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A Note — Why Now?
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A Note

Things might get a little squirrely around here this evening.  Your comments might not appear, or may disappear, but “Don’t Panic!”, simply have your towel available.

Just some testing, nothing to worry about, but you may want to avoid posting any really profound observations until later tonight.

17 comments

1 Fallenmonk { 07.22.08 at 5:32 pm }

Thanks for the warning. I was going to post a solution to world hunger tonight but I will hold off. Happy testing…I hope it goes better than mine did today. Client made secret changes in their data feed and then posted partial data files on the FTP. My work flows went nuts I just got up and walked out at 6pm…I’ll try and untangle the mess tomorrow.

2 Fallenmonk { 07.22.08 at 5:33 pm }

Interesting what the code did to my three letter EFF TEE PEE. Thinking for the user again I guess.

3 Bryan { 07.22.08 at 7:43 pm }

There is nothing I hate more that a “helpful” program. I would probably be arrested if I said what I would like to do the the MS Office programmers and their damn paperclip.

I spend more time undoing what various software editors do to my text, and their concept of what I want to copy is never correct.

Ah, yes, nothing like altering the output without telling anyone who has to use it.

4 Kryten42 { 07.22.08 at 8:29 pm }

LOL @ both! 😀

Oh yeah… clippy! LOL You can turn that off you know… And I found a great tool that gets rid of the crappy new menu system/tool bars in O2007!

Or… just use OpenOffice (I use a derivative called Oxygen Office actually). 🙂

So… no profound comments then… Someone posts profound comments here? Who knew? Who dat den? :p LOL

5 Bryan { 07.22.08 at 10:30 pm }

I have “killed” that obnoxious little twerp on every machine I have ever used since it appeared.

I will definitely be using Open Office on future machines, now that I no longer have to support the last client [a volunteer gig for a non-profit] that used Office.

Profound is in the mind of the writer.

6 LadyMin { 07.22.08 at 10:56 pm }

I still use WordPerfect. 😐

That may or may not be profound.

I can’t stand that little clippy. I replaced him with an equally obnoxious little dog on my mom’s computer. She thought the doggy was cute.

7 Bryan { 07.22.08 at 11:38 pm }

When I’m doing a lot of programming I drop back and use WordStar, IMHO the best editor for a touch-typist ever conceived because you don’t have to take your fingers off the keyboard to do anything and in non-document mode it produces pure ascii.

My Mother, who refuses to go beyond Dos 6.22 also used WordStar.

8 Steve Bates { 07.22.08 at 11:44 pm }

“Profound” means “deep,” right? Some of the stuff I wade into gets pretty deep…

I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries lately, and I just wondered whether, say, Hercule Poirot would look the other way while I murdered Clippy. The only thing worse than Clippy is that damned cat, so of course Stella has substituted it for Clippy… a fact which one of her live kitties actually noticed one time.

9 Rook { 07.22.08 at 11:45 pm }

You want profound comments here? I didn’t know that. After all these years you finally set a standard.

Damn.

10 Kryten42 { 07.23.08 at 12:20 am }

You can blame MicroPro (WordStar producers) for the dominance of M$ Word! *barf*

Like many other producers of successful DOS applications, WordStar International delayed before deciding to make a version for the commercially successful Windows 3.0. The company purchased Legacy, an existing Windows-based word processor, which was altered and released as WordStar for Windows in 1991. It was a well-reviewed product and included many features normally only found in more expensive desktop publishing packages. However, its delayed launch meant that Microsoft Word had already firmly established itself as the corporate standard during the two previous years.

There is a Wiki for everything! 😉

WordStar Wiki

I was the Aus distro for MicroPro in the 80’s. I still have the CPM disks somewhere in archive. 🙂 Had CalcStar and DataStar… and the other little Star’s too! LOL

11 Bryan { 07.23.08 at 12:36 am }

See, I didn’t know about the dog or the cat, I just ruthlessly eliminated it.

Rook, profound is better that prolost. Give me a break, you do chess matches at your place. I do admit I’m a bit put off that I’ve never attracted a long-term troll, even though I will allow anyone to rant within reason.

MS never showed any respect for the company most responsible for their cash flow. For years their biggest seller was a CPM card for Apple IIs to enable people to run WordStar. MicroPro rested on their laurels and cash cow too long. WordStar/DataStar was the power user solution for mail merging for years.

12 LadyMin { 07.23.08 at 10:20 am }

I learned data processing on WordStar. For anyone who did a large amount of typing back in the 80s, WordStar was the greatest invention since paper plates. Around 1990 I moved to WP 5.1 Dos. I liked that even better. It was fast and did anything I wanted and did it MY way.

13 Bryan { 07.23.08 at 12:46 pm }

Ah, but I modified WordStar to work exactly as I worked, and I could never get WordPerfect to do that. I didn’t like using the function keys .

But I dealt with documents in two steps: first I typed the text, then I formatted it. I started in the big iron world and that’s how it was done. WYSIWYG was not a big motivator for me, because it didn’t work all that well until the screens became 1023 X 768 for the printers used as output.

14 Steve Bates { 07.23.08 at 7:48 pm }

During my first encounter with WordPerfect, while I attempted to help a neighbor, I managed to lose the entire content of someone’s (fortunately small) document. Why? Simple: because WordPerfect, unlike every other word processor at the time, did not observe the standard convention for saving files and exiting. Not observing the simplest, most basic conventions of a platform is IMHO a fatal flaw in s/w.

My second encounter was with an early version of WordPerfect for Windows, again in the context of attempting to help someone. The s/w was so buggy that it locked up twice in the few minutes I was using it. Twice. At least we didn’t lose an existing document, because WordPerfect would not run for long enough to create one.

There was no third encounter. And there will not be.

Whatever its purported virtues from a feature standpoint, WordPerfect is, or at least was, simply faulty. MS Word may suck, but it rarely if ever quits on me.

15 Bryan { 07.23.08 at 8:22 pm }

I know people who swore by it, and others who swore at it. It never did anything for me, but different people work in different ways.

16 LadyMin { 07.23.08 at 11:50 pm }

I’ll agree, early WP for Windows for horrible. Ver5 was just nasty; they did finally get it right with ver6.

In WP you have the “reveal code” feature. You can see the coding and fix the formatting. In Word that function doesn’t exist. That’s what drove me crazy trying to go from WP to Word.

17 Bryan { 07.24.08 at 12:53 pm }

Word does very little that is consistent. It wraps so much insulation around the user in an apparent effort to make it “friendly” that you have to print out a copy to find out what it has done.