This is topic BILL GATES.....MICROSOFT SUCKS! in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.


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Posted by Will Kutler (Member # 770) on 02-12-2006, 04:45 PM:
 
I am getting sick and tired of Microsoft. Hell, I took printing in high school, which included hand-set printing and offset, and I swear that I could have shit done faster and better the 1930's way than I can with these [sex] Microsoft programs!

Some of my peers give me confused looks and say I don't know how to use the software. All I know is that the computer lab techs always admit that it is a computer or system problem, and not me!

AND..OH BEWARE of DELL computers with the vertical CD drives! CDs can and will fall off inside the computer and FUCK everything up! I just bought a brand new $20.00 music CD that I have been wanting for some time...had it for one week!

I am now trying to complete a report for one of my classes. All I needed to do was post and paste some jpegs to a Microsoft Word Document, add in some text boxes and aarows refering to paticular parts of the images, then group them. Six simple images all together. Simple-UH! 12 hrs plus...I should have just printed the jpegs and used a SHARPIE! Anyhow, I am always told that it is either software or Dell graphics car problems! I don't give a FUCK....I just need ASU to have computers that WORK! And ya, I did try putting everything into text and object boxes...but the computer is being VERY touchy!
 
Posted by Jamie Glossop (Member # 2180) on 02-12-2006, 04:48 PM:
 
Have you tryed http://www.openoffice.org/ ?

I hate all microsoft products even tho i have to use thier windows system
 
Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 02-12-2006, 05:16 PM:
 
Gosh Will, it sounds like operator error to me... [Razz] [Big Grin] [evil]
 
Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 02-12-2006, 05:33 PM:
 
Will, I have used Microsoft Word to produce the newsletter for my union. I used a number of JPEGs per issue and have never seemed to have a problem inserting them into textboxes or adding borders or anything else around them.

As far as vertical CD drives go, are these drives actually open on the sides? The ones i've seen are usually self-contained units that wouldn't allow them to fly around inside the computer case.
 
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-12-2006, 05:48 PM:
 
I've never had any trouble with Word.

Button your shirt and then try again. You are probably just scaring the program. [Razz]
 
Posted by Will Kutler (Member # 770) on 02-12-2006, 06:07 PM:
 
I don't know what is going on. Every time I turn around and have a problem the computer tech people here say its some type of system problem...usually graphics card or network.

Anyhow, here is the problem:

I am doing a report for my Strength of Materials class. We ran tensile tests on several types of materials samples, and the tensile tester recorded the results on an analog load vs time graph. The graphs were then scanned and sent to each team member as jpegs. I copied and pasted the jpegs to a Microsoft Word document inside a text-object box. Then I drew in some text boxes so that I could highlight certain parts of the graphs, and used the drawing tool bar to fill in some aarows from the text boxes to their respective points on the graph. So, once drawn in, I tried using the "grouping" command to group these objects, and the grouping command did not want to work, it finally did and was very "touchy", doing different things with each jpeg! Then there was some kind of graphics card problem where a majority of the report would disappear form the screen whenever the mouse was moved. Took several minutes for image to regenerate.

Going back to the rest of my report, need to take info from the load vs time graphs and use Microsoft Excel to generate stress vs strain graphs.
 
Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 02-12-2006, 06:24 PM:
 
Will, perhaps you should have majored in Computer Science so you could straighten out the POS computer guys you have there! [beer] [Razz] [thumbsup]
 
Posted by Bruce Hansen (Member # 281) on 02-12-2006, 06:30 PM:
 
I understand that Bill Gates named his company "Microsoft", after his dick. [Big Grin]
 
Posted by Adam Wilbert (Member # 1184) on 02-12-2006, 07:34 PM:
 
why are you using word for page layout anyway? Word = text, use publisher or even powerpoint (if you're stuck with MS software) for layout. If you're in the main ASU campus computer lab, I believe there is a learning lab on the second floor. Spend a few hours up there working through some inDesign tutorials and I guarantee the time will be well spent the next time this issue comes around. Honestly, use word for writing the text, then copy/paste it into a *real* page layout program.
 
Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-12-2006, 07:50 PM:
 
quote:
computers with the vertical CD drives!
Does the tray have adjustable locking tabs to keep the CD in the vertical position so the CD doesn't fall out when the tray opens?

You think that when a drive is placed in the vertical position, that there would be tab on all four corners of the tray to secure the CD when in a position not horizontal....seen these tabs on some TEAC drives in the DTS units..

Even Playstation 2 has a shelf device on the tray when the unit is placed in it's vertical stand to keep the CD secured..

-Monte
 
Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 02-12-2006, 09:19 PM:
 
If the CD fell out of the drive inside the computer, it should be a very simple matter to take the case off and get it out. If the computer is fairly new it'll probably open by just sliding a couple of latches. Older, you might have to remove some cabinet screws but either way, nothing to worry about.
 
Posted by Will Kutler (Member # 770) on 02-12-2006, 09:23 PM:
 
The computors are DELL flat screens with the CD horizontally behind the screen.
 
Posted by Adam Wilbert (Member # 1184) on 02-12-2006, 09:57 PM:
 
...and they use a drive tray instead of being slot-loading?
 
Posted by Brian D. Whitish (Member # 825) on 02-12-2006, 09:59 PM:
 
Bill Gates was at my theatre yesterday(Guild 45th, Seattle) to see Mrs. Henderson Presents. He comes to our theatre quite often. Which is amazing cause his home theatre is quite nice.
 
Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 02-13-2006, 08:16 AM:
 
Will,

Word, EXCEL, and PowerPoint are great programs if you know and understand how to use em. I suggest that you take a class or two in the use of them. There is alot more to Word than meets the eye!! I have no problem with Gates, his philanthropic efforts are unsurpassrd and far ahead of many others [thumbsup] .

Brian... I bet he comes there because he knows you have DP-70'S!

Oh and by the way my Dell Laptop is one of the most reliable computers I've owned... It takes a beating riding around in the "CLACO VAN" and it sits near the flamethrower gas tamk....

Mark
 
Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 02-13-2006, 10:37 AM:
 
quote: Brian D. Whitish
Bill Gates was at my theatre yesterday(Guild 45th, Seattle) to see Mrs. Henderson Presents. He comes to our theatre quite often. Which is amazing cause his home theatre is quite nice.
[thumbsup] Bill Gates and Paul Allen are evidently big supporters of seeing movies presented correctly in theatres, with the Internet being a profitable release venue afterward.
 
Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-13-2006, 11:34 AM:
 
I bet 95% of Word and Excel users "master" less than 5% of the programs' capabilities. I include myself in that group.
 
Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 02-13-2006, 01:02 PM:
 
quote:
Bill Gates and Paul Allen are evidently big supporters of seeing movies presented correctly in theatres,
I knew I liked that guy for some reason. Obviously he has taste (except in hair, as Letterman would say).
 
Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 02-13-2006, 01:21 PM:
 
I'm in that group too Dave. I use MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access every day as either a student or a teacher, and not a week goes by that I don't learn yet another trick or shortcut or capability in using them. Never bothered to take any courses for them, just read a couple of "idiot" books and dove in and have been learning ever since. To me, the on-line/built-in help as presently implemented is worthless. I guess I'll never be a power user.

I think MS tries too hard to be everything to everybody, which results in cluttered and bloated applications that have dozens of ways to accomplish the same tasks. In some ways I wish we went back to forcing people to learn single specific ways to work with software instead of giving them so many options, most of which never get used anyway. Sure would make learning to use these tools easier. They'd probably be easier to write, document, and maintain too.
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-13-2006, 01:56 PM:
 
I have little patience for MS Word or Excel. They're fine for writing regular letters and making ordinary spreadsheets. But they do suck much ass when it comes to attempting any real graphics work. I'm glad I have all my Adobe, Macromedia and Corel applications. That way I don't have to burn ulcers in my stomach trying to get something done within an MS app.

MS Publisher is a dog that needs to be put to sleep. It may allow users to get some creative work done. But Microsoft, still to this day, has not picked up the first clue that they need to make that shitty application export useable files that will import correctly into real, professional graphics applications. The .WMF files exported by publisher are purile shit.

Now Microsoft is trying to boast how they're developing apps that will kill Adobe Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop. Pardon me for laughing like a madman.

One of the keys to success in any graphics program is that it is able to play nice with other applications and other computing platforms. Vendors like Adobe, Corel, Quark and others have taken many steps to make sure their applications get along as well as possible with graphics mainstays like Photoshop and Illustrator as well as be able to produce Acrobat PDFs worth a damn. As long as Microsoft thinks they're going to manage to go it alone and not give a damned about standards that have 20+ years worth of development, they're going to get their asses kicked.

This MS graphics thing is a pet peeve of mine because I get to see a good number of customer supplied Publisher and Word files. Some will bring in PowerPoint files that are even more useless. The artwork almost always has to be rebuilt using scans of print outs or screen shots of the document.

For real vector-based graphics work, there are affordable alternatives.

Inkscape is a free, open source vector drawing program:
Inkscape Web Site

An Open Source version of Xara X is being developed:
Xara X

The commercial version of Xara Xtreme is just $79:
Xara Xtreme

Those applications aren't quite as well featured and developed as CorelDRAW X3 and IllustratorCS2, but they don't cost nearly as much either. You can design logos and other graphics work within those programs and then export art in formats like EPS that will actually open properly within professional level graphics programs.
 
Posted by Barry Floyd (Member # 385) on 02-13-2006, 02:15 PM:
 
We use Microsoft Publisher to make up all of our theatre newspaper advertisements, but must print them to an "Acrobat Distiller" in order to submit them to the newspapers. It seems every newspaper we submit to uses "Quark Express" (??), and it has no problem with importing the PDF files.

We use Excel on a daily basis at the theatre to generate the boxoffice reports, and keep a record of attendance, concessions sales, car counts, per caps, etc.. Sure there are POS systems like RTS, but I made up our own and it has worked out great for us.
 
Posted by David Buckley (Member # 2600) on 02-13-2006, 02:20 PM:
 
quote: Bobby Henderson
As long as Microsoft thinks they're going to manage to go it alone and not give a damned about standards that have 20+ years worth of development, they're going to get their asses kicked.
Microsoft have a history of releasing really useless V1, mediocre V2, and excellent V3s, and if they determine that they are going to kill Adobe, then given time, that is exactly what they will do. It may take time to get there, and they'll have to buy in some specialists, but its just time. Microsoft's have enormous determination and deep pockets.

As an example, goinbg back a few years, WordStar for Windows was so much better than Word (for DOS) and Word for Windows (before it got renamed word) but it still got trashed in the marketplace. There are many similar examples. The only real failure of Microsoft's I can recall was Access. Not Access the database product, but Access the terminal emulator, which they dumped as it was a market of diminishing size, and people were dumping terminal emulation altogether, rather than upgrading or transgrading to MS, leaving the market open (as it is today) to a few small specialist comapanies. And the name Access then got recycled.

I used to think that MS couldn't just walk into a marketplace and make it their won, but the evidence doesn't support that assertion.
 
Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 02-13-2006, 02:39 PM:
 
I use Adobe's old Pagemaker 7 for making up ads and signs and such. I've been using it since V3 and I guess they've abandoned it now, but I'm very comfortable with it. Tried Publisher once (a few years ago) but it's not nearly as versatile.
 
Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 02-13-2006, 03:38 PM:
 
quote: Barry Floyd
We use Microsoft Publisher to make up all of our theatre newspaper advertisements, but must print them to an "Acrobat Distiller" in order to submit them to the newspapers. It seems every newspaper we submit to uses "Quark Express" (??), and it has no problem with importing the PDF files.
I don't think there's a newspaper on the planet not using Quark. If you can, and Publisher bothers you at all, spring for Quark.
 
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-13-2006, 04:16 PM:
 
quote: Brian D. Whitish
Bill Gates was at my theatre yesterday(Guild 45th, Seattle) to see Mrs. Henderson Presents. He comes to our theatre quite often. Which is amazing cause his home theatre is quite nice.
Next time he shows up to buy a ticket, have the box office attendant pretend that the computer froze up and start making cracks about how unreliable the Windows operating system is (acting like they don't know who he is). Comments such as "what moron would design something so crappy" should prove to get some interesting looks. [Big Grin]
 
Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 02-13-2006, 04:27 PM:
 
As for MS being able to dominate and distroy....think of where WordPerfect was in the 80s. Everyone on the PLANET who was using a PC used WordPerfect. It was THE office wordprocessor in schools and business offices. WordStar was in there, but to a much lesser extent. Back then, WordPerfect was to office wordprocessing what Word is today. Today Word is so ubiquitous that people send Word files with the expectation that everyone who is using a computer be able to open their Word file. That presumption can only become prevelant if MS has simply bulldozed the competition. Word is like Bandaid....it has become generic, at least in the PS world.

The beauty of WordPerfect was that ANYTHING the program could do, the manual could explain in detailed, understandable instructions. There wasn't a function that was not fully explained. And it was in a printed manual, not some HELP command that told you nothing, ala Word's HELP. To this day we have people in our office who still use WP to do all kinds of complicated forms, posters, brochures, etc. And I am talking about the last DOS version of WordPerfect, when it was still the original company, not the Windows version that turned into dog poo once Novell bought the company and once they ruined it, Corel kind of kept it going but it had already sucummed to slow death by Word. That DOS version of WP was that odd graphic WYSIWYG thing that looked like Windows but really was still DOS. The younger people on our staff never heard of WP. The older ones will soon have to move to Word because being a DOS program, it doesn't have drivers for newer printers.

WordPerfect was a perfectly good word processor and could do anything a small office operation needed, but Word came along and just killed it. I found WP to be much more logical and intuitive that Word ever was. Once you learned a WP function, either by just playing around with it or by reading the manual, it was like a light goes on and you never forget it because it is intuitive. Word on the other hand, I have figured out how to get something to work in Word but will hardly ever remember how to do it again later because it simply isn't intuitive. Stuff is burried under tab after subtab and in places where you say, why is it there in the first place.

And as for the MS Office suite. Let me ask you this about the so-called "integration" of the programs. Outlook is in that suite and people put all their addresses in the Outlook Contacts, but has anyone tried get an address from a Contact record so it can be put into a Word document? If there is a way to do it, I have yet to figure it out. You would think that would be the most elementary of integration functions, to be able to write a letter and then get the address information from the address book. I have asked the college Help Desk, the Library Computer Learning Center and everyone I know....to a person, no one so far has been able to do that simple task. And don't get me started on Word's infuriating habbit of doing stuff the way IT wants and not the way you want.

As for the CDroms or DVD units being placed in vertical desktops. Just last week I bought a CD and put it in a Dell desktop that is sitting on it's side, i.e., like a tower. Mind you, it is designed to sit either way -- horizontally like a desktop or vertically like a small tower. In goes the CD, it won't play....I eject it, and as the tray trys to extract the CD which evidently has unseated itself somewhere in its travel into the compartment, is now jamming the CD between the tray and the wall of the compartment. As the tray forces the CD out, it gouges big chunks of silver off the playing side of the disk. Talk about wanting to take a hatchet to this thing.....

If the CD or DVD player's tray doesn't have spring loaded clips to firmly hold the disk in place, it SHOULDN'T be used in a vertical position, even if the dumbass computer manufacture installs it that way.
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-13-2006, 06:18 PM:
 
quote: Barry Floyd
We use Microsoft Publisher to make up all of our theatre newspaper advertisements, but must print them to an "Acrobat Distiller" in order to submit them to the newspapers. It seems every newspaper we submit to uses "Quark Express" (??), and it has no problem with importing the PDF files.
It should be noted ALL of the credit for that file interoperability goes to Adobe Acrobat and all the PDF creation hooks it applies into MS Office applications. Unfortunately, few users are going to pony up $200-$400 for full versions of Acrobat or Acrobat Pro.

Without Acrobat to help create workable PDF files, Publisher users are either locked into the native .PUB format or trying to export .WMF files. I haven't seen any professional graphics app able to adequately import such .WMF files (believe me, I try on a frequent basis).

quote: David Buckley
Microsoft have a history of releasing really useless V1, mediocre V2, and excellent V3s, and if they determine that they are going to kill Adobe, then given time, that is exactly what they will do.
Microsoft would literally have to buy Apple Computer to make that happen in the graphics arena. Graphics people are fiercely loyal to applications that have worked great for them over the years. For instance, you can get my collection of Adobe Photoshop CDs only when you can pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

Microsoft's "sparkle" and "expression" efforts are Windows Vista-only things, whereas Adobe PDF and Flash (as well as their entire CS2 graphics suite) are platform agnostic. Adobe has a giant advantage there. Both PDF and Flash are mature technologies with more than a decade head start over Microsoft.

Microsoft also gained its lead in office applications via bundling with new Windows PCs and playing lots of dirty pool against smaller companies they could push around. Microsoft can't really pursue the same tactic in the graphics area, especially when so many graphics people still insist on using Macs. Adobe is the 2nd biggest software company behind Microsoft. They're not exactly small.

Overall, I don't think previous Microsoft victories in bulldozing office productivity app competitors is any indication MS can do the same in graphics. They have little expertise in that area. MS had tried many times over the years to get a foothold in selling creative programs and got nowhere. For example, they bought the Softimage company after Jurassic Park was released. They got nowhere with it. Now Avid owns Softimage.

quote: Daryl C. W. O'Shea
I don't think there's a newspaper on the planet not using Quark. If you can, and Publisher bothers you at all, spring for Quark.
Actually lots of newspapers and magazines have been shifting their workflows over to Adobe InDesign lately. The pace has ramped up since InDesign hit version 4.0/CS2. Adobe's PageMaker replacement is superior to Quark in many regards. Adobe Illustrator and InDesign are still the only graphics applications on the market that fully support all the specifications of OpenType.
 
Posted by Barry Floyd (Member # 385) on 02-14-2006, 12:44 AM:
 
We have the "full-blown" version of Acrobat here at the house for the theare ads, but only use the "distiller" function of it. At the time we bought it, that was the only choice we could find.

At my day job, we use PDF995 to create PDF files. It was a downloadable thing we found on the net, and for $19.95, you can get the version that doesn't have the on-screen ads.
 
Posted by Anslem Rayburn (Member # 1267) on 02-14-2006, 03:56 AM:
 
I love Photoshop. I can make PDF files (as I do for the newspaper), and I can also compress the hell out of images for our website. It's great. I also use it to make signs for sold out shows, and will use it for our newsletter that we are getting ready to launch. It's also used to make certificates that we give away on the radio and anything else that has an image in it.

MS Word makes great fax cover sheets, but that's all we use it for. Letters and internal notes are all made with WordPad.

Does anyone here know how to make numbered certificates using Photoshop? I have looked around and not found any method to do this.
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-14-2006, 02:18 PM:
 
Photoshop's PDF creation capability is pretty limited compared to Acrobat Professional, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign. And that's due to the mainly raster/bitmap-only capability of the program. Photoshop is great for editing photos and other kinds of bitmap artwork. However, it has very limited capabilities for producing vector-based artwork. That limitation makes Photoshop inappropriate for the most part to use in creating logos and other graphics work.

As to the sequential numbering ability, Photoshop doesn't have that either. Dedicated page layout programs like Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress have some sequential numbering capability, but most of that is tied to page numbering metaphors. It takes true, dedicated variable data software plug-ins or standalone software to do large numbers of sequential numbered tickets, postcards or other items with unique numbering.

quote: Barry Floyd
At my day job, we use PDF995 to create PDF files. It was a downloadable thing we found on the net, and for $19.95, you can get the version that doesn't have the on-screen ads.
CutePDF is a decent, free PDF writer (free for personal, non-commercial use that is). It does require the installation of the open source Ghostscript 8.15 application. One cool feature about CutePDF is it now supports 64-bit operation.

There are a number of other free/cheap PDF creation utilities available online. However, most lack the content security features of the Adobe-branded Acrobat. They also don't support a lot of the additional features Adobe has added, such as interactive layers (viewers can enter data into form fields to add comments or fill out forms) or even true 3D document display.
 
Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 02-14-2006, 02:28 PM:
 
I think Bill Gates was handled best in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut....(the movie)
 
Posted by Mark J. Marshall (Member # 1409) on 02-14-2006, 05:43 PM:
 
Barry...

What's the size of the Publisher file vs. the size of the PDF distiller makes out of it?
 
Posted by Martin Brooks (Member # 1269) on 02-14-2006, 07:26 PM:
 
It has amazed me for years that Microsoft dominates the market because most of their applications have incredibly awful UI and they frequently violate classic and documented GUI conventions. Word and PowerPoint drive me up the freakin' wall!!!! But I do think that Excel is quite good. Excel's advanced features are a little hard to understand and the Help screens are worthless, but at least the UI makes sense.

And Microsoft apps don't play well together. Ever try to use Visio to create objects and then place them into Word or PowerPoint? Sometimes it works, frequently it doesn't. Sometimes you get the object at original size, sometimes PowerPoint reduces the size and sometimes it pushes some other object in PowerPoint out of the way.

I happen to be doing a lot of work right now in PowerPoint. If I take a heading from one slide, let's say it's in 12 point bold Arial and paste it into another slide to replace a heading that is also in 12 point bold Arial, the idiot program changes the type face to 18 point. Ridiculous! (and it's not because the master has an 18 point heading, because it doesn't.)

In Word, if you back up a paragraph because you want to get rid of an extra line space between paragraphs, it frequently completely changes the type style and it's not necessarily the type style of the preceding paragraph, which at least would make some sense.

In Word, if your cursor is at the top of the page, and you draw something and then want to start typing again below the diagram, you can't do it. The cursor is still at the top of the page and you can't re-place it with the mouse or cursor keys. If you use the Enter key to move the cursor, the diagram moves down. You have to remove the diagram, press Enter until the cursor is below where the diagram would be, then re-paste the diagram. And that's aside from the fact that objects can never be placed precisely because they stick to a grid.

And the rulers in Word make absolutely no sense at all. A ruler should never move - it should start at the left border and extend to the right border of the page. Microsoft's rulers move. Frequently, they simply disappear. You should be able to copy a ruler that you "like" from one section of a document to another - but you can't. Apple's cheap word processor MacWritePro had this feature about 15 years ago.

I could understand this if Microsoft was a tiny start-up producing these apps with small teams of programmers. But Microsoft has tens of thousands of programmers working on these things and they're still garbage. It's not that Microsoft doesn't spend lots of development money on these apps, they simply don't know how to make an application that has an intuitive and consistent user-interface. They should spend less time adding advanced features that no one uses and instead improve the UI on these products.

There's a great article about PowerPoint called "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" by Edward R. Tufte, the author of the classic, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and several other books about visual information design. He makes the case that PowerPoint presentations "usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis." He argues that PowerPoint "replace(s) serious analysis with chartjunk, over-produced layouts, cheerleader logotypes and branding, and corny clip art."
 
Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 02-14-2006, 07:56 PM:
 
quote: Martin Brooks
"usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis." He argues that PowerPoint "replace(s) serious analysis with chartjunk, over-produced layouts, cheerleader logotypes and branding, and corny clip art."
You do realize that that is the entire point of PowerPoint, right?
 
Posted by Jon Miller (Member # 163) on 02-14-2006, 08:11 PM:
 
That, and more proof that the average person does not care about typefaces and typography. Just as most documents cranked out in Word are done in the default Times New Roman (one of my least favorite typefaces because of its overuse), PowerPoint presentations seem to be a vast wasteland of Arial, with a little Verdana or MS Comic Sans to, umm, "spice" things up. Nothing like clichéd bland to get your message across.
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-14-2006, 10:22 PM:
 
Oof. Arial. That's bad enough. But then you had to say...ulp...Comic Sans...gack...gulp...getting dizzy....gonna go vomit now...
[puke]
 
Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 02-15-2006, 12:29 AM:
 
Wow, someone else who hates Word as much as me! And here I was feeling like an alien and out of step with the times (roman). I have a kindred brother who hates it too!!

Martin, EVERYTHING you said, I have experienced it all and it has turned what few hairs I have left to gray. Spend HOURS forcing the damn thing to put text and objects where you want them and then you make the mistake of adding as insignificant as one last little period and the ENTIRE page completely turns into a badly animated cartoon with everything scrambling into chaos -- stuff scattered helter skelter, hither and yon and some elements just disappearing completely. Many times I have just had to settle for NOT have that last period just because it was easier than wrestling with the damn program from hell. And what about the way it handles font changes? You can't find where the change happens. Logically, the font change should follow the curser; in Word, it is just the opposite and you have to put your curser one letter ahead of the font change point and retype that letter and then backspace to erase the extra letter you created. Well, it’s hard to explain, but trust me, it is totally, completely illogical and ridiculously counter-productive. How do I know this, because in WP, it is exactly the opposite. I can't tell you how many times my lady has looked over at me at the computer, quietly mumbling under my breath, punctuated with the occasionally shreak an a fist punching the table like a person with terretes, and asking me who it is that I am cursing and wishing I could personally administer the hang-him-by-his-oh-henry torture. “Why the geek scumbag programmer who wrote this Microsoft Word pile of putrefied puke,” says I. “Oh” she replies. [Mad]
 
Posted by Will Kutler (Member # 770) on 02-15-2006, 01:27 AM:
 
I have done some nice work with VISIO illustrating a manufacturing cell. Unfortunately, many of their icons suck, and I have been unsuccessful at pasting or creating my own...not sure if it can even be done?
 
Posted by David Buckley (Member # 2600) on 02-15-2006, 04:26 AM:
 
quote: Bobby Henderson
... Microsoft would literally have to buy Apple Computer to make that happen in the graphics arena.
Err - they did, more or less. Back in 1997 MS bailed Apples's ass to the tune of $150m, without which Apple would by now be only a distant memory.

MS did this, of course, for all the wrong reasons - it wanted to prove to the various organisations that were investigating it (inc the DoJ and EU) that there was a competitive marketplace, and Windows wasn't a monopoly, and having Apple exist was a item of evidence supporting that assertion. Thus $150m, a drop in the ocean for MS, was money very well spent.

Unfortunately, this bailout enabled Apple still to be with us, and so we have two mainstream GUIs which from a distance look similar, but when you are used to one and try and use the other, you discover that they are very different. I would far rather that Apple had vanished, and then all software would have one user interface. I'm not saying that as an MS supporter: I'd be just as happy if Windows dissappeared leaving us with the Apple GUI, I just want one or the other, not both.

As I've written before, there are companies that have product for both the mac and windows platforms, but although the product may run on both, it's attitudinally aligned to one or the other, and thus almost unusable by a member from the opposite camp. An example of such software was (happily no longer existing as a product) Logic Audio for Windows (LAW), a mac product almost unusable by a windows user.
 
Posted by Paul Trimboli (Member # 1509) on 02-15-2006, 04:59 AM:
 
I can never understand why people use Windows. Lets say you had a washing machine that was as unreliable as MS Windows, wouldn't you take it back to the shop? Yet people use something as bad as Windows and think it just how computers are, when that is wrong. And if anyone says the never have problems with their Windows computer that is just a load of crap! I have owned computers running Windows, worked with them, worked at a computer repair center as a technician and even when they are running 'smoothly' they are still buggy. Why does MS have such a hard time writing software?

Draw a flow chart of Windows XP, and draw a flow chart of Mac OS X (10.4 for example), you can tell that Apple have actually sat down and worked out the best way to lay things out.

I will say that versions of Mac OS such as 9 were pretty below average but once Steve Jobs was back on board he got that place going great, just like before he left! In the mid 90s when Windows 95 came out I was a SORT OF happy Windows user (MAC user at school) but as time when on and things do not improve with their software I switched over to Mac completly.

One other point, Apple's OS can work alot more smoothly becuase it is writen to run on their hardware. So if people say they can't run Mac OS on any old peice of hardware that is like that for good reason. In that regard I do understand some of MS problems.
 
Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-15-2006, 10:32 AM:
 
quote: Martin Brooks
It has amazed me for years that Microsoft dominates the market because most of their applications have incredibly awful UI and they frequently violate classic and documented GUI conventions.
Microsoft Office didn't rise to prominence over simply being the best product. It rose to the lead because Microsoft aggressively bundled the suite in many new computer systems, often twisting the arms of computer makers to do it. They also made sneaky little changes to Windows to break the office suites others were selling.

quote: David Buckley
Err - they did, more or less. Back in 1997 MS bailed Apples's ass to the tune of $150m, without which Apple would by now be only a distant memory.
Regardless of the previous parade of knuckleheads who ran Apple, Microsoft's cash infusion to Apple was not an outright purchase of Apple. They don't own the company. And they don't have any legitiate footing in the creative software industry. They are King in office products, but they are nobody in terms of graphics.

Microsoft must accomplish several things to gain any traction in the graphic industry.

First, they must make their MS Office products play nice and have file interoperability with industry standard graphics programs -such as being able to output EPS and PDF files and do so correctly. They can't seem to even figure out that very basic first step -even with their shitty Publisher application.

Next, they have to actually make creative software products that graphics people will want to buy as alternatives to industry standards like Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDRAW, InDesign and QuarkXpress. Professional graphics people don't gain their creative software by having it bundled in with new computer systems. It's sold separately. As such, it has to stand on its own as a good product.

Microsoft would also have to make any new graphics programs available for multiple computing platforms. Going Windows-only, as they're obviously doing with Expression and Sparkle, is pretty stupid.

And Microsoft must gear their graphics programs to graphics people, not computer programmers. That's another completely idiotic thing they're doing with Expression and Sparkle.

With all the things Microsoft must do to get anywhere in the graphics industry, I feel they pose little threat to Adobe. If anything, Adobe should probably be more concerned about Apple's moves than that of Microsoft. Apple actually makes a lot of professional level creative applications that people love to buy (such as Final Cut Studio).

quote: David Buckley
I would far rather that Apple had vanished, and then all software would have one user interface. I'm not saying that as an MS supporter: I'd be just as happy if Windows dissappeared leaving us with the Apple GUI, I just want one or the other, not both.
Having just one computing platform would be incredibly bad. And bad for lots of reasons. It would make life even easier for scumbag criminal hackers. It takes away any competition or incentive to improve the interface. It stifles innovation.

I'm hoping the new Intel-based Macs will be able to dual boot Windows Vista along with OSX. I would very much prefer to have freedom to choose whatever platform I want to use without having to repurchase all my software all over again.
 
Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 02-15-2006, 10:49 AM:
 
I use Star Office and Open Office and am happy with both
 
Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 02-15-2006, 03:10 PM:
 
quote: Paul Trimboli
Draw a flow chart of Windows XP, and draw a flow chart of Mac OS X (10.4 for example), you can tell that Apple have actually sat down and worked out the best way to lay things out.
How's that flow chart go... 1) Use BSD. 2) Stick our GUI on top of it.

quote: David Buckley
Err - they did, more or less. Back in 1997 MS bailed Apples's ass to the tune of $150m, without which Apple would by now be only a distant memory.
Now I await Aaron Haney to come kick some ass...
 
Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 02-15-2006, 04:00 PM:
 
The only things that saved Apple's ass are:

Quicktime
Final Cut Pro

and of course

The iPOD

Everything else is shit.
 
Posted by Jon Miller (Member # 163) on 02-15-2006, 08:21 PM:
 
quote: Bobby Henderson
But then you had to say...ulp...Comic Sans...gack...gulp...getting dizzy....gonna go vomit now...
Sorry to stir up the ol' gag reflex, Bobby. You did check the link, didn't you? [Smile] (I must admit, though, the colors of some of the shirts they offer are a little [puke] -inducing.)

Unfortunately, for my day job I have to put up with a departmental Web site where "that font" appears quite a bit. I've mentioned the M$CS site to the Webmaster (who is also my supervisor) only to receeive something to the effect of a "so, what?". Just another small reason to blame M$.
 




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