Links for 2012-04-14

  • Microsoft Word is cumbersome, inefficient, and obsolete. It's time for it to die. - Slate Magazine

    Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone's archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It's time to give up on Word. It took years for me to get to this point. I came of age with Word. It's the program I used to write my college papers, overcoming old-fashioned page counts with its magical font-switching technology: Times, tightly justified, if the writing was running too long; airily monospaced Courier if things were too short. In those days, Word was an obedient and resourceful servant. Today, it's become an overbearing boss, one who specializes in make-work.

  • Texts From My Dog

    Emmy is jealous.

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The New York Times wonders if E-Books are inherently less pleasing for the brain that ink on a page. They canvass a diverse group of experts, most of whom focus on the nature of attention during the reading process. They see old-fashioned printed books as a distraction-free medium, stark and pure…
Uh-oh, get the muzzle: Ken Ham is practically foaming at the mouth. He's upset that I pointed out that one of his displays is a relic of a racist theory of human origins. And it is! He does a bit of yelling about credentials, too. And this professor seems to have a fixation on me--yet, our own full…
Radio Open Source is calling for Blogs of the Union (BOTU)posts. So here I go.... Ten years ago the internet was a new and innovative technology that was going to change our lives as it entered into mass culture. Today I doubt most citizens of this union could imagine a world without the…
Here's Jeremy Rifkin in the LA Times on why we should pursue a range of decentralized energy technologies -- solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biomass, for example -- and not the nuclear that's become in vogue of late. (For the record, here, here, and here are some posts from the past few weeks…

On the first one, an interesting piece of someone using the wrong tool for a job and complaining they can't hammer the screws in well enough with it.

They complain about how bad it was turning it into plain text describing an absurdly long progress to get plain text.

Open notepad, paste, select all, copy, now go paste it wherever you want.

Or hey, maybe use a piece of software designed for web publishing rather than complaining a tool designed for printing hard copy doesn't do a great job of web publishing. I wonder if they complain that tap water puts scale in their radiator.

By Jake-413451 (not verified) on 14 Apr 2012 #permalink