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Re: [LUG] Excel mangles genes draft letter
Simon Waters wrote:
The authors wrote programs to workaround this in Excel, had they used a
free software spreadsheet with such interface issues they could have
distributed an improvement, rather than distribute extra sticky plasters
to manage. My dislike of the concept of managing patches is only
exceeded by my dislike of managing third party patches.
The authors didn't need to issue any kind of patch - the software wasn't
operating incorrectly. The researchers needed to be taught how to use
the software - that is a totally different issue. With any worthwhile
spreadsheet you should format the cells and create the functions before
you drop your live data into it. Any other method of operation is asking
for trouble to slap you in the face. the patch's were issued to work
around the stupidity of the user not the software.
| This has *nothing* to do with .......
| or trying to kid the world that software has no cost.
I don't think anyone was trying to kid the world on that issue.
However the true cost of software is a lot closer to zero if you share
it. Indeed it is effectively as close to zero as makes no difference if
you only want to do things that have been done by people who share.
I've always believed this to be a fallacy perpetuated by the "Free"
software" advocates. Are we talking about "free" in the intellectual
sense or the financial? If we're talking the latter then free software
is a nonsense. The only reason major corporations and Governments want
to move over to Linux is because their accountants believe they can make
financial savings. The only reason the person in the street wants "free"
software is because they don't want to pay for it - mainly because it is
something they can't hold in their hand (which is which software houses
always put their products in large, ridiculously over packaged boxes, to
try and give the software some kind of presence). They will happily pay
for a PC, but not software.
The most successful open source/free operations have been Open Office
and Redhat/fedora. In both cases Sun and Redhat did what they did in
order to take advantage of free development. They let us do the work for
nothing - instead of paying a programming and development team, and
ensure that the licence agreement allows them to reap the rewards of our
Freely given effort by selling or incorporating the work into their
marketed products. Of course the cost of these is lower than that sold
by major software houses - there are no research and development costs -
the most expensive part of any project.
One has to wonder how many times over the world's geneticists have paid
for the cost of developing Excel, to end up with a tool that many of
them are finding difficult to use.
So much for the expense of University education that these people don't
seem to be able to read manuals. In what ways have they paid? Apart from
the cost of ignorance?
What you are looking for here is a "backup". Saving your raw data for
later review/checking - that is good science, although it can get very
expensive very quickly - especially where satellite based instruments
are concerned in my experience.
Sorry, I don't understand the relevance of satellite based instruments
here. The simplest way to ensure that you don't get the problems the
geneticists did is to initially drop your data into a universal raw
system such as comma delimited text files before throwing them into any
kind of spreadsheets.
It also helps to identify the correct tool for the job. Many
"professional" users use whatever software application is to hand
irrespective of it's suitability. This is especially true of Public
sector programs around the world where it difficult to have access to
anything other than a corporate software base - which usually means MS
Word, Excel and PowerPoint and little else , Oh, and that most
"wonderful" of browsers, IEx
Carl
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