[Gllug] Distribution Pecking Order So far

[Richard Cohen]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2001 tet at accucard.com wrote:

>
> >Solaris on my boxen at work - well, it's a company standard for some
> >strange reason.
>
> I've been wondering about this -- what do you do (the company in general,
> not you specifically) when people send you documents in MS format? Yes,
> Star Office handles most of them now, but it's only recently that it's
> done so, and it still doesn't catch them all. ISTR that Sun used to use
> FrameMaker internally for documentation, but I guess that's changed now.

I fire up StarOffice :-)

I very rarely get binary e-mail from outside the company to my work address,
and I haven't seen an occasion yet where StarOffice *couldn't* handle a file
I was send - albeit sometimes with formatting difficulties.  Anyone who send
me binary e-mail to my non-work address is liable to get a reply in
PostScript - it's a pretty standard format, and a lot more open than MS
formats, right? :-)
I also sent a binary, unstripped copy of Pine to a friend a while back, as a
backup to my repeated requests to STOP sending my cute little Windows
programs.  I can't run them at work, I don't want to run them at home, and
no sane company should be allowing any MIME-attached file called *.exe,
*.com, *.pif or any other Windows binary formats through thier mailservers
anymore, anyway...

Seriously, I don't know what the public-facing people use in that situation,
although I have seen mention of an automated MS2SomethingSane converter
somewhere on the company WAN - I assume you can just mail a MS file (or drop
it in a web form) and get a sane version back...

I think FrameMaker was used heavily internally, and I think Applixware was
also used before StarOffice came on the scene.  Nowadays, the only valid
binary formats are the various StarOffice formats and PostScript - and most
of the company is sane enough that flaming for sending plain text in a
PostScript file is considered fair.  I know - I did it (flamed, that is)
recently... :-)

> I can't imagine it being politically acceptable to have a Windows box on
> every desk...

There are still a scary number of Window boxes around here - mostly used by
the less technical people like managers.  It is also acceptable to be rude
to people when they use Windows on desktop boxes. :-)
The networking folks have a number of Windows boxes for inter-operability
testing.  That's allowed...

> Tet

Cheers
Richard



-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug