Adobe and the pound
Windows 7's arrival is reminding the world of just how bad some Microsoft products are. It's a bit unfair, because there's a lot of competition for slipshod software. Take Adobe, for example. It has an expensive suite of graphic-design programs, but they fall short in terms of cross-compatibility. The programs are intentionally impaired so that you have to buy the whole suite, and the commands in the individual programs don't always mean the same thing. We need three of the programs to produce the Final Word. Still, when we use our expensive InDesign program with a special Czech font, we run into some odd quirks. If we type in the sign for the British pound, in pops a € sign. No matter what we do, the pound sign simply won't stay in place. Could it be that Adobe is in fact trying to tell us something about the impending demise of the pound? And if so, why does the $ sign still work?
Glossary of difficult words
slipshod - careless, sloppy;to fall short - to be deficient or inadequate;
cross-compatibility - interconnectability; ease of use among related objects;
impaired - disabled; stripped of some features;
quirk - oddity, characteristic;
impending - to be about to happen.