[vox-tech] MS products (was: Questions about building my own box

[Mark K. Kim]

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Micah Cowan wrote:

> So do I, except for Office.  Office is horrid.  Interface is great -
> but the resulting files are horrid.

I agree with you, but I haven't found a word processor that does better
output than Office.

Well... maybe WordPerfect 5.1.  But it has too many shortcomings, like a
lack of GUI, WP-specific printer drivers, etc.

> Especially compared to what I can
> do with TeX or Apache's XML tools.

[La]TeX is great for typesetting.  For more visual-oriented documents,
though, [La]TeX isn't the way to go.  Like if I wanna make a
pretty-looking table or putting things in alignment.  For those tasks, I
still use word processors, which means booting into Windows for Word
because I don't like any of the word processors on Linux.

> Not a chance.  For a long time, I had lamented that there were no
> browsers even *close* to comparable to MSIE.  Now with recent versions
> of Mozilla, I lament no more.  In fact, I even prefer to use Mozilla
> on my Windows machine.

I still like IE the best.  The last version of Mozilla I tried was way too
slow for my taste (though I was probably using a version with debuging
turned on.)  Netscape is not very good.  Opera comes pretty close, but
there are too many things it can't do, like Flash plugins (I'm waiting for
6.0 to stabilize!) and the controls are a little querky, too.

> Outlook I've never missed.  Never liked it much anyway, and mutt, or
> emacs' rmail-mode, offers me the ability to read my mail without
> reaching for the mouse (which can be annoying).  However, if I *did*
> miss Outlook, I'd switch to Evolution - in fact, I am experimentally
> switching anyway.

I'm with you there.  I use Outlook at work, and I can see how people might
like it, especially with PDA syncing and stuff.  I think the information
is too localized on Outlook (or any similar program), though -- I like to
be able to access all my info from any computer with Internet access.

-Mark

--
Mark K. Kim
http://www.cbreak.org/mark/
PGP key available upon request.