Bob La Quey wrote:
I am curious what she is likely to run into that cannot be handled by say Open Office. Maybe some .wmv stuff?
Actually, no, the latest incarnation of ffmpeg handles that just fine. Both VLC and mplayer seem to chew through most .avi and .wmv files I get nowadays.
Some problems will be anything that requires authentication or monetary charge. If you want to print to campus printers, I don't know of any way outside of windows.
Also, I occasionally have to receive or transmit files to hardware. The last thing I bumped into was a scanner. Also, sometimes the Linux drivers for printers are *far* inferior (this even includes native Postscript printers because you often can't toggle things like image quality, resolution, paper tray, etc.)
None of the foreign language software available from the SDSU language labs runs on anything other than Windows or OS X.
She has shown no interest in games. My main objection is simple. I do not want to be on the hook for keeping viruses and spyware off her box.
OS X also serves the same purpose. There is a reason for all the OS X users at the KPLUG meetings.
I don't use the silly Mac applications. The *only* Mac app I have open right now is iTunes. And I would dump that if any of the open source folks would get a clue and release a cross-platform music player/music organizer.
I use almost all open source stuff. The normal open source stuff works like I expect. However, there are Mac open-source programs that are just plain nicer than anything on Linux. Neooffice is a native OS X OpenOffice and replaces the garbagy font and printer handling of Linux (which I can't stand) with the OS X handling (works like a charm). Colloquy is a lot nicer for IRC than anything natively on Linux. Adium is nicer for IM. There are other examples.
Do you have a simple solution that I am ignorant of for keeping a Windows box running?
As I said, VMWare. I really *really* am starting to use VMWare *very* hard. That way I can take a clean snapshot of XP and revert back to it anytime I even think I *might* have been tampered with. This includes the tampering that Microsoft does as well as any possible viruses. It also includes being able to "revert" and *know* that the uninstall of a software package that I only need once really uninstalled and didn't leave any Windows registry/files/bitbarf.
Besides, it's *very* useful to just be able to keep XP *OFF* except for the few minutes I actually need it. And, even when it is running, XP is so firewalled and sandboxed by my own machine and VMWare that it is kinda hard to get at to infect it.
Maybe I am just old fashioned but the vast majority of what I expect her to be doing is just simple word processing. That and web surfing. Just a few years ago we did word processing quite adequately on 10 Mhz machines. Web surfing can use more horsepower for sure ... but what it usually needs is more bandwidth.
Sometimes. Often web surfing is now constrained by the threadedness of the viewer. A single web page often kicks of dozens off separate calls--all of which hit DNS, caching, actual transmission, etc. Having that stuff confined to a process on one core while the other core handles your interactive usage makes the *perceived* speed of the computer quite a bit faster.
PS. Antonet is enrolled in the nursing program. She might become a doctor.
I don't know a lot about that. The only question I would ask is that if she might want to become a doctor, is the nursing program academically rigorous enough? Organic chemistry tends to be the big hammer that separates out the wheat from the chaff on the MCAT tests (chemical engineers tend to destroy just about everybody on the MCATs). I don't remember whether the nursing program really hits that hard enough.
-a -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
