On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 20:39:38 PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> For once we disagree No problem, it happens to outstanding minds :-) With respect to your remark that theory is greatly different from practice and that: > So as long as you don't get caught and don't crash your computer, > everyone is happy. I am perfectly aware that this is how things go in practice in mine, yours and most other workplaces. Two facts remain: 1) if you get caught downloading music or other, er, non business-oriented material, you can at least _try_ to say "everybody else in the office is doing it, can you fire/punish everybody?" Ditto for installing and running, say, computer games on the office PC. Both things _look_ (in PHBs perception, that is) much more independent, ie less bad, from dangers to company information than running a macro just on those files. 2) so far, nobody has ever tried to wrote this macro and, unlike reveal codes, ooo startup time, "please integrate an email client/calendar/coffee pot" and similar, _this_ particular issue pops up just once every 2/3 years... both facts seem to prove that yes, you are right, but in practice almost nobody wants to "bother" running this particular macro rather than OOO as is or mp3 players and so on, because he either doesn't imagine the possibility at all or reasons as I wrote in my earlier message. > > The existence of an anonymizing macro wouldn't change this a bit: > > it just cannot be used in many workplaces, period, unless one goes > > through way more trouble and _risks_ than any potential benefit. > > The potential benefit of course is you can report problems and get > them in a reasonable time here's another trap. _Whose_ potential benefit? Remember that here we are talking of big corporations (which often just outsorce IT and sw choices to 3rd parties, these days, so local offices CANNOT change anything). In a smaaall business it's very different, but what is the benefit for an employee of a big company to run such a macro? Bonuses? Career advances? FOSS and making the world a better place? The first two are just slightly more likely than a return of the dinosaurs. The third... can be accomplished much more effectively helping to install and support OO.o in the local schools, for example. Printing an OO.o manual for your kids school with the company printer or sending anonymized company files to OO.o developers are both illegal or forbidden. Given this, I'll bet that most pro-FOSS white collars will prefer to do the first in their lunch break. That, and the possibility for the developers to test themselves the tons of .doc files _already_ online, are why I and, I guess, most other users who have this problem simply end up _not_ wishing or bothering for anonymizer macros. Oh, and another reason why such a macro hasn't been developed yet and would probably remain irrelevant is the fact that the bug reporting interfaces at oo.o (and mozilla, evolution, whatever) are done and worded for developers in the first place, that is pretty scaring or confusing for end users. Notice how many people report a bug on the list and disappear when asked (rightly!) to file them in the bug tracking system... I'm not happy about it, but I'm pretty sure that things stand this way. Should I be wrong, great, all the better for OO.o. > The sad fact is there are so many problems independant of the actual > text written in the docs even if the macro wouldn't work every time, > it'd still catch a lot of things. You're right here. > I'm a user. I only provide user input. If I don't have the means to > do it safely, I won't. Same here. I just pointed out that probably for many people "safely" means "if they catch me sending out a company file, they'll eat my ass, without even checking if it had been anonymized, so why bother?" > (and since if I can't report problems I hit > easily there is a low > chance they'll get fixed, I might as well stop using OO.o) I agree. This exactly what I was forced to do in many occasions at my job. > The problem BTW is not limited to end-users. Before a corporation > decides to deploy OO.o, it needs a way for its support staff to > report bugs upstream safely. Absolutely right. My corporation, however, like many others, doesn't decide to deploy anything. We lease PCs and other HW with preinstalled sw through a company-level deal between us and a service company. In such a scenario (dealing not will your boss, but with external drones which will send _official_ reports, complaints and other papers to your boss's boss if they have to fix, remove or install anything outside the service contract) makes debugging OO.o with company files even less attractive. BTW, that's one of the reason why I was already saying almost 5 years ago (http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=discuss&msgNo=8757 and similar) that pressing our politicians to adopt oo.o formats would be a much better strategy that spending lives in the impossible quest for perfect filters. Ciao, Marco -- Marco Fioretti mfioretti, at the server mclink.it Fedora Core 3 for low memory http://www.rule-project.org/ Do not ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Physicist Richard Feynmann, Nobel Prize --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
