this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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xkcd

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Title text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.


Transcript2003:

[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]

Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we're building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.

2010:

Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they're DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?

[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]

Bearded Fellow: It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.


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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My Dad got frustrated with docs as people saw that as an invitation to edit the document, or cut and paste stuff he would write. So he switched to using PDF whenever other people got involved.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that’s ironically what Microsoft has been moving towards. Collaborative editing is incredible when used properly. But that also means anyone with edit access can mess up your carefully crafted document. Luckily, things like Comments are becoming more commonplace, so people can suggest edits without actually being able to commit them.

It doesn’t solve the copy/pasting issue, but you can copy/paste from PDFs these days anyways. Realistically, even saving it as an image won’t solve that, since most devices can recognize text in images now.