[rescue] Re: nuking from orbit

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 08:14:00AM -0500, Dan Sikorski wrote:
> Yes, it works, for now.  I don't know how many winderz machines that 
> have just randomly stopped working one morning.  You go into work, and 
> it just doesn't work (tm).  There's a reason that the novell market 
> moved into the NT market, it's the people looking for the easy way out.  
> How long have unicies been around??

One semester the harddrive in my windows box died, and it was 3 months
before I could replace it.  So, I spent most of the semester using a 486
runnin linux (my then file server) for everything, and I made an amazing
discovery.  When I came home it was still working.  The windows box tended
to have crashed during the day, and I had been spending more time fiddling
with getting it working than I had spent actually using it.  The rest of
the semester on the 486 was very productive, and when I got a new
harddrive for the windows machine, I decided that maybe it was time to
switch to something other than windwos.  So, I spent several monthes
trying out BeOS on the desktop before switching permenantly to linux
(although not that permenantly since NetBSD is starting to look really
attractive).  I liked BeOS, but the audio API was too much work to use,
and it didn't do 3D well enough for me.  At the time I had a Riva128, and
I had to drop to low resolution under linux, but when I did, it
accelerated things nicely. 

> vi is NOT, never has been, and never will be a word processor.  Have you 
> ever used word to edit a configuration file?  I'd hope not.  It's a 
> matter of the right tool for the job.  /etc/resov.doc doesn't work.  Nor 
> does c:\autoexec.doc for that matter.

I know numerous people that would argue that vi is the best word
processor.  I prefer emacs myself...  Anyway, what do you need from a word
processor that can't easily be done in vi?  Spell checking?  Use the pipe
feature to pipe the file out to ispell.  Grammer?  Pipe to dict and
style.  Formatting?  Use latex.
 
For everyone?  Nope.  But, word processing should be this simple or
simpler.  Word has just perverted word processing to the point that people
associate word processors with what food processors do to food.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd