RMS: Putting an End to Word Attachments 1022
sombragris writes "I've spotted in NewsForge a very interesting editorial by none other than RMS himself on the subject of getting rid of those annoying MS Word attachment that people send. The essay is worth thinking and doubtless worth implementing." I've found that KWord and Abiword both did a fine job of reading Word files - it's the being able to Save As Word where things get messy.
Bernie will sue (Score:5, Funny)
because the mob is polite... (Score:3, Funny)
What, you mean completely ignored?
OK , now what? (Score:3, Funny)
Misreading the title (Score:4, Funny)
Re:unfortunate ? (Score:4, Funny)
I would think that most Word users don't want their mother to catch a bunch of viruses. What kind of scumbag would train their mother to accept Word documents?!
Re:Microsoft XML (Score:3, Funny)
<font style='0010101' size='man' kern='385420' content='00101110101000111000000010100101010100'/
</style>
I can't wait
Re:damn microsoft word... (Score:2, Funny)
graspee
Re:Give as good as you get. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:unfortunate ? (Score:3, Funny)
And while we're at it. Stallman's solution is " All we have to do is ask each person who sends us a Word file to reconsider that way of doing things."
Sure. Why don't we "ask" them to stop top-posting, sending HTML mail, and clicking on "snow_white.txt.vbs".
(I've been saying "Sorry, I don't do Windows" to .DOC files for years. It hasn't stopped the lusers yet. The worst time was when someone sent me a list of names in .DOC, and then resent it as a column of cells in an Excel spreadsheet. No, they weren't being sarcastic, they were just. that. dumb. To this luser, Word and Excel were the only applications on their computer.)
Re:Give as good as you get. (Score:5, Funny)
A few months ago I was introduced to Latex.
Another geek gets laid!
:)
There is (yet another) decent way to handle this (Score:3, Funny)
If you really dont want to recieve or promulgate any word documents, set up your mailserver to filter out all .doc attachments and replace them with a small ascii note:
<<< Word.doc 900k -- file removed by VirusScanner 7.0 >>>
Then anyone who uses the server can honestly reply- "I want to get that document from you, but my virus scanner keeps deleting it, if you could send it as plain text or rtf... "
This directive will fit nicely next to the ones for *.exe, *.vbs, etc.
this is amusing... (Score:4, Funny)
But I did run into this ad [msads.net] while checking my hotmail account, and I thought it was pretty funny in light of the current discussion
Re:"a polite reply"? (Score:2, Funny)
Sheesh...
True Story (Score:4, Funny)
The attachment was a ZIP file;
The ZIP file contained a powerpoint presentation;
The presentation had a single slide;
The only thing on the slide was a BMP picture;
The picture consisted of a scanned image
Of...
a printed email message!
Re:This is an Open-Standards, not Open-Source, iss (Score:3, Funny)
They have submitted RFC's on the MS WOrd format. Their submissions were answered with:
Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we are unable to publish it in its current format. Please resend the attachment as plain text.