[wellylug] TradeMe Linux jobs

nic nic at tymar.com
Sun Jun 29 16:33:39 NZST 2008


I think this is thread is turning in to a free-and-frank-interchange-of-views (tm) between 
Idealists and Pragmatists. Idealists (try to) work with the world as it should be, and 
Pragmatists (manage to) work with the world as it is. I'm quite a hard-line Idealist, but 
I'm starting to understand that the lack of bloodied forehead shown by the Pragmatists is 
quite a good thing.

The different viewpoints are quite well highlighted in Joel Spolsky's 'Martian Headsets' 
article (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html)

As an Idealist, I take comfort from George Bernard Shaw's quote about progress:
"""
The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable 
man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
"""

Nic

Bruce Hoult wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 3:36 PM, Pete Black <pete at marchingcubes.com> wrote:
>> Take out the word 'proprietary' - which is hardly the case anyway -
>> OpenOffice has read every .doc file i've been sent in the last few
>> years
> 
> Then you've had better luck than me.  Even just a club newsletter and
> roster I get monthly are enough to give OOO fits.
> 
> 
>> And before you cry PDF - You should see how OS X preview mangles the PDF
>> output of gnome-print when Type-1 fonts are used,
> 
> I suspect that -- the whole OS's rendering model being based on PDF --
> Preview probably isn't the one at fault there.
> 
> 
>> and its not like PDF renders a document uneditable. Inconvenient to edit, sure,
>> but  it's no silver bullet.
> 
> It's approximately as good as sending the document on paper.  You can
> edit those as well, if you want to badly enough.  PDF doesn't require
> letter by letter OCR, but it puts the would-be editor to exactly the
> same heuristics of reassembling words and sentences from individual
> letters and word fragments based on spacial proximity.
> 
> 



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