Re(2): [SunRescue] a bit OT but...

[Tim Hauber]

David writes:
>Most of the time it isn't the OS they are thinking about, but the 
>application. I try to look at it the way we look at it for our graphics 
>folks. They really do require Adobe Photoshop and not something that 
>acts like it most of the time. There are too many things that are 
>dependent on Adobe Photoshop's behavior that a replacement just won't 
>do. Indeed, there are some shops that have stopped upgrading PS, because 
>the new versions are different enough that they don't work correctly for 
>them.
>
>For suits that critical app is MS Excel, and the good suits really are 
>as adept at Excel as our graphics people are at at PS. So, we give 'em 
>Excel.
>
>Umm, trying to get a little closer to 'on topic' -- unless Star Office 
>does all the Macros that MS Office does, and in the same programming 
>language, etc. we will have to give the suits a PC OS to work on.

I agree with this, and it doesn't apply just to applications, but to
people.  Two recent cases in point, at the school where I work, we had a
lot of fun moving someone from Wordperfect, because her documents (which
she re-uses every year) were full of WP-specific formatting, boxes and
tables, etc.  She was willing to change, but it made her job more
difficult for a few months.  Another person we have to work with is
absolutely positively attached to her word perfect 5.1 for DOD, with some
custom font handler tacked on, and because of her position and length of
employment, we have been told to do whatever it takes to make her happy. 
She is now running DOS 6.22 in Virtual PC on a Mac, so she can run her
precious word perfect.  And in her case, most of her documents are all
plain text, and could easily be converted, but she can't.  (One of her
requirements was that her keyboard template from Word Perfect fit above
the Fkeys on the new keyboard, and she was unhappy when her plastic
keyboard skin didn't fit the keys on the new keyboard).

Unfortunately, no matter how well you can configure a network, you can't
edit the /etc/rc.d/personality.rc files of the users.

Tim