[haiku] Re: BePDF documentation
- From: "André Braga" <meianoite@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:41:24 -0200
On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 19:08, Karl vom Dorff <karl@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I don't really care, as long as it isn't trash. It just seems the term is
> from another era when most didn't have a second thought or a bad conscience
> from throwing stuff away; that, and as you said - it doesn't really make
> sense.
The "Recycle Bin" thing had nothing to do with some eco-friendly
foresight of Microsoft, but with the fact that back then they intended
it to differentiate its trashbin from Mac OS's (read: needed bullet
talking points to sell Windows 95) saying it could be used as a
staging area for users users to move stuff from one folder to another.
Of course it never worked, since Windows doesn't allow non-fixed disks
to have trashes (unlike Mac OS!) and mixing actual purgeable files
with temporarily tucked away files and folders is a *royal* bad idea.
Needless to say, the idea never catched on (no surprise, given that
it's fundamentally flawed), but the name stuck, if for no reason other
than inertia.
(Still, have you ever actually heard a Windows user call it anything
other than "the trashbin" or "the trashcan"? I know I haven't, in
English or otherwise. And I can't really say how that icon is named on
other localised versions of Windows, but in the Brazilian Portuguese
version it's a synonym to "trash bin", not "recycle bin". I can only
imagine it's the same for a myriad other languages.)
Regarding hardcopies and document formats, making printing the
documentation a convoluted process wouldn't gain us any mindshare at
all. And it would probably create a market for people to extract the
text from the documentation and create nicely-formatted,
print-friendly versions of it and probably end up selling hardcopies
for profit.
If we want Haiku to convey an eco-friendly message, let's have the
promotional materials printed on recycled paper with soy ink. That's
as far as we should go.
It's not our judgement to make whether printing documentation is a
waste of paper or not. For all we can tell, the user might not have
used his/her printer for years, but on the other hand could use
massive amounts of, say, toilet paper (!!!), and there's absolutely
nothing we can do about this. :)
Cheers,
A.
Other related posts:
