On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 12:39:45AM +1200, Philip Charles wrote: > > > > Take the Lawyer example. He probably bought his legal practice when it > was all Word. He does not like it, he is stuck. >
If he was really interested in his data, he should convert them in a standard and portable format soon. The same for all that people who have the same problem. Registration and maintainance of historical e-data is not something that Debian can manage. It's a big problem which requires strong choices. Anyone who stores in proprietary formats his data is looking for problems. They have to convert them as soon as possible. > Take my wife's Ph.D., started seven years ago. We looked at MS Word and > it could not cut the mustard so she stuck with WP 5.1. What free > alternatives were there then? Maybe Lyx, certainly latex, but my wife is > a musiciannot a geek. Anyway, her M.A. thesis was in WP 5.1. So when the Mmmm, bad example. See http://www.lomuto.it/HomeMicheleLomutoE.htm That is a non-geek musician who uses Emacs and Latex only :-P because he is seriuously concerned about his data. > Please remember this is 2003 and not 1983. People have accumulated a lot > on their HDDs in twenty years. > ... and they are also completely uninterested in storing docs in a way that will allow them to read their own data in the future... -- Francesco P. Lovergine
