Deeper Into the Age of Stupid
Sep. 11th, 2017 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceagleOf course there are lots of things we could cite to exemplify the Age of Stupid. The one I'm choosing right now is Microsoft Word.
In the 1990s, oddly enough, Word 4 for Mac (and later Word 5.1 also) were gleaming examples of Fast and Capable writing/editing software. WordPerfect was good too, but I didn't get to use it that much, so I'm less familiar with it.
...but I used Word pretty much every day, and when you needed to edit FAST and THOROUGHLY, it did the job amazingly well, even on those slower machines back then. The most IMPRESSIVE thing about Word was its ability to Find/Replace pretty much EVERY INVISIBLE CHARACTER conceivable. This was VERY important, considering I would receive files from many sources at my editor's desk... and there was crucial need to strip out random and repetitive TABS, Carriage Returns, Line Feeds, and pretty much all the BLOCK characters in the ASCII table.
I could do it in a few seconds to a few minutes with Word 4, and also Word 5.1 ... Word 6 began to be a bit lumbering, but it was still fairly decent. Between Word 4 and another two programs (WriteNow and Aldus PageMaker, which sometimes could catch a few stray characters too), it was a fast and smooth process ^v^
But now.. enter the Age of Stupid. Trying to make every web page look best only on tablets and phones. Not programming auto-device-detect to instead direct you to more capable pages when a full computer is detected. And composition software that barely even comes close to the editing capabilities Word 4 had .. ;P
And I emphasize this, because Microsoft Word no longer can easily detect all those deadly invisibles that are so important to catch before you send the file to press. AND, OpenOffice sadly does not offer a useful solution either! This is shocking to me, because progress is supposed Build on successes in history, not forget about them and leave them out in the dust.
This situation has obviously existed for quite a few years (after the 1990s when operating systems changed mostly) ... but having just had to go between LibreOffice and WordPad back and forth for a 1/2 hour just to do what Word 4 could have done in 30 seconds, I thought it might be useful to revisit this lament and get it off my chest... ;P
Any of ya have other glaring examples from today's Age of Stupid that you'd like to put into the spotlight? :}
In the 1990s, oddly enough, Word 4 for Mac (and later Word 5.1 also) were gleaming examples of Fast and Capable writing/editing software. WordPerfect was good too, but I didn't get to use it that much, so I'm less familiar with it.
...but I used Word pretty much every day, and when you needed to edit FAST and THOROUGHLY, it did the job amazingly well, even on those slower machines back then. The most IMPRESSIVE thing about Word was its ability to Find/Replace pretty much EVERY INVISIBLE CHARACTER conceivable. This was VERY important, considering I would receive files from many sources at my editor's desk... and there was crucial need to strip out random and repetitive TABS, Carriage Returns, Line Feeds, and pretty much all the BLOCK characters in the ASCII table.
I could do it in a few seconds to a few minutes with Word 4, and also Word 5.1 ... Word 6 began to be a bit lumbering, but it was still fairly decent. Between Word 4 and another two programs (WriteNow and Aldus PageMaker, which sometimes could catch a few stray characters too), it was a fast and smooth process ^v^
But now.. enter the Age of Stupid. Trying to make every web page look best only on tablets and phones. Not programming auto-device-detect to instead direct you to more capable pages when a full computer is detected. And composition software that barely even comes close to the editing capabilities Word 4 had .. ;P
And I emphasize this, because Microsoft Word no longer can easily detect all those deadly invisibles that are so important to catch before you send the file to press. AND, OpenOffice sadly does not offer a useful solution either! This is shocking to me, because progress is supposed Build on successes in history, not forget about them and leave them out in the dust.
This situation has obviously existed for quite a few years (after the 1990s when operating systems changed mostly) ... but having just had to go between LibreOffice and WordPad back and forth for a 1/2 hour just to do what Word 4 could have done in 30 seconds, I thought it might be useful to revisit this lament and get it off my chest... ;P
Any of ya have other glaring examples from today's Age of Stupid that you'd like to put into the spotlight? :}
