill pill" and calm down and learn to accept what you can't change.

You change people's minds by showing them that you understand them and then gradually leading them in the direction of better tools, methods and practices, not by shouting at them and calling them idiots.

from you. Because, while I am quite certain that you're a

On 19 October 2011 05:10, Dave McGuire<mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: I'm not going to bother debating point-by-point with an offensive, loudmouthed bigot. Who is, incidentally, younger than me and is very definitely a *lot* less experienced than me in the wider world. You clearly know very little about the realities of commercial, home and business computing in C21. I am happy to accept that your statements are entirely accurate about technical/scientific computing. I have little contact with this area, but when I do, I mostly see Linux and Mac OS X, and Windows is rare except in the administrative areas. However, the fact remains that technical/scientific computing is a small niche market. If you have managed to remain within it, good for you. I am happy for you. You are making a cardinal error of logic in thinking that the area that you specialise in is the whole world, though. It's one I've made myself. For instance, it would be very easy to deduce, from walking around homes and offices, that x86 computers utterly dominate today. No mainstream PC manufacturer makes desktops or laptops that run anything else, except occasionally as sidelines, e.g. Toshiba's AC-100 ARM netbook. But actually, ARM processors outsell all different makes of x86 chips many times over, perhaps 10? over. Embedded computers far outnumber PCs, and in the embedded world, things like MIPS are still strong, as even are 8-bit devices. One of the world's most widely-deployed OSs is TRON and iTRON and yet few have ever heard of it. But in the world of the PC, of general-purpose computers, yes, x86 rules, and in the world of x86, Windows rules. Apple with Mac OS X has about 5% of the world market. It's gone lower but since the launch of the Mac in 1984 it's never gone much higher. In terms of value, Apple sells very well - in some sectors it's reached a third of the market, but in terms of units, it's way behind. And Linux is a dramatically smaller sector than Apple. It's around a single percent. Yes, I can demonstrate all this conclusively with figures, but I am not going to go obtaining and giving references for a hostile and abusive fool who repeatedly calls complete strangers arseholes. You are demonstrating the exact sort of prima-donna behaviour that is [a] strongly associated with Asperger's Syndrome, meaning that you need to learn some people skills, and [b] is exactly what keeps Linux in a tiny niche and prevents it from expanding in the world of business. Because the sort of people who build and run elaborate Unix systems are big, grumpy, bearded boorish males who are very hard to work with and expect to be treated like gods when they behave like spoiled schoolchildren. Oh, and by the way, just to point out the foolishness of your mud-slinging, this is typed on my Linux-powered main PC, which like my laptop, runs Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot". I have never bought an Microsoft product in my life and never will, and I have bought one used end-of-life Apple OS and two used Newtons in my entire computing life, nothing else. Yes, I have a dozen or so Macs. Most are 15-20+ years old, because after all this is a classic-computers collectors' list and it's why I'm here, and *every single one of them* was free.

We could use a bit of "Barn Raising".

On 20/10/11 11:58 PM, Jerome H. Fine wrote: We didn't need to wait for Mr Kahn. The Greeks were all over this one: ?"...we must be able to employ persuasion, just as strict reasoning can be employed, on opposite sides of a questio, not in order that we may in practice employ it in both ways (for we must not make people believe what is wrong), but in order that we may see clearly what the facts are, and that, if another man argues unfairly, we on our part may be able to confute him. No other of the arts draws opposite conclusions: dialectic and rhetoric alone do this. Both these arts draw opposite conclusions impartially. Nevertheless, the underlying facts do not lend themselves equally well to the contrary views. No; things that are true and things that are better are, by their nature, practically always easier to prove and easier to believe in." ?(Aristotle, "Rhetoric") --T

On this list, isn't it 'Stop arguing you two, or I'll crash your heads right into the platter' :-) -tony

At the risk if being naive, perhaps this list could use a bit of inspiration - to see if we could help the discussion to be more useful. There is a book written by Michael Kahn: ?"The TAO of Conversation". The primary point is that in an idea conversation, there can never be an opinion which is right or wrong. ?Attempting to support an opinion helps us to understand the opinion even if we totally disagree with that opinion. While I agree with both of the opinions of Dave McGuire and Liam Proven, it seems difficult to figure out exactly which is more useful because they seem so angry at each other.

We could use a bit of "Barn Raising".

Dave McGuire wrote:

Not from my point of view.

That much was obvious. ?The question is why you became irritated! Read the source (the book) Luke (Liam), read the source. There is much more behind the concepts in the book, but they are a good start. ?After reading for more than 36 years, I am just beginning to understand myself. ?I also used to be irritated (still am sometimes - and I also react without thinking some of the time), so it is now easy to recognize those events even easier in others as opposed to myself.

Liam Proven wrote:

I only noticed this in a subsequent quote today. I was irritated, yes, but I was trying /very/ hard to be calm, polite and reasonable. I was the one getting abused, not dispensing it.

What does that mean?

Actually it doesn't do everything I could ever need which leads me to a serious qyestion : Did/does any spreadsheet, on any platform, allow you to put complex numbers in the cells and operate on them? Yes, of course you can treat a complex numner as 2 real numbers and define the appropriate operations -- any spreadsheet will do that. I did it in Visicalc. But as I use complex numbers a lot in AC circuit analysis, and I know others who do too, I am suprised no spreadsheet handles them as well as my HP calculators.

No, I've not managed to find one, and nor has anyone I've talked to (many of whom also want it). This is a serious question, BTW, not M$-bashing or anything like that. I do use complex numbers for AC circuit analysis, they are useful to represent the magnitude and pahse of signals, things like that. I'ev been told many times that the reason I can't get a 'good' scientific calcualtor any more is that 'everybody uses a spreadsheet'. That may be true (for suitable approximations to 'everybody' :-)), but nonetheless my HP RPL machines handle complex numbers directly and are much easier to sue for AC circuit problems than any normal spreadsheet as a result, -tony

On 10/20/2011 03:36 PM, Tony Duell wrote: That makes about as much sense as saying "We don't need screwdrivers anymore, because we have pickles!" Two totally different tools for two totally different jobs. Stop the world, I wanna get off.

That makes about as much sense as saying "We don't need >screwdrivers

Two totally different tools for two totally different jobs. Stop the world, I wanna get off.

On 10/20/2011 03:36 PM, Tony Duell wrote: That makes about as much sense as saying "We don't need screwdrivers anymore, because we have pickles!" Two totally different tools for two totally different jobs.

Read the book "Laboratory Lotus : A Complete Guide To Instrument Interfacing"; Louis M. Mezei, Prentice Hall, 1989 ISBN[10]: 0-13-519885-2 'Twould be presumptuous to specify "everything you could ever need". Some of us have unusual needs, that you might consider bizarre. "You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime, you get what you need"?? On Wed, 19 Oct 2011, Tony Duell wrote: I'm far from expert - I don't even know how to get Excel to TELL ME which numbers are float, which cells (particularly floats) are calculated fron other floats, or even which have been rounded. I have used Visicalc, Lotus, and Excel for a number of "off-label" uses, such as small flat-file databases, etc. ?A lot of my CGA and MDA monitors had burnt-in "Lotus L"s. It is amazingly versatile, but certainly NOT "everything that you could ever need"

you're kidding right? excel is a joke. 1-2-3 was much better, quattro was even better sadly both have been crushed by monopoly of m$ is quattro old enough to be considered classic computing yet? :)

I read once that the creation of the spreadsheet is the basic trigger for the loss of leadership skills at the helms of most companies. The logic went something along the lines of ' spreadsheets allowed decisions to be justified, not based on what was good (tm), instead of having a sound financial basis. ?Resulting the the removal of decision making powers by visionaries, into the hands of the bean counters who should have been making sure that there was money in the bank." So - in that context, why would an engineer ever need the tool of a back room bean counter, who has been pushed into the executive offices?? Doug

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 9:54 AM, Dan Gahlinger <dgahling at hotmail.com> wrote: -- Doug Jackson VK1ZDJ http://www.dougswordclock.com/ ?-< My clocks http://www.vk1zdj.net -< My Amature Radio Activities

I think a true engineer (or scientist, hacker, what have you) will use whatever they consider to be the most appropriate tool for the job in hand, no matter who else might use it, or what they might use it for. -tony

On Thu, 20 Oct 2011, Doug Jackson wrote: Q: Who, other than a bean counter, would think that bean counters are the only people who ever use tools to work with numbers? There ARE other reasons to do so, even for just adding up a column of numbers!

Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:43:53 +0100 Subject: Re: Spreadsheets (was Microsoft flamage) From: lproven at gmail.com To: cctech at classiccmp.org On 19 October 2011 23:27, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: >> > Excel - well, it's the most polished spreadsheet there's ever been. >> > Other did some things better, but Excel does everything you could

>> > need. > > Read the book "Laboratory Lotus : A Complete Guide To Instrument > Interfacing"; Louis M. Mezei, Prentice Hall, 1989 > ISBN[10]: 0-13-519885-2 > > 'Twould be presumptuous to specify "everything you could ever need". > Some of us have unusual needs, that you might consider bizarre. > > "You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime, you get

> you need"?? > > > On Wed, 19 Oct 2011, Tony Duell wrote: >> Actually it doesn't do everything I could ever need which leads me to a >> serious qyestion : >> Did/does any spreadsheet, on any platform, allow you to put complex >> numbers in the cells and operate on them? >> Yes, of course you can treat a complex numner as 2 real numbers and >> define the appropriate operations -- any spreadsheet will do that. I

>> it in Visicalc. But as I use complex numbers a lot in AC circuit >> analysis, and I know others who do too, I am suprised no spreadsheet >> handles them as well as my HP calculators. > > > I'm far from expert - I don't even know how to get Excel to TELL ME

> numbers are float, which cells (particularly floats) are calculated > fron other floats, or even which have been rounded. > > I have used Visicalc, Lotus, and Excel for a number of "off-label" uses, > such as small flat-file databases, etc. A lot of my CGA and MDA

OK, I defer. I was not aware of anything 1-2-3 could do that Excel could not, but hey, apparently there is. I was wrong. Sorry. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On Thu, 20 Oct 2011, Andrew Burton wrote: Excel is part of Microsoft OFFICE, NOT part of Windows. Q: Is it also included in "WORKS"?

I deal with plenty of Windoze machines that don't have it, and I need to decide whether to buy additional copies V installing Open Office. ?My personal preference, of course, would be Open Office, but other people have participation in the decision making process. ?Several things might be different if they let me make the decisions.

On 20 Oct 2011 at 15:27, Fred Cisin wrote: I can also provide SuperCalc for x80 CP/M as well as MS-DOS. Sorcim was pretty much destroyed after it was acquired by CA.

Doesn't that cover pretty much everything ever acquired by CA? :)

Excel is easy to use and comes with all Windows based computers.

Sadly I am not old enough (or lucky enough) to have used any alternatives - though I have heard of Lotus long before I joined this list. Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk

. . . We just HAD TO call you on your use of the word "everything". Excel certainly has hundreds of "features" that I'll never use, and might never even become aware of. I assigned creating a partial implementation of form 1040EZ when I was [involuntarily] assigned to teach a [REMEDIAL] Intro to computers class using Microsoft Office. ?I did not do a good job of it - a lot of the students cheated! ?and retyped a long paragraph just to avoid learning "cut and paste"! I LIKE Excel, but the depth of my knowledge of it leaves quite a bit to be desired.

Actually it doesn't do everything I could ever need which leads me to a serious qyestion :

Of late the negativity in CCTALK has reached somewhat epic proportions - and people are coming across in a rather poor light. Many posters seem to be permanently stuck in the stone age and appear to hate anything produced in the last 30 years.

This post is a perfect example :

"Outhouse" and "Weird" - hate to tell you but both of those particular products have been the business standard for quite a few years now and a lot of roles are advertised that require the applicants to be proficient in their uses.

Nor should users of the products be denigrated as useless or idiots because they use them - claiming such only proves that YOU are the foolish one.

These are the tools of the trade now (and despite the haters who seem to think they are "rubbish") are rather powerful ones - especially Outlook.

I have a fondness for Commodore 8 bit machines and have for a long time, but you won't ever find me holding them up as the paragon of computing experience or denigrating users of modern equipment/software in the false belief that the tools of the trade were better 30 years ago!

Were I a newbie looking for info on older machines and had I stumbled across this thread first I doubt I'd want to jump in and participate for fear of the angst I'd face from the stone age "things were better" people here.

And to drag this back on topic, in my role (Genesys engineer), when I'm hiring people that piece of paper that states they are a certified Genesys professional has great importance - I would not hire someone if (a) they didn't have it, or (b) they weren't embarked on the certification process without some indication that they would come out the other end with the relevant qualifications. There are times when a piece of paper is extremely important to some roles because it shows dedication to achieving the relevant learning for a particular role.

Going backwards - we may all love and be passionate about our old machines and may have learnt skills to keep our hobby alive, but those skills (ie soldering, coding in a dead language etc) don't nec. translate into something useful in today's computer related job market and people should not be put down or denigrated because they don't have them.

Cheers, Lance (yes - written in Outlook)

I fail to see why. In the case of Outlook, surely any e-mail prgram can send/receive mail that is compatible with it. Does it matter what I choose to use? It's about as sensible as saying I _must_ use a tektronix 'scope.

Err, yes, sorry... I was just giving an example, not moaning about Tekky.... Although modern Tektronix 'scopes seem to be in plastic casings, and it wouldn't suprise me if some parts were made in China. More seriously, If you ask me to fix your classic computer you (I asusme) don't care what tools I use. I cna use any brand of screwdriver I choose. Of course, if I chew up the screw heads, or damage the plastic casing by using the wrong sort of screwdriver then you have every reason to moan, but I've not met anyone who cares whether I use CK, Xcellite, Facom, or whoever. Ditto for test gear. I like tektronix 'scopes, but even if you prefer LeCroy, I don't think you're going to complain if I find/fix the fault. It should be the same with computer tools too. Provided I can read and produce files in the format you require it shouldn't matter what I use, and what machine/OS I run it on.

And that is why we have the Second Amendment.

Absolutely. But here in America, thieving idiots wearing ties occasionally wander in off the golf course and tell technical experts how to do their jobs, and feel perfectly justified in doing so.

Yep, and there's a darn good reason for that. Almsot nothing produced in the last 30 yerars has improved my life one bit. I refucse to regard them as standards for one very good reason. They are not fully documented. The 'stnadard metre' is a standard. It's docuemtned, I can in principle recreate it at home. But just try getting enough docuemntation to fully interpret a Word file. I fail to see why. In the case of Outlook, surely any e-mail prgram can send/receive mail that is compatible with it. Does it matter what I choose to use? It's about as sensible as saying I _must_ use a tektronix 'scope. In the case of Word, I can understnad that alas we've got in a situation whete propriatry programs are used and where you van't correctly generate or interpet the docuemtnes without using that progam. Why the world got int othat state is beyond me, but... However, I would argue that for somebody emplyed as a designer, vintage computer engineer, or whatreer, learning Word is a trivial task for them, based on what they already know. Unless said person has a religious objection to said program, it's surely better to pick the candidate who is best at reapiring vintage computers (a skill which can not be picked up in an afternoon) rather than the one who knows Word (which can). I am not conviced thet would be any better than the tools I already use for the jovs I need to do now. If that changes I am nat averse to considering them. -tony

I was planning to go to thunderbird, but I didn't know it is such a resource hog.

(anyone remember eudora? :D)

Recent releases have fixed that pretty well; response time is pretty much instantaneous for most operations. (for me at least, and I have GIGANTIC mail spools) Trying really hard not to.

(anyone remember eudora? :D)

I don't have any memory problems with T'bird on OS X PowerPC 10.4/10.5 (741MB inbox, 6.7GB total mail). But I do think the UI needs refreshing desperately.

Is that folder where the memory problems arise?

Word has been around for almost 30 years so there is no reason why anyone should complain about its use, its also one of the easiest programs to use (up to Word 97' then after that the interface got annoyingly top heavy and insanely overpopulated, the latest revision is so ridiculously complex - plus always wants to save its default to the .docx type, it becomes garbage) but if you can use wordpad, you can use Word... Quite frankly, why we are all using Word today is it was a lot easier to use then Wordperfect which we're all talking about a program that went back to CP/M days...

Word has been around for almost 30 years so there is no reason why anyone should complain about its use, its also one of the easiest programs to use (up to Word 97' then after that the interface got annoyingly top heavy and insanely overpopulated, the latest revision is so ridiculously complex - plus always wants to save its default to the .docx type, it becomes garbage) but if you can use wordpad, you can use Word... Quite frankly, why we are all using Word today is it was a lot easier to use then Wordperfect which we're all talking about a program that went back to CP/M days...

Outlook - eh, its got its plus' and minus' - I stop using it years ago due to all of the security flaws in it, plus it was such a slow prog and a resource hog - though now lately - Thunderbird is getting a bit sluggish and sometimes goes outta control memory usage insane...

So what should we do? Go back to edlin or vi for wordprocessing? Maybe Electric Pencil? as for email, hey lets go back to uucp mail programs or maybe lets use SNDMSG, you don't like Outlook, lets go back to MS Mail.... ;-)

It's odd, but I find it a lot easier to get the results I want in TeX/LaTeX than my Word-using friends do with Word.

On Wed, 5 Oct 2011, Dave McGuire wrote: > On 10/05/2011 03:51 PM, Tony Duell wrote: >> It's odd, but I find it a lot easier to get the results I want in >> TeX/LaTeX than my Word-using friends do with Word. > > And it actually LOOKS good. I've often wondered if Microsoft has hired > ANYONE who knows anything at all about typography.

I often get comments of "That looks nice. How'd you get it to look so good?" regarding my LaTeX stuff.

On 10/05/2011 11:32 PM, Toby Thain wrote: That's awesome, I didn't know that. I'm quite certain there'd be enormous improvements if some people in that group would be introduced to the people maintaining Word. One of the most consistent things I've seen in consumer-level computing is that Word documents look just awful.

-Dave

I fail to see why. In the case of Outlook, surely any e-mail prgram can send/receive mail that is compatible with it. Does it matter what I choose to use? It's about as sensible as saying I _must_ use a tektronix 'scope.

Further yet, WTF does that have to do with EMAIL?! Lack of product purpose focus is hardly the exclusive domain of Microsoft, heck look at iTunes which does EVERYTHING now...and if you try hard enough, it'll actually play mp3s...but calendaring built into an email client is pretty silly.

And to drag this back on topic, in my role (Genesys engineer), when I'm hiring people that piece of paper that states they are a certified Genesys professional has great importance - I would not hire someone if (a) they didn't have it, or (b) they weren't embarked on the certification process without some indication that they would come out the other end with the relevant qualifications. There are times when a piece of paper is extremely important to some roles because it shows dedication to achieving the relevant learning for a particular role.

Going backwards - we may all love and be passionate about our old machines and may have learnt skills to keep our hobby alive, but those skills (ie soldering, coding in a dead language etc) don't nec. translate into something useful in today's computer related job market and people should not be put down or denigrated because they don't have them.

In article <CALfYgt=b_yBskG6jj2XSeRZ_LrFx+19ouvKzsHiFX45cQGds4w at mail.gmail.com>, ? ?Dave Caroline <dave.thearchivist at gmail.com> writes: Yes. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download ?<http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> ? ? ?Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

In article<CALfYgt=b_yBskG6jj2XSeRZ_LrFx+19ouvKzsHiFX45cQGds4w at mail.gmail.com>, Dave Caroline<dave.thearchivist at gmail.com> writes: Yes.

You really think not using outlook makes me fit the asshole category!

But there's a reason we all put "BS required" in those ads, and it is because it's a filter. It's not a have/not have filter. It's an asshole/not asshole filter. This proves the job seekers view of HR, The complexity of a machines

repair here is required as a primary skill, some thing as simple as mail program can be learned or taught, it is far to trivial to be mentioned in any job specification.

? In the corporate world, there is no place for learners. Although I believe

I can learn and operate faster a program than any (insert expletive here, I'm in a [expletive again] bad day), it is difficult for an (insert expletive here) HR understand that. ? (insert expletive here. yep, again.) ? Alexandre (in a [insert expletive again, you know the drill] bad day)

In the corporate world, there is no place for learners. Although I

I don;t Soem fo approrpriate obviosuly thier meansyou're not a prectical persion'. bothrered tbhey Taht invterviewer understnaa candidtate buzzword,s arew ina differnet thst probzbly folloiw microcontrolelr Somethign leaat saem absolutle ownderful othre doens't considert Otherwiase enginewer soemthing htey lsit

Why can't HR people use their mother tongue in the accepted way?

On Tue, 4 Oct 2011, Brent Hilpert wrote: all of which are "lysdexia", adjacent keys, etc. none of which are homonym substitutions, or lack of understanding of correct word(s) (no "their" v "they're", "to" v "too", etc.)

Surely NONE of those errors would have ever occured if he were to be using Outlook!

There are, however SOME language rules that I CHOOSE to flagrantly break.

Those include comma before "and" in a list, "LOGICAL" placement of punctuation relative to quotation marks, arbitrary creation of plurals

(particularly with acronyms or other capitaliation exceptions), certain

"creative" spelings, capitalization for emphasis, nested parentheses, etc.

As do I. I do it conciously, because I feel the 'standard' rules obscure meaning. In particular, I've been known to end a quotation with ` .". ' (that is 3 characters, a full stop, a double quote and another full stop). The first full stop was part of the material I was quoting, the quotation marks ended the quote and the second full stop ended the sentence I was writing.

I also refuse to capitalise something that can never be capitalised, even at the start of a sentence. Things like variable names, unix commands, etc. Of course it's best not to start a sentence with soemthing like that, but... I really object to the English conventions which state that a single close parentesis closes an arbitrary number of oepn parentheses (and that uou should never have 2 adjacent close parentheses in a piece of text).

That oen makes it impossible to write accurate text in some cases. Nor do I like that idea that quotations (and parentheses) end at the end of a paragrpah. Seeing a whole string of paragrpahs starting with open quotation marks and never seeing any closing quotation marks drives me mad. -tony

There are, however SOME language rules that I CHOOSE to flagrantly break. Those include comma before "and" in a list, "LOGICAL" placement of

On 10/05/2011 02:15 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: What's the rule there? Comma or no comma? Is it "this, that, and the other thing" or "this, that and the other thing"? Also, howabout a period ending a sentence of which the last component is quoted text? Period inside or outside the double quotes? -Dave

The typographic convention is inside, but do whatever you want electronically... nobody's watching except your inner Aspie...

True, but 1) few people really notice and 2) rules tend to be a bit looser in media like email and irc, I seem to observe. Perhaps because the traditional cost of fixing a typo in a warehouse full of 200,000 books is relatively prohibitive :)

^^ look, I omitted a period & you didn't notice! So there's a new de facto rule: No period after an emoticon...

But, when I was doing the Honda book (a non-computer project 30+ years ago), my publisher insisted that I was "breaking the rule". We also faught about "burnt valve" V "burned valve". And wherever I wrote "tighten til snug", he wanted to change it to "till"! So, I changed all instances to "until".

On 10/05/2011 02:15 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: What's the rule there? Comma or no comma? Is it "this, that, and the other thing" or "this, that and the other thing"?

Also, howabout a period ending a sentence of which the last component is quoted text? Period inside or outside the double quotes?

On 2011 Oct 4, at 1:10 PM, Tony Duell wrote: On 2011 Oct 4, at 1:10 PM, Tony Duell also wrote: > Why can't HR people use their mother tongue in the accepted way?