How about a challenge: suppose Mr X wants a postscript viewer to pop
up when he clicks on a .ps link on the web. You install such a viewer
on your PC and let us know how much it cost and how long it took and
I'll do the same. Is it even worth holding this contest since it
would take me $0 and a few minutes.
I use ghostscript (Aladdin Ghostscript v1.3). This is a GNU program and
thus the installation process is the same for Win32 as it is for the
various Unix variants, namely, ftp, gzip, untar, make, and run. Often you
can find the Win32 binaries (since Win32 is such a popular platform) and
thus skip the make step altogether.
Do you, Adam, do any serious work on your PC? Or do you log in to a
Sparc for that? (and no, Minesweeper or Jezzball doesn't count). Did
you type your message in Emacs by any chance?
Obviously I can only speak for myself. But regarding the question of
gnu-emacs for email:
I do use gnu-emacs for programming. I've been using it since 1984 and my
fingers don't like to change. Besides, programming has stuck close to the
punched-card format (80 fixed-width characters) and does not benefit from
rich-text editing. (To be fair, I've never given the good third-party IDE
products a fair trial. I do know that I type faster gnu-emacs than in
Microsoft Visual C++'s editor... but God help me, I sound like a vi user.)
However, word processing (documents and email) is a different story. I use
Microsoft Word, of course, and in particular Word 97 for my email. I like
the multiple fonts, sizes, colors, justification, etc. as well as the
real-time spelling and grammar checkers. Using gnu-emacs for mail seems
pretty crude in comparison. You can generate html docs from any doc you are
working from. For example, this email (at one point in its composition)
generated:
>[...] The people who work at Microsoft are smart.
Oh, like Bill Gates who said recently that cryptosystems' security
relies on "the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers". ROTFL.
Do you really, in good faith and complete honesty, really believe that Bill
doesn't know that prime number's cannot be factored?
Don't you think it's a lot more likely that he made a verbal typo?
I've dealt with him enough times to know that he's no dumber than I am.
(And I'm no dummy.) He really does know his grade-school math.
- Joe
Joseph S. Barrera III (joebar@microsoft.com)
http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/barc/joebar
Phone, Redmond: (206) 936-3837; San Francisco: (415) 778-8227
Pager (100 char max.): 1338993@roam.pagemart.net or (800) 864-8444
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