I use RTF because it works on most systems out of the box.
I write my papers in markdown. Simple to write, easy to paste into Discord or Lemmy, and you can use pandoc to instantly turn it into any format you like.
Okay, I just want to say I blame schools for Microsoft’s monopoly on personal computing. School sysadmins are always dazzled by the shiny looking gifts that Microsoft gives them, ensuring the next generation of Microsoft useds is ready.
Really?
They’re almost universally Chromebooks and the Google suite for schools these days…
A couple years ago I interned for computer support at an elementary school in NYC. Most students had Chromebooks and Gsuite, K-2nd grade had iPads. Teachers had Lenovo laptops with Windows 10 and Office365.
yeah but that’s fairly recent.
when i was in school in the late 90s it was all microsoft all the time. we had courses specifically on MicrosoftTM WordTM. that sort of indoctrination isn’t visible in the workplace until the people going through it are old enough to work.
I graduated in 2011, and same. My high school had a pretty janky mix of mostly Dell Inspiron towers, and mostly Windows XP but with a handful of Windows 2000 and ME machines that for some reason (prolly hardware too old) escaped their upgrades. We went through impressively comprehensive MS Office training and even Computer Tech classes (essentially an intro to an intro to computer science where we learned data concepts and built a PC).
A few years later, 90% of those machines had been scrapped, the mandatory courses were all gone and the kids all had cheap crappy Chromebooks. Now any tech courses are just electives and the students are expected to magically know how to use the software they’re required to use. (Because “they’re young, of course they know it!” Nevermind that they’ve only used iPads since birth).
Consequently, any class involving a computer, even if it’s just word processing for English essays and such, has the teacher taking time out of instruction to show the students how to use the stuff. Otherwise there are problems. It’s a sorry state of affairs and a lot more kids are getting left behind when it comes to tech. Google might be the worst thing happening to education now if it weren’t for the GOP.
i was a ta in uni in 2011-2015 and while ipad babies weren’t a thing yet we did definitely have to explain to some people what files were. as far as i understand from my contacts at the university it it’s way worse now.
Ohhh, I can sign off on this.
The amount of 20 year old university students that do not understand how to save a file to a specific location on their computer and then retrieve that file later has skyrocketed the last five years.
This is very obviously a consequence of them only ever having worked through tablet- or phone-type interfaces, where the file system is completely hidden to the user. I teach these people to program, and their eyes gloss over when I ask them where they put the data file they need to parse for the assignment. Once they understand the question they’ll typically open the file explorer, click on “recent files”, and ask me why their python script won’t open it, when the files are right there next to each other in “recent files”.
To be fair, that’s about all there was… Corels (?) WordPerfect was ass, for sure. Office 97 was freaking amazing.
Although, I was a product of the time as well.
I used Applix on Unix / Linux and it was fine.
sure, but computers are so much more than office suites.
I don’t believe you
/s
our lab computers ran novell netware, which definitely told me that microsoft wasn’t all there was. but yeah, it definitely conditioned an entire generation into only understanding windows.
To be fair, NetWare again was the product - microsoft didn’t have anything worthy of respect until much later (and I can’t remember if AD was any good in the early 2000s!)
NT4s Lanmanager was rubbish - NetWare was light years ahead as a directory service. I’d argue the institutions simply had the right tools for the job.
You are right about the hostile defaults / corpos getting into education to capture a generation, of course (and institutions want to be relevant to the market rather than to the principles or foundations, which is a shame)
K-12 use Google, University use Microsoft
Yes I really liked the “microsoft excel and spreadsheets” class everyone had to take for 1-2 whole years. The tools designed for us to learn basics within weeks and discover features naturally over time.
I mean imagine how many negative side effects on education there would be if we just spent one or two weeks learning KStars or Geogebra or Kalzium.
Don’t worry tho cause with microsoft backing openai I am sure every student will be given a set of chatgpt premium accounts to “help” them in their learning. Universities are already doing it en masse.
You lose some you lose some.
Schools could have used that time they were “teaching” the Office suite to give an introduction to unix, programming, and the basics of how the internet functions. I had to read and analyze Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Homer and memorize the names and formulas of 33 polyatomic ions. Computing education to the same depth should have been and should be required as it was required for the other subjects.
Knowledge is power.
We understand a very small subset of what we use every day, and that can only be catastrophic.
just rename the file and submit it as a .docx, it’s their fault
I once failed a uni assignment, because the teachers assistant wrote remarks on a pdf in a way that’s only viewable in adobe’s products.
She failed is because “we ignored her remarks”. Had no idea they were there.
Ooh I would fucking LAY into her in the review if she did that, and cause a stink to the dean. That shit would’ve pissed me off so bad. I hate when people expect you to be telepathic like that.
To be honest she probably didn’t even know that the comments were only visible to Adobe product readers, but that’s still infuriating as hell
All pdfs must be flattened! You just never know what people will use so flatten.
Tbh it’s probably less of an Adobe problem and more due to the absolute mess that is PDF annotations.
Despite being a defined open standard, most free PDF viewers either don’t support them (zathura etc), or fuck them up (GNOME evince). Even some of the viewers that do support them like Okular need extra configuration.
Unironically Firefox as a PDF viewer actually has the best support for PDF annotations.
The state of PDF Readers on Linux - Discussion - It’s FOSS Community - https://itsfoss.community/t/the-state-of-pdf-readers-on-linux/12798
Had the same in gymnasium, eventually got it overturned via bitching about it. Notes wouldnt even show up on their webapp : /
Best thing I ever saw was an Italian cooking class that sent recipes as an ODT, and then 20 minutes later as a DOCX as an afterthought for the Americans.
Why not pdf?
Because the chef didn’t know how to do that? I dunno.
Mine accepted both. The professor read it from a web app anyway.
🤮
agreed
I would do my work in OpenOffice at home, save it to doc/docx, then when it is entirely completed, I will bring it to the library to load it in Word on a library computer and correct any formatting issues and resave it.
Personally complain to the it crew and you get that look.
Me when the school system is Google Classroom
that’s an old looking William Riker
It’s the root mean square of Riker.
Well played
Most of my professors prefer pdf
Nick Offerman after getting Jumanji’ed
Mine accepted rtf.
Another proprietary Microsoft format:
Wasn’t .docx also supposed to be an open standard but M$ kept fucking with the implementation so it would only work in Office?
Yes, it technically is a standard, but because it’s an ISO standard you have to pay for I wouldn’t call it open. https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html but people have different definitions of what an open standard is and I’m not trying to critique them.
Isn’t it open? It works with Dropbox and macOS Numbers opens .docx and saves as .docx.
So does LibreOffice, but they’ve been called out multiple times for purposefully making the format overly complex to make it as hard as possible to reliable read and write to it.
I genuinely think they’re just incompetent lol
You should see the windows xp source code
You should see the windows xp source code
The rapidly dwindling sanity of windows programmers as expressed through code comments
Certified classic
So it’s an “open standard”, not in the sense that anybody can contribute to the development, but in the sense that the details of the standard are open and you can learn about them.
The format itself is an XML version of the existing Office document formats, and they grew organically over decades with random bugs, features, and bug compatibilities with other programs. e.g. There will be a random flag on an object that makes no sense but is necessary for interoperating with some Lotus 1-2-3 files that a company had, who then worked with Microsoft to support back it in the 90s. Things you can’t change, nobody really cares about, but get written down because the software already implements it (and will emit sometimes)
Could we perhaps not drag RMS out of whatever dark place we’re blessed not to hear about him from now?
We have enough pedo shit going on with the POTUS at the moment.
Also, LibreOffice saves in .docx format, if you want to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic.
Yeah, LibreOffice saves in docx. Which is fine as long as you don’t care what it looks like when they open it.
At least for school assignments this is easily fixed by just opening it yourself in the school library and adjusting format. It’s usually pretty minor.
Honestly most of my professors accepted papers saved as pdfs which was helpful too
I agree, I fixed it.
I kinda like using Doctorow for this:
- Similar facial expression
- Works with the EFF
- Cool shades
I fucking love Cory Doctorow. All his articles are so well told you get his feelings right away.
- is an all-around cool, intelligent person and unquestionably punk
For anyone who’s not aware:
https://stallman-report.org/For anyone who is not aware: https://stallmansupport.org/
To our collective social woe, disinformation succeeds because so many people care deeply about injustice but do not take the time to study the facts before passing along or acting on disinformation.
Something many of us should learn from, even more appropriate on lemmy.
Wow, he’s quite passionate. I just kept scrolling through the quotes and it never ends
Thanks. Sorry I should have linked to it. I kind of assumed it was common knowledge.
I had no idea. With all of the things I have to follow on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis some things are just going to fall through the cracks. “Minor public figure holds reprehensible views” won’t generally hit my radar. “Major public figure did something reprehensible” may not hit my radar depending on how busy or drunk I am in a given week, which will leave me wondering why people hate them years later.
I’m not saying this as a criticism of you. You brought it up which is super valuable. There’s just so much shit to keep up with that I always appreciate context because I have other things going on and rarely have any idea what reprehensible thing a particular person has said or done.
Hey no sweat 🙂 I just happen to be old enough to have known / read about / heard about RMS for decades. Given enough time, if you’re at all interested in the free software movement, his less-than-savory traits naturally end up coming to your attention.
I’ve been using free software (both free as in freedom and free as in beer) off and on since I discovered slackware in the 90s, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m not plugged into the scene. I’m not plugged into most scenes except possibly rock and Americana music, and I know all the gross shit that happened there. Rock music especially. And that may actually be why I tend to avoid getting plugged in.
But I went through the whole report. I’m sad to find out someone with such lofty ideals in one area is so scummy. A lot of that just sounds like typical neckbeard idiocy dialed up to maximum. And if he were just any neckbeard or incel on the street everyone could just dismiss him. But he’s a prominent figure that represents a movement spouting gross and harmful shit. It has nothing to do with the validity of the movement, nor does it remove the value of free software, but him being a keynote speaker everywhere and being so involved makes things feel dirty.
I don’t know. I didn’t take my medication today so I’m scattered. I just hate when people doing important or influential work are gross people, especially if they have harmful attitudes towards minors.
Well they have now, damn. Thanks for the info
Does using the computer just turn people into this?
When I was in college and I needed extra time on a paper (because I procrastinated too hard), I would deliberately save the .odt as an incompatible .doc format and submit it. Which gave me at least as much time as it took for the professor to let me know they couldn’t open it and ask to resubmit.
