[wplug] Word attachments (was: MISM mentor program)
Scott Kiesling
kiesling+ at pitt.edu
Mon Feb 10 15:23:08 EST 2003
I agree, it doesn't have to be life. It may be as small as sending that
email to someone, and it spreads. I had never really thought about it
before today's discussion, but now I plan not to accept .doc documents.
This means that I will be writing many, many people at the university
(inlcuding deans), and telling them about open source options. Perhaps
they will start to rethink the mega-licensing deal they seem to have
with Microsoft.
I also have had editors send me documents using the Word track changes
option, which does not work in OpenOffice.org. I find this frustrating,
but now I have an argument for telling them to send it in a different
format.
I will also be requiring students, who have the option in many cases of
submitting things electronically, to use a publicly available format.
This means future computer users at the rate of a few hundred a year
will learn other ways to send their documents (and that other formats
even exist). While this may not seem like a lot, they may also adopt
this practice and send out similar emails and, well, you get the
picture. Butterflies and hurricanes.
One question: I believe it was on this list a while back that someone
suggested that MSWord 6.0 was a more reliable standard than RTF, and it
is essentially open now since most word processors have decoded it. do
people agree?
Scott
On Mon, 2003-02-10 at 13:25, Alexandros Papadopoulos wrote:
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> On Monday 10 February 2003 12:59, Russ Schneider wrote:
> <snip>
> > I'll have to Google Palladium and see what this is, but remember
> > where you live. In the US, the people with the most money win.
> > Microsoft (and others) can do any number of things to screw the rest
> > of us. That's life. :)
>
> It's not a matter of the US. It's global. I'd like to stuff my head in
> the sand and say that it doesn't affect me, as a foreigner, but the
> truth is it does.
>
> And no, that's *not* life. With this kind of mentality the GNU project,
> Linux, the endless stream of Open Source software it inspired and the
> EFF would not even exist, and the world would soon be quite hard to
> live in.
>
> (Unless one assimilates. That's always been the easiest choice.)
>
> - -A
>
> PS: *Do* read about Palladium. Everyone should know what lies ahead, to
> be able to put things into perspective. Another keyword is TCPA.
> - --
> http://andrew.cmu.edu/~apapadop/pub_key.asc
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--
Scott F. Kiesling
Assistant Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Linguistics kiesling at pitt.edu
University of Pittsburgh, 2816 CL Phone: 412-624-5916
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA Fax: 412-624-6130
http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/skpage.html
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