Re: Xy on Mac

[flash flash@xxxxxxxx]

Y'all,

Open Office (which does indeed have a similar GUI to MS-Office) supports
Win98 thru Vista, GNU Linux, Sun Solaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD. See
http://www.openoffice.org

≪Apple is still another really big company [and] it would be foolish to
trust it have its customer's interests at heart≫ Do I sense a tinge of
paranoia here? That really big companies aren't interested in the
individual customer's total delight is not peculiar to RBC's. They're
just like the rest of us: they're interested in surviving. Really big
companies do offer one really big advantage over really small ones: they
are probably going to be around in another 5 years with technical
support, spare parts, reference materials, and a substantial online
library of workarounds.

≪I've pretty much made up my mind that I'll never upgrade my Win2K
machine with Microsquish.≫ I second that. So the options are,
practically speaking: Mac OS or Linux for private users, or, in
professional environments, something of the order of magnitude of Novell
Netware (which is out of the question for home users).

I tried SuSeLinux a year or so ago and gave up on it. What flummoxed me
was the paucity of drivers for ordinary peripherals. SuSeLinux
autodetected my HP 5550 printer and my internal HD, but nothing else. I
found no suitable drivers for USB sticks or wireless LAN cards--this
seems to be common to many if not all Linux distributions. And only half
the functionality of my flat-bed scanner was utilized. The list of
missing or half-baked drivers kept getting longer. Linux nerds will tell
you what a joy it is to write your own drivers. Bullpucky. I want to get
on with carving the statue and not waste my time grinding the chisels. I
ended up reformatting the HD and (reluctantly) going back to w2k. At
least I know where the snags are and how to work around them. And,
however much we bad-mouth MS, Windows does recognize peripherals.

≪I figure that cutting down on the number of psychopaths with influence
on my life is a good thing.≫ Hear hear. Howbout starting inside the
Beltway?


I abate with weighted breath,





PS Geography 101: where's the Beltway?