-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:24:00 -0800 Russell Johnson wrote: <snip> > Part of my requirements for my laptop is that 'it just works'. If > I have to futz with it, ever, then I'm not doing my job nor my > boss any good. OS/X gives me that more than any other OS ever has. > Yes, there was a learning curve, but now that the learning curve > is mostly over, I'm more productive, and have fewer issues than > either Windows or Linux gave me.
That's important. I'll tell you a story, because history deserves to be told. But then history is old news, so stop reading if you do not care. Just less than 25 years ago I drove to Southern California, with one of those Compaq 'portable' PCs in the back of my Mazda RX7, headed down to Orange County to replace its property tax system, due to Proposition 13. I was an IBM mainframe systems programmer at the time, a member of that priesthood. I'll gloss over that Orange County work, but I survived it, and the takeover of Arthur Young by Ernst and Whinney in 1990, somehow. I'd bought a Zenith 12Mhz 386 portable PC, and I was the first one that had his own PC at Ernst & Young on the west coast. I put OS/2 on it and set up dual boot with a Windows partition, an OS/2 partition and shared a data partition. OS/2 'just worked' and I avoided Windows crashes that plagued my peers. Thus I was more productive and I got a lot more work. In the early '90s an E&Y government practice in Dallas TX got itself in a bind and I was flown in to get a dozen huge Excel spreadsheets to run under OS/2, because Microsoft Windows couldn't handle that memory load. I kept using OS/2 through about the year 2000, and I even hacked Lotus Notes to let me do that, after IBM dropped support for it, those swine. And no, I didn't mention that when I worked for IBM shortly thereafter. I could tell you many more stories, from 9600 baud access to mainframes through $100 per CPU-second charges and executive malfeasance and other things, however my real point here is that what you use had better work. Whatever you use when you're on the road, it had better work. There are no excuses. Whether that's Linux or a Mac is up to you, but it's damned sure not Windows. I think IT professionals know this by now and it will become more and more well known among the population at large. We might hope so, anyway, and we should be doing all we can to make it accepted. Best regards to all, Robert -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk8SQuYACgkQ+qYMIUkNJCyRtACffAvd5Of6+LLdJEassDcKQ1O/ G/wAnRaraYdwT+XtdO/Yuy82UkFBsN0u =sPBY -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
