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On Tuesday 20 July 2004 17:15, John Daragon wrote:
I doubt that this is refutable. But, given that the idiot^h^h^h^h^huser didn't bother to read the manual (where this behaviour *and* how to defeat it is clearly documented), I'd say that the probability of him/her reading the *source* tended to zero.
That argument, as is often the case, about the accessibility of the source code is not that the individual user should or would read or modify it, in this sort of case, but that the development of the software is improved by the openness of the source code.
My opinion is that end users who take science forward through peer-reviewed publication whcih includes details of methods are likely to think that the publication of the method in the instance of the software is a significant difference.Alas, you've picked te wrong horse to whip. The book (in this case the online documentation) makes it absolutely clear that this is the way in which Excel is designed to work. Just because this user doesn't like it doesn't make it wrong.
Possibly, but not with as big a whip as it may appear - it isn't an argument about wrongness, or actually about the virtues of Excel, what it is is pointing out that one development process produced Excel which behaved thus, and another development process produced Gnumeric, which experimentally did not behave thus (and in this single instance that would have been nice) and draws a parallel which I have for some time believed to be significant between the development process for science (in an idealised form to be sure) and the development process for Gnumeric, in contradistinction to that for Excel.
Between the seats in a Piper PA28 there's a lever with a button on the end. It's where you'd expect a handbrake to be if you hadn't read the manual.
Only if you had learned to drive a car. If you came to a car, having only learned to fly then you would have a different sort of accident available. I've only flown a Chipmunk, where the seats are fore and aft. So from what are people expected to come to Excel, and appropriate assumptions built into Excel?
and if you'd failed to read the manual then you'd be one disappointed bunny if you expected it to work like one. That doesn't make Piper irresponsible for not publishing its drawings.
Although I think they do.
Excel doesn't damage data. It merely transforms it in this case, and in a manner that the manual tells you it will. The idea that this user couldn't reconstruct his or her original strings (or whatever) from the data that Excel holds is frankly ludicrous
But reportedly true. Perhaps a reasonable design aim might be to separate the display format from the underlying data, which would avoid this entire class of accidents being possible. I see that the open source development process of the WWW has tended that way. -- Adrian Midgley Open Source software is better GP, Exeter http://www.defoam.net/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.