``In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.''

Before going any further, please download OpenOffice.org. Now. For whatever computer you're using to read this. I give you permission. It's big, so the download will take a few minutes, but while that's happening, you can come back here and read the rest of this delightful blog. If you do, I promise not to blog about MSFT for a long time after this.

[Were you wondering how long I'd have a blog before ranting about Microsoft? Three entries, it seems; probably not a record in the blog world.]

My place of work is rabidly Microsoft-oriented. At my orientation, when I told the orienter-woman that I use LaTeX instead of Word, she literally rolled her eyes. She went on to explain to me things like `You know how a computer will start acting funny if you leave it on for a long time?' and I wanted to say, `No, actually. The crappy Linux laptop I'm writing this imaginary conversation on has been running for 16.3 days without any problems, and I use it heavily for writing, number crunching, serving files, and as a shield against oncoming cars', but instead I sat docilely as she then explained that `we also don't want you installing any external programs on your computer, since they may interfere with Office', but did I roll my eyes at her? No, I did not.

I'm writing a proposal for a simulation. Being a simulation, I asked for cash for some badass hardware. Being at a bureaucracy, the IT department also demands a line on my proposal. I feel like I shouldn't give an exact figure, but it's seven times what I requested. With the money needed to buy seven top-of-the-line dual processor bazillion-GB machines, they'll make sure that their Microsoft file/web/email server keeps running 24/7, protect me from viruses, and make sure my copy of MSFT Office is up to date. I don't think the IT department is especially bloated or dumb; that's just how much cost and effort is required to keep MSFT software running.

Maybe you should check up on your download of OpenOffice.org about now. The name is Openoffice.org because OpenOffice was already trademarked, so they had to go with the silly-sounding URL-as-name thing. Oh well.

So today, my administrator person, who generally has a heart of gold, sends me an email asking, `instead of sending me a PDF, could you send me the original Word document?' She should have realized it wasn't a Word document, since you have to pay extra to have Word save your documents as PDF, unlike, say, OpenOffice or, um, anything else. So I sent her the Latex source code, telling her that she shouldn't have any problems fixing whatever she wanted to fix, since it's basically plain text. Her immediate reaction was, of course, to re-format it in Word. She gave it to an intern, who spent an hour changing fonts and margins. Many things, like numbering sections and then referring to those sections elsewhere, or including references, were too difficult, so she eliminated them. In other words, after spending an hour getting Word to do what LaTeX does automatically, the result was still inferior, excluding content because it was too difficult to write down in Word.

If you're not using LaTeX now, I'm not gonna sell you on it here, but have you tried OpenOffice.org? It's a solid piece of software, and is free in every modern sense of the word. It generally avoids most of the problems that this amusing article snippet complains about, though it still auto-switches i to I.

Our next project at work, already in development, is a model of the economy of open source software. Evidently, I'll have to write the proposal in Word.

In my next entry, I'll continue this thread, clarifying where this empty ranting is going (without mentioning MSFT).