Making sharp pdfs

[Noel_Carboni]

What's killing us all on an epic scale are poor computer literacy and poor tools

Hear hear!! Well said, Martin.

Hate to say it, guys, but the war is being lost.

As a computer engineer for 33 years now, I can honestly say that operating systems are moving away from solid things we can trust with our files to entities full of mystery and magic. There was once a time when you could trust that what you see in Explorer (or goodness, what you see on a CMD line DIR response) is actually what's on the disk.

No, now instead of educating people to use the computer properly and responsibly, Microsoft and Apple are building much magic into the operating system all in the name of "protecting" the users.

Remember those bars on chain saws that "protect" you from kickbacks? Remember the guard rail by Niagra Falls? Remember Vista?

It has taken every bit of prowess I have to configure Vista to actually be useful, and to do so I've had to turn off some features (e.g. UAC), reconfigure many others, enable "Classic Mode" for several things... I have little hope that I'll even be able to do most of these things with the next version.

In the past I've always assumed that it was actually possible to configure the operating system to be useful because Microsoft's own Engineers need to do so to get things done. Now it's clear that they're either still using XP or have spent the time to configure it as I have.

What would be better?

1. Train a person well then hand them a gun.

2. Hand a person a gun, watch them make a bunch of mistakes (some of them deadly), then sell them a new model that doesn't shoot when pointed in certain directions. Keep upgrading that model until it really no longer works for its intended purpose (yet still can be deadly because of unforeseen scenarios).

Computers need to be computers, not playthings. They need to do what we tell them to and no more. No magic!

Just to make this post useful and not a complete rant, for those of you who want to transfer large files, the BEST way with the general public is usually this:

1. Upload the file to a web site.
2. Give the recipient an http: URL from which to download it.
3. If you have the time, present the URL as a big button on a page with instructions.

If you don't have a web site of your own with which to accomplish this, YouSendIt.com and several others serve this purpose passably well. YouSendIt is free to use up to 100 megabytes.

-Noel

[Noel_Carboni]

By the way, the "Press Quality" PDF I made was only a hundred kbytes or so larger than the high quality JPEG I embedded in it. At 571k it could easily have gone via eMail.

Click Here To See It

-Noel

[Richard Dickins]

Totally agree with you Noel, things are getting out of hand with the operating systems etc.

However - think of it as an opportunity - *we* (I'm also a computer engineer) have some idea what's going on and can help out those that don't. For money. (Although, to be fair, I try to avoid fixing people's PCs now because I just can't be bothered with the annoyance factor.)

One thing though - I don't generally reconfigure my PCs into 'classic mode' or things like that because I need to support what 'lesser' people have on their systems, so I need to see what they see, or at least be not too far away from it.

It's only going to get worse though :-(

[Jerry Skrocki]

I think this is more a case of learning the applications since the operating systems have become more transparent.

For me, going back to college forced me to learn the applications in the Adobe Creative Suite. Most community colleges offer night courses in Photoshop and other graphic applications.

[Noel_Carboni]

Bravo Jerry!

Studies have shown that ongoing education and facing mental challenges help keep the mind young and pliable.

-Noel

[DougAxford]

Originally Posted by Jerry Skrocki

I think this is more a case of learning the applications since the operating systems have become more transparent.

Have you ever tried Vista? Transparent is not the word I would use.

[Noel_Carboni]

I think Jerry may have meant that the OSX and Windows both offer similar functions, and so the emphasis is on the applications.

Everything I read about Windows 7 makes me ill... More magic, less "real work" features.

Funny thing is the "early adopters" are mostly people with nothing better to do than to try a new operating system for the halibut. People trying to do real work are usually more conservative... Many (most?) corporate environments are staying on XP (I know of one still on Windows 2000). I saw a sign on the local computer store today that said "We Recommend XP (the one that works)."

The sad reality is that 99% of the people want a computer as a plaything, and couldn't care less whether they get any real work done with it.

-Noel