re: Windows '95 MS Office or Freedom

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "TMatsumu" == TMatsumu  <TMatsumu@example.com> writes:

    TMatsumu> Form: Reply Text: (16 lines follow) Stephen, Obviously
    TMatsumu> you're not keeping up with MS news.  I've been surfing

You betcha I'm not.  I admit I'm a bit religious about avoiding MS,
but since I operate in a mixed-platform environment (Sun Un*x, Linux,
Win 3.1, Mac, Novell, VMS, MVS or Fujitsu equivalent, etc), none of
which coordinate with each other for factional reasons (so I can't
really say cross-platform), all I need to do to share as much as is
feasible is X and TCP/IP (and protocols built on TCP/IP like FTP,
telnet, and HTTP).  Linux provides a lot of tools for file conversion.
It doesn't hurt me to avoid MS.

    TMatsumu> the net with MS word (yes, using tcp/ip) for 6 months or

Hmmmm.  MS Word gives you in-line GIFs, table formats, and Java
interpretation?  If we can do that with Word now, what the hell is the
MS Explorer for?

    TMatsumu> longer, and you will be soon also, if not you, your
    TMatsumu> customers.

No, I won't, and no, they won't.  My "customers" will be using
Macintosh Netscape for 'net surfing for the forseeable future.  (The
Windows-using faculty don't surf much; when they do they use Netscape
because they need to ask the undergrads how.)  We can't make
first-year undergrads buy MS Office for their Macs when Netscape and
several non-MS tools, including Mathematica, are site-licensed.  AFAIK
MS Office doesn't run on Suns.  Or does it?  And for how much?

Fact is, Ted, around here when people's personal Macintoshes don't
talk to the world, they ask Michael Bjorn, a Swedish grad student.
He's had family problems and spends a lot of time in Sweden these
days---guess who gets the overflow?  Yup, *me*.  I don't own or manage
a Mac.  Never have.  Windows 3.1?  Same story, different grad student,
except I do manage a few Windows 3.1 boxes, NT boxes, and one lonely
Win 95 box.  The Windows 3.1 boxes are used by students mostly, I only
touch them once in a great while.  The Win 95 box has a great CD
player accessory and runs freecell real fast.  (You should talk to the
government about how your Japanese tax yen are spent....)

Why do people come to talk to me, non-owner of Mac and despiser of
Windows, when their Macs or Windows boxen have network trouble?
*Because I run Linux.*  Under Linux, I've got the tools to look at the
LAN and the Internet and localize the problem.  I can find out their
IP address when the techs are on vacation if their baby puts the TCPIP
config file in the gomibako; I can tell them whether the net broke
down at their local cisco, the University JUNet gate, at the WIDE
project's window to the world at Todai, or at some MCI router in
Maryland using traceroute; I can put my smail or popserver into debug
mode and watch them try to get mail from a fake mailbox on my Linux
host and see if there's something okashii there.  You cain't do those
things under any Windows less than NT AFAIK.  I wonder how easy it
would be to do it under NT; I know nothing about the system hacking
utilities of NT.

It is certainly true that we are handicapping our students by making
them learn MacOS rather than Windows 95.  If I had my druthers, they'd
all be buying Pentium notebooks, not Powerbooks, and not only would
Win 95 be available to them, but Linux and DJGPP for programming.  But
I don't have that power.  Still, *I* would run Linux, because I'm much
more useful to my colleagues as a net trouble-shooter and potential
alternative mail host, than as a Word guru who knows what all the
buttons on the toolbar do.

    TMatsumu> When you don't use the platform your customers are
    TMatsumu> using, you lose sight of their perspective.

True.  So what?  I should give up the tools that make me valuable to
my colleagues and students so I can see their perspective?  I think not.

    TMatsumu> One of the reasons win 3.1 is so fast is that the
    TMatsumu> developers were forced to use it on slow machines.

This is certainly true for developers.  But to the extent that I
develop for my department, I must use portable tools like C/C++, HTML,
Mathematica, and Perl, so that they can run on my machine and the
department's Suns as well as on DOS machines (the Macs are kinda left
out wrt Perl; but those guys in general don't need to use my hacked-up
tools, if they can't point and click they get upset---the Windows and
Unix crowd runs into ugly data-cleaning work, where Perl shines, far
more often).

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
I have discovered a truly wonderful procmail recipe which filters out
excessive quoting and Novell attachments, but it is unfortunately too
long to fit in this .sig.