[tex-live] Ruby interpreter for Windows in the TeXLive distribution?

[Zdenek Wagner]

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006, Fabrice Popineau wrote:

> It is easy to argument on the defects of Windows, but
> my kids are playing on their computer for years, my father started to
> use it at almost 70 to send emails, connect to the internet, do
> audio/video conferencing with messenger (talking to my kids), my wife is
> using her computer too for her job heavily each day. BTW, they don't
> expierience much annoiyances. And now imagine I
> switch all these people from their XP os to some Unix version and change
> all the applications too for Unix ones. Don't tell me that they will agree and be
> satisfied. Just because they don't want to do any kind of programming,
> they don't want to type in shell commands, they don't want to understand
> how it works. They just want to use it.
>
You've hit the greatest problem of Windows, the computer pretends to be
cleverer than a user. Such users often do not know what a directory is and
what a file is, they even do not know that files have names because Words
picks some phrase from the file and turns it into a file name. I have too
often problems opening someone else's Word documents in my Windows
computer because the file name contains national characters in a different
locale. I must first rename the file either in OS/2 or in Linux. The users
have no understanding of OLE so that they link images instead of embedding
them. We too often receive documents with missing images and tables. Of
course people will not understand how the programs work internally
similarly as the driver rarely knows what's going on inside the engine.
However, everybody knows the purpose of safety belts, steering wheel and
the clutch, unless he or she has a car with an automatic gear box.

> Let computer scientists use tools for computer scientists but for the
> good or for the bad, Microsoft has done a lot to make computers
> accessible to the largest number of people.
>
It would be even better if Microsoft understood that most people have
usable brains. I taught one young lady to use computers, even the command
line. A few years ago I managed to teach her XML within 15 minutes
although she has never studied any university. Recently she came into a
course of making web pages. She learned HTML 3.2 and she realised, that
she understands it well because I taught her almost everything in the 15
minutes' explanation of XML.

> (Now Sebastian can kick me out of the list!)
>
> Fabrice
> _______________________________________________
> TeX Live mailing list
> http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-live
>

Zdenek Wagner
e-mail: wagner at cesnet.cz

see also http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
         http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz