On Thursday 21 December 2006 08:09, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
On 12/21/06, Vihan Pandey vihanpandey@gmail.com wrote:
O.K, so in that case the only option is the lesser evil. Go to the windoze filled cyber cafe and download OOo for win32 and use ODT. Is it REALLY that hard?
You're assuming that one will have unlimited rights installing any programs on a cyber cafe computer. While this may be true for Win98 computers, most cyber cafes I've frequented of late lock everything except the "my documents" folder. Also, consider the amount of time I'll have to waste downloading a program -- zealotry at its best I'd say.
Rubbish. Pdf should have been available or easily installable by a simple request to the cafe guy. That has been the case with EVERY cybercafe i have visited across India. In 90 % of the cafes i simply reboot with knoppix and usb, only occassionally having to tell the cyber guy what i was doing (and sometimes having them peering over my shoulder abt what exctly i was doing). In the two cases where linux was refused was because they thought i would suck up all the BW!.
Devdas, I know that flaw in my argument ;-) I'm just trying to make a point that fanaticism doesn't always make sense. There are many other ways to convince users
Whose talking about users? These are the characters who are going to mangae others linux infrastructure and u tell me that they cant use odf. There is a complete disconnect in your logic and excuses.
Try this -- pick up an Open Source app (Open Office, Gimp, etc) and discuss it with a windows user who's used that app and gone back to the windows version. What you'll probably get are real reasons why it's difficult to migrate users (not developers) from one app to another.
Indeed there are and the reasons are very well known to us and has absolutely nothing to do with usability, quality or developer ability as the rest of your mail seems to suggest.
Do note that software "mukti" doesn't count for much to end users. Hell, in case of Indians it doesn't count for much for many developers even.
And your point is?
Also, note how IE specific sites (activex sites, IE only javascript) have diminished over time because of firefox (or iceweasel ;-) ). The reason is that users find it better than IE.
The main reason is that the web is "reasonably" standards compliant primarily cause bill-e-baba thought that the internet was rubbish and was late in getting his trash on to the servers.
I believe if openoffice was good enough, the same would have happened for the ODF as well.
It is infact a lot better. Except for the ability to faithfully reproduce the dirt dump that is .doc. Besides the obvious stupidity of trying to emulate thrash there are very many other reasons for which the beast of redmond is paying a fat fine in the EU and facing a fresh bout of litigation in the US.