(no subject)

[rubah]

I'm 60% LiveJournal!



Maybe starting to get into it a bit too much.
Either that, or your life's really interesting.

The LiveJournal Quiz

Take Other Caffeine Nebula Quizzes

Hello, Kids. Welcome to "Junior Paper Hour" with Allie.

Today's lesson is on open source software and why it is so much better than that silly stuff you paid $350 for.

Take a certain well-known free word processing suite. Today I saved a one page file, with all the proper formatting I needed for it and it was about 6.4 kb in size.

Well, a "friend" of mine, for some reason, does not have that program installed. Is that a problem? No way! I use the handy Save As: function to save it as another popular, but costly program's filetype.

The size? It was now 11kb.

Still with the proper formatting. The text became a big hyperlink for some reason, but I wasn't complaining.

Then I decided to paste the original file directly into that costly word processor and see if it was any better than the imitation filetype.

The formatting went to hell.

I spent five minutes getting the spacing to stop adding an extra space between paragraphs, and then I had to fight with hanging indents, which had to be manually reset every single time, rather than just once, or just adding a tab where I wanted it. No, when I did that, it added a tab for every single line in the paragraph, above and below.

Eventually I beat it down to how it was before.

Saved it.

A whopping 24.6 kb.

Now children, I had noticed open source software saving files in less space in the native format of their commercial competitor (Hello, graphics editing programs!), but to find out that it seemed to be common in the industry, that was a little mind blowing.

That's all for today, Kids. I hope you all learned something very valuable from this.

Comments

[uselessrandom.livejournal.com]

I only use it because my sister picked it up sorta cheap from her campus store and I figured I might as well take advantage of it.

I'm so ashamed of myself :(

[krabmeat.livejournal.com]

gimp sucks

[jume.livejournal.com]

it saves a psd like wicked crazy small though.

[krabmeat.livejournal.com]

yeah, too bad it makes my icons black and white LIKE THE FAGGY PIECE OF SHIT IT IS. I WANT IT TO STAY IN COLOUR DSRHSJHSRTHJSR >:(

[jume.livejournal.com]

sounds like a usererror.

Check what your color mode is when you save.

[krabmeat.livejournal.com]

I would if I could bother to reinstall it. I just use IrfanVeiw to save them now since it can do so without have to bullshit around with settings.

[jume.livejournal.com]

I want to kill a kitten every time someone mentions irfanview. I don't even know why-- I've never used it. I just hate it blindly.

[krabmeat.livejournal.com]

It probably because of your underlying racist desires.

[rsl.livejournal.com]

I use irfanview to resize all the pictures I take with my digital camera!

[uselessrandom.livejournal.com]

It's convenient because it's a really slim program for doing simple image operations. If I just want to crop and resize an image, I don't see any need to take up all the resources (or use all the time to load, in the case of Gimp) to open the program.

It's nifty.

[jume.livejournal.com]

You've been tainted.

[rsl.livejournal.com]

I got 60% on that lj thing too!

[jume.livejournal.com]

Good job!

[shifty-lynx.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, more accepted software is handy, like in school situations. Haven't had a class yet that endorses the use of GIMP and is happy when you use something other than what they're used to when acquiring their desired results. It doesn't quite matter that the results are what they want; doing things a certain way and with certain tools are what people are sometimes looking for.

Plus, there's no point trying to get someone to switch over to something else, even if it's more efficient, bigger and better, if they're comfortable with what they have and their needs are easily met through what they've already adapted to. Change is an obstacle and most people avoid those those things.

[jume.livejournal.com]

How would they know what steps you used to get those results?

[shifty-lynx.livejournal.com]

...Working in class?

[jume.livejournal.com]

Your superior logicin' powers have startled me.