Dear Penlrs, For the most part, it's hard to escape the ubiquity of Microsoft. If you're working with other folks, odds are you're stuck using MS Office. And unless you want inflict upon yourself the pain and suffering of Unix (as some of our Linux enthusiasts have suggested on Penl), you're probably stuck with Windows95. But when it comes to surfing the Net, I just found a really neat browser that you might want to check out. It's called Opera, and it's available at http://www.operasoftware.com. It's very, very small--1.7 megs--it's very zippy, and, once you turn off some of the clutter, it's very easy to use. It was developed by a small company in Norway, who seem to provide really great support. Right now, it's only available for PCs, but it'll run quite happily on a 386 with 8MB of RAM, and they seem to be promising they'll have a Mac version out this year. The only drawback is that it doesn't support Java and that you can only use it for free for 30 days (after that, you need to shell out $30). If you mostly use the Net for reading text, it's sooo much nicer than Netscape or Explorer. So the next time you're feeling pissy at Microsoft, check it out. Anders Schneiderman Progressive Communications
