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Commentary by 19 Jon Rochmis | 20 Also by this reporter 21 back Page 2 of 2 03:00 AM Feb. Soldiers Killed in Iraq Attacks * 35 Sharon's Likud Party Votes on Gaza Pullout Plan * 36 Blair Appalled by Iraq Abuse Photos, Doubts Emerge * 37 Son of Ex-Dictator Seen Winning Panama Election * 38 More Breaking News * 39 Wire Service Photo Gallery Tech Jobs Partner 40 Today's the Day. What that fine quote means is that writing is pretty darn hard. If you're going to develop a software program for it, make it easier. If you want to rewrite something in Word, you get a string of hyphens across the words instead of just being able to erase it. The dastardly spellcheck will treat you like a moron if your name is Duane or Tamisha (or Jon, for crying out loud). And every other word has a red squiggly under it because the built-in dictionary hates your guts. Try importing content from another application without crashing once. Has anybody figured out how to stop those bullet points from procreating? How about highlighting just one word, no spaces, please! Want to disable any or all of the 10,598 largely unnecessary features these job-justifiers programmed in? First you need to figure out if it's a Preference, an Option, or something that's Customizable. Then scroll down and keep on scrolling across those mind-numbing phrases that were first written in English, translated into Sanskrit, then into Latin, then pushed through one of those goofy 41 dialect programs on the Web (Latin with a Hillbilly Accent), then translated back into English, and hope you've deselected the right option. They were simply busy doing the business that made them rich and got them in trouble. You've got to punish the programmers themselves for devising such insidious, maddening, horribly designed, awful offal. If they're no longer in Redmond, find out where they work and make their boss fire them. Take away their stock options and hack into their 401 accounts, changing all their long-range holdings into Overseas Tech Investments. The remaining Microsoft programmers -- nay, code-writers everywhere -- would have no choice but to answer to the needs of the people, not to their unimaginative, bullying, monopolistic employers. End of story Send e-mail icon Have a comment on this article? Your use of this website constitutes acceptance of the Lycos 60 Privacy Policy and 61 Terms & Conditions Note: You are reading this message either because you can not see our css files (served from Akamai for performance reasons), or because you do not have a standards-compliant browser.
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