Desktop Linux (fwd)

Michael Costolo mcostolo at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 26 15:43:26 EST 2004


--- Jeff Kinz <jkinz at kinz.org> wrote:
> Ok, I understand.  You're ignoring the obvious for the purposes of making 
> a point of vocabulary or splitting a semantic hair that has absolutely
> no meaning in the real world.  

I see it this way: you're telling me, in essence, that for all wants and purposes
OpenOffice Writer and MS Word are the same program because a particular class of
users can use the two interchangeably.  That few enough people will have difficulty
operating one while being trained in the other that qualifies them to both be, in
essence, the same product.  

But almost all commercial software is GUI these days and follows similar design
formats.  And how many GUI toolkits are there, really?  Pull-down menus, labeled
buttons, integrated help, etc.  It is pretty hard for even a really dim user who has
even so much as watched someone use a computer to not be able to figure out
File->New.  By your reasoning, almost every GUI-based word processing software ever
written is the same product.  They all consist of the same basic elements: titles,
paragraphs, tables, etc., and how many ways can you code Insert->Table of
File->Save?  Almost all of the common operations are identical in any of the popular
similar software packages. For that matter, even non-similar software packages.  But
Word isn't PowerPoint even though they're probably more than your 51% the same
thing, right?    

> Truly thou art a Software Engineer.

Actually, I'm not.  I do write software, but the last formal training I had was in
Fortran 77 (for a physics degree).

> (So am I.)   Being occasionally A.R. is something we definitely have in
> common. :-)

I'm sure I resemble that remark.

> So, what happened to the Table ?  :-) 
> You couldn't come up with example of a common operation that was
> different between the two? Why? 'Cause there aren't any.

(see above)

> > It is a new application, no?  
> No.
> I'll specify a standard here so we have something to measure by.
> 
> In order for something be considered a new application it needs to have
> at least 51% of the common operations invoked and operated in completely
> new and different ways.  (We can negotiate the percentage to something you're
> happy with if you don't like 51%. )

Okay, so Word is the same application as PowerPoint then?

> > Perhaps we should just agree to disagree on this one.
> Can we learn how to do that? :-)

What is it they say, "we'll get along fine once you accept that you're wrong?" :)

=====
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it"
-George Bernard Shaw

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