One thing I've learned over the years: the scruffier looking the IT guy, the more they should be listened to.
xkcd
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
They don't bear the moniker "greybeard" without reason
I have a great idea for a program! I should describe it in agonizing detail to an AI owned by some company so it will spit out working source code. Nothing can go wrong with my plan!
Hot take: while I do appreciate and use FOSS (I'm on Linux), that doesn't make the people who talk about it 24/7 non-stop any less annoying.
Hot take but PDFs became the primary form of document transfer because Microsoft made .doc, docx, docm, rtf, doc 2003-2020...
All those "It won't open" just forced everyone to say "Fuck it send me the PDF"
Pretty much. PDF was specifically designed to retain the same look across any device. The goal was that if you designed a document to look a certain way, that opening it on another device wouldn’t fuck your entire design. That’s also why editing PDFs is so damned frustrating, because they’re designed to not change. It largely started as a frustration with the “move an image 3 pixels to the left, and now all your text is in the wrong place” issue. But the EEE strategy by Microsoft directly contributed to pdf becoming the de facto way to share documents.
Well, that and every time you touch a DOC/DOCX file it reformats itself to your local settings, fucking up the entire layout. PDF is a terrible, inefficient, poorly (or at least variably) implemented format which was proprietary for two decades but is now about the best option we have for a document to look the same at the recipient end as the sender and still include text, vector, bitmapped, semi-interactive, and certifiable/traceable contents.
I really, really hate that so many people still try to share ebooks as PDFs. Why that was ever a thing makes no sense to me. Yes, I absolutely wish to read a 500 page novel on portrait letter size pages with tiny font that completely ignores my screen size.
What are more efficiente and better implemented formats for documents sharing?
Markdown is gaining traction. There's lots of tools that will edit and display Markdown consistently, and without a dedicated tool, it's just a very readable text file.
And, most importantly for today, it's easy to generate a PDF file from, haha.