KarmaGirl: Hrm, no, I hadn't heard that. Isn't PDF an open format now? I was thinking that it was because of all the libraries I have seen for both compiled languages and web scripting. There are tons of ways to make them out there. PHP has a nice PDF Lib. Whether it is open or not, I am sure the license would have enough built-in to make MS pay for the right to use it commercially.
I had heard, however, that the next version of Office that had been touted as totally XML capable will only be so if you buy the high-end versions. I had planned on migrating back to MS office, but if the regular peon version of Office doesn't support XML, then I don't guess I will.
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I had a hand in hijacking the thread, too. My apologies.
There may be overdog worshipers out there, but I don't really see them often. I think at the root of almost every anti-Stardock pocket are the oldster, UI Luddites. It is their silly minions that I see more often than not.
We all remember people who were constantly derisive about shell themes that were too 'heavy', and that did their best to make their desktop look like a command line. For some reason most techie communities have at their l33t core a few of these "Things were great before the mouse" types, and people emulate them as much as possible. There have been types like this in our own community who laughed off WB as superfluous resource use, *while* they made themes for it.
Now that the standard shell is as stable as the shell replacements, they have even less reason to tinker. To someone like that, WB and such are still another running app they don't need, topped off by 3 year-old impressions of the software. They make mention of those impressions, and all the kids who want to be as cool as them carry the bias around, mouthing off and choosing anything else, even if the alternatives are worse. Msstyles doesn't
need to be better, it just needs to be outside the scope of oldster derision.
You hear people come in here all the time spouting some fact about WB that hasn't been true in 2 or 3 years. They picked that up from some UI luddite, sitting with an @ symbol by his name in IRC. In short, I think this is less an Overdog thing, and more a social, pack mentality problem. People keep emulating the old 'alpha males' even though their points ceased to be valid with the advent of gigahertz-era processors and modern amounts of ram.
As to what to do about it, I dunno. If such people are still griping about the superiority of the command line and grimacing at their mouse, then they aren't gonna change their mind anytime soon. I still here stuff like that really often. One can only hope that in time they'll migrate to Linux for good...
