LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Daryl Tester <dt@picknowl.com.au>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 21:02:43 +1030

Re: when saving doesn't mean saving

Jake Hawkes wrote:

> When saving doesn't mean saving
>  - an essay in angst

1995.  Economics essay due.  I'd written practically the lot using
vi, but being a recently ex-destitute full time Uni student I still
hadn't acquired a printer yet, and the lecturer apparently didn't
want a "Flat ASCII Essay".  So I took the document into my new job
early one mid-summer's morn, fired up Word 6 under Windows 3.1,
imported the text file and then set to work doing those pretty
things to documents that Management love so much, all the while
saving my work.  The machine hung a couple of hours later into
the process, as it was wont to do. "No worries!" said I, "I've even
made multiple backups!".  Not one of the three backups I had made
had worked - they were all the original flat ASCII text file I'd
imported that morning, with none of the formatting changes that
I'd made (and saved) since.

I've hated Microsoft for the time they've wasted of my life ever
since (mind you, they aren't the only ones, but they're a major
contributing factor).  Tom Landauer (in "The Trouble With Computers"
- a good read if you can snag a copy) makes interesting cases about
productivity losses beceause people spending too much time fiddling
with programs like word processors trying to get things like the
layout of a document correct.  Then of course they explode in mid-
flight without warning taking your saved work with it :-|.

For the next assignment, I wrote it in groff using me macros and
postscript output; made me a lot happier knowing I could see my
work getting commited to disk, and I spent far less time mucking
around with the format.

> Bugga

Indeed.

Mind you, Netscape exploded on me again while replying to this
message when I modified the Address recipient from Jake to the
mailing list (as it often does - if I forget to change it at the
start of editing a message, I'll cut and paste what I've already
done into a window running vi, just for backup's sake).  Does
anyone have this problem with the Netscape shipped with RedHat
6.1?  What mail readers are there for Linux that works with IMAP?

Regards,
  Daryl Tester.

-- 
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