Author Topic: Microsoft windows is a waste of space (and time, and effort)  (Read 548 times)

Calum

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look at this:
Code: [Select]
For those of you who still think in DOS, this is showing three documents all mad ein OpenOffice.org 1.0
I made a spreadsheet to do a report for a company i am doing some work for, and it is an openoffice (sxc) file. I have to convert it to some windows format though to take it into work and print it out. So, i made it into a pdf and a microsoft excel file and lo and behold. The original spreadsheet is 7.9 KB, the PDF is 19.4 KB and the microsoft excel file is a stupid 43 KB! now that is ridiculous. scale that up to really huge databases and you can see that one could save a LOT of disk space by avoiding this and other bloated microsoft products.

This seems like a good time to mention my bizarre laptop battery discovery as well. With windows, it was normal for the laptop battery to run out after exactly an hour. We noticed that the battery now consistently lasts for 1 hour and 35 minutes now that we have switched to mandrake. interesting...
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DC

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Microsoft windows is a waste of space (and time, and effort)
« Reply #1 on: 13 November 2002, 05:20 »
Not really new. MS office is horrible on disk usage. Apparantly MS files made by MS office itself is even worse.
GS/CS d- s-: a--- C++ UL+ P+ L++>+++ E W++ N>+ o K- w-- O- M V? PS+>++ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5+ X R tv+ b+++ DI+ D+ G++ e>++++ h! r- y
A quantummechanical wavefunction describing an unknown amount of bottles of beer on the wall
A quantummechanical wavefunction describing an unknown amount of bottles of beer on the wall
We take a measurement, the wavefunction will collapse, and one of the bottles of beer will fall

dishawjp

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Microsoft windows is a waste of space (and time, and effort)
« Reply #2 on: 13 November 2002, 21:31 »
Here's one I love to show people who tell me how wonderful M$Office is.  Get on a DOS/Win computer and create a text file. For example:

C:\> copy con stuff.txt
this file is just stuff
^z

You have created a 22 byte file.  Open the file in Word97.  Make NO changes to the file whatsoever.  No formatting changes, no text changes, nothing.  Save it in "word document format."  Then do a "dir stuff.*"  

You will find stuff.txt is 22 bytes and stuff.doc is 19,456 bytes.  Pretty darn efficient :).

Of course you could then copy those two files to a floppy and try to read them on various platforms... like DOS without using Word (or even an older version of Word).  You could read stuff.txt, but not even see a single text character of stuff.doc.  Opening stuff.txt with Word6 instead of Word97 would give you an error message and no way to open the file.  You could read  stuff.txt in Linux with a simple "cat stuff.txt" or "more stuff.txt" but you'd see nothing in stuff.doc.  

Great stuff!  How the hell did such a crappy bloated office suite ever manage to become the standard?
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Calum

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Microsoft windows is a waste of space (and time, and effort)
« Reply #3 on: 13 November 2002, 22:13 »
obviously because microsoft's stuff is more 'compatible' than anything else, whatever that means... obviously it means 'shit' i think...

Today's pet peeve is that many of the people at my work appear to have a habit of referring to their external floppy drives as 'A Drives'. It's only a fucking A drive if you use windows, i feel like screaming at them...
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pkd_lives

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Microsoft windows is a waste of space (and time, and effort)
« Reply #4 on: 13 November 2002, 23:03 »
I had been planning something similar, strangly enough I started with the hypothosis, if M$ produce bloated software, it would follow that their filestructure is also bloated.
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