Any working SIP-phone on FreeBSD?

[Chad Perrin]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 12:34:51PM -0400, Jerry wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Jun 2011 09:49:49 -0600
> Chad Perrin articulated:
> >
> > I eagerly await the day when office suites go the way of the dodo.  I
> > think people use them more due to a form of Stockholm Syndrome than
> > out of any specific need, in most cases.
> 
> Would you care to elaborate on that statement? Is your prejudice based
> on the fact that there is nothing in the open-source community that can
> even begin to match the robustness and ease of use of MS Office, and so
> as to simplify this question, I am referring to the latest offering; ie
> MS Office 10, or do you have some other specific complaint?

It's not "prejudice".  That assumes I prejudge.  My judgment is based on
years of fighting with the BS features of office suites of all
descriptions for years, and loathing every minute of it.  I don't care
whether they're open source, closed source, or blue-green algae source.

Office suites are basically just featuritis sores growing on the faces of
our computer working environments.  Feature creep has gotten so out of
control in MS Office that the "ribbon" was invented to deal with the fact
that it had far more features than the interface could reasonably manage.
The "ribbon" is, in fact, basically a very clever, well-designed answer
to a problem that should never have existed in the first place, and as
such the "ribbon" ends up being little more than one more feature in
something that has far too many features in the first place.

People actually open MS Word or OO.o Writer to do nothing but make
simple, unformatted notes to themselves.  Have you people never heard of
a damned text editor?

For all the document merging and management features of these things, in
the end one is usually better off not using any of them; just cut and
paste instead.  Cut and paste takes less than a minute, but I've seen
"expert" MS Office users spend half an hour screwing around with document
merging to do what could as easily have been done with a simple cut and
paste.

For actual content merging, despite all the derogatory noises MS Office
users will typically make about the evils of the command line and how
difficult it is to use, what might take an hour in MS Office can often be
accomplished in roughly equivalent fashion using simpler file formats and
a couple of command line tools like grep and cat in under five minutes.
By the time you get to the point where all these ridiculously
overburdening "advanced" features are "needed", you're better off storing
your data in a database and moving on with your life.

. . . but we've strayed off-topic quite far enough in this thread.  Maybe
we should drop the subject here.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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