Put it this way - Slashdot is the ONLY place on the net where people have such... different views. The engineers I work with don't get fussed about such crap.

As for my account, I've posted on Slashdot before using different accounts because I don't like to let people trace my history, so this is just my latest. The fact you therefore assume that I'm a kid tells me more than you know.

I've given up. Too many people live in their own bubble here. I was just trying to challenge the misconceptions a lot of people have here about normal folks who don't hang around in their fields, and how they see technology. But too many people here are fucking weirdos and I just don't want to have anything to do with them, thinking about.

So until my next account... bye....

I'm almost 30 mate. It's the high school geeks who don't understand why the world hasn't embraced open source yet who are the difficult ones.

Your life isn't that important that a transition effect from when you log in to when the desktop appears will have any practical significance.

Like a lot of people (probably you too) I spend the majority of my working time in front of a computer. I also spend a good portion of my free time involved with computers. I enjoy working with a nice interface because it's soothing. It's pleasant to use. If my interface was full of harsh colors you might argue "well you can still run applications on it". That's true, but it'll subconsciously affect my mood because that's how humans work. That is, most humans anyway.

You don't need a lot of bling. A bit of tasteful bling is hardly an issue. I assume you dress nicely at times? Why do that, if clothes are purely functional? It's because people appreciate good dress sense, and that also applies to computer aesthetics.

I feel like I'm talking to a kid here. You should know this already.

She's quite good with technology, that's not the issue. I probably didn't make it clear in my post, but the stress would be due to incompatibility between LibreOffice and MS Office (yes they exists, I've experienced them myself, nothing you say will make this not a fact).

Hopefully you now don't "pity the children under her care".

I don't understand the people that post here sometimes. You're all supposed to be geeks, surely you know how to disable a plugin (like I do) so that PDFs can be opened externally, hence not freezing/crashing your browser. But I guess that's too complicated nowadays...

I don't like using the alternatives because honestly, Adobe Reader/Acrobat have the best support for things such as forms that sometime fail in other PDF readers. And since people generally target Reader/Acrobat when building said types of PDFs it feels counter-productive to use a non-standard reader if it's not necessary to do so (even though PDFs are meant to be a standard, sometimes it doesn't quite work out that way).

Hell no. I'm not anti-Linux. I'm anti-fanboy who live in their own little reality and get angry that not enough people follow their religion.

If you have a bunch of people doing it, yes, a server dedicated to the task is not out of the ordinary.

Bunch of people? I made it clear we're only using this feature for ONE PERSON, you fucking idiot. Heck I didn't bash the WatchOCR, I even mentioned that it might be suitable "for certain scenarios", but setting up a server just for one person?

You are correct though, there are indeed .deb files for Ubuntu. Pity we're not using Linux since we still have a dependance on all that other damn stuff I mentioned (like Office at least), but whatever.

Nothing that Adobe does is elegant. Just because you can't see the guts working doesn't mean it's a massive dump.

Load PDF, select View > Tools > Text Recognition, change a couple of options (or leave the defaults which generally work anyway), and Bam! PDF scanned and text now highlightable/searchable. I agree that a lot of Adobe software is bloated but in terms of steps to get the job done, how is that not elegant?

FYI: Adobe Reader XI is a 36.1 MB download (assuming you use the directly link and not the web installer). But Reader won't do what we want, only the full Acrobat. Can't remember how big that is, but hey, disk space is there to be used.

Man. You are so different to the folks I'm referring to in my sig. Congrats on being sensible. :)

It varies. I graduated HS in 2000 (Australia) and recall a mixture of PCs and Macs in my school. As for what my wife encounters I'd probably it's still predominately PCs since they're cheaper than Macs. There are occasionally Macs but not in the same number, and for those Macs that do exist, you can be sure they would be running Office anyway for interoperability.

Australia is still a very Microsoft-friendly country. If we were European I wonder what the odds were that this would be such an issue...

You really think the solution is to use a Live CD and run a server on my network? This might work for certain scenarios but it doesn't match what Acrobat does - load up a PDF, convert images to text, allows searching of text within that PDF, all without any extra work since it's all elegantly integrated into the same tool. There's major value in being able to do that within the one program without any additional setup and have it used by a non-geek. I think geeks overlook this rather important facet.

Likewise.

I mean what did you expect? You're not listening to reason, you just want to insult. How you expect to grow and appreciate other people's viewpoints by calling them dumb over their choice of operating system, I'm not. But it's fun to watch you squirm. :D

I'd expect Office 2007 and 2010 to be compatible with each other (at least you'd hope - they use the same format by default). I can't really get into a discussion with Access or Powerpoint though - from my experience she uses Word the most. Point is though, regardless of what version is being, the schools are still based around the Microsoft ecosystem and as such, deviating from that at home is just gonna make her already stressful job even more stressful. For my own personal use I can use just about anything - but I'm married. I'm hardly gonna create marital harmony just for Linux's sake. :D

OK, think about that. What's easier for a HUMAN to do? Have Acrobat do all that work seamlessly and efficiently within the same program, at which point you can re-save and work with it like a text-filled PDF? Or extract the images, run them through a script and dump the text to a file? What if you're looking for captions connecting to diagrams in the PDF? Once translated you'd search easily in Acrobat and you'd be able to clearly see the caption connected to the diagram in the file. With a text dump you'd see no such thing, and you'd have to manually hunt for the correct location of the caption/image.

Something tells me you don't want people to have a use for non-Linux software. You're not used to people not seeing your way. Well I'm smarter than you, friend, because I know how the world works. :)

Heh, well...

The problem is mainly due to the fact that the more different the DE is to the status quo, the less support you'll find. By using Windows 7, my wife can use it, my brother can use (on the rare occasions he visits) and basically if someone wants to do something on it, they can, because everyone knows how Windows works. The more you drift from that, the more difficult things get and the more effort needs to be expended. Even if I'm the only one uses my computer, I will end up having to use other computers, whether it's my wifes or someone elses, or my computers at work. Having them all run Windows 7 makes life so much easier than expend the mental effort to remember the UI differences between, in your example, Fluxbox and the Windows shell.

I've already run into this problem, even with GNOME. Gedit uses the non-standard Ctrl + Shft + Z key combination for Redo action (after performing an Undo). Windows universally uses Ctrl + Y; even on Linux Ctrl + Y is used as a redo in LibreOffice and I believe GIMP. But Gedit wants to be different, which is unfortunate since it's the most heavily used text editor I use in Linux. Little things like this get annoying after a while, and that's just one example.

I guess some people notice things differently to others. What I know for certain is that a non-composited desktop has a tearing effect when moving/resizing windows since vertical sync isn't applied, where as compositied desktops have silky-smooth window manipulation.

Also, what's wrong with the fade in/out with login/logout in Windows 7? Do you really suffer simply because a second is taken out of your life when it happens? It's not like you'd be able to do anything with the extra second anyway since Window still has to load stuff up (and is still doing so during the transition).