Re: A92: Why there haven't been Fargo updates for a while...
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Re: A92: Why there haven't been Fargo updates for a while...
BG McCollum wrote:
> Its kinda funny, your system died, and you have to buy a whole new
> computer? And it took a mac to show that you were still alive and still
> working. Yet you were scared to to d/l your mail to a mac and communicate
> with us? Why would it have been worse to telnet to the sendmail port? I
> just think you're a mac-a-phobic, and would have been ashamed to
> successfully use one.
First of all, I *didn't* buy a whole new computer. Just motherboard, CPU, RAM,
and case. I thought I made that clear. This upgrade was something I had been
wanting to do anyway, but the situation forced me to do it much sooner than I
had planned.
Secondly, I wasn't "scared" to use the Mac to download my mail. I just didn't
want to screw up my email archives: you see, I store all my mail, old and new,
in one place on my hard disk. Downloading it onto the Mac would have the
effect of dividing my email archive.
Besides, I actually did decide to download my mail on the Mac, after all. I
configured the email client to keep the mail on the server, so when I get my
PC up again, I can download all the mail again. (1405 messages so far.) Of
course, now I have a new archive of sent mail, but I find that much less
repugnant than having my *incoming* mail separated into several different places.
Telneting to the sendmail port to send mail would have been disorganized. I'd
use that option only in emergencies where I have no other choice. This
actually did happen once, when I was using a Unix account through an XTerminal
at school, in a three hour programming contest where we needed to send our
answers using email, and the NFS stopped responding. (In that situation I also
used /tmp to store files.)
Finally, I am not "Mac-a-phobic". I'm perfectly fine using Macs, and have even
done some programming on them in the past. It's simply that I find that the PC
platform currently has supierior software, and that includes the operating
system. MacOS 8 still has the annoying habit of using system-modal dialogs
*way* too often.
Another example. Our new scanner, which came free with the Mac, is a lot
easier to use on my PC under Windows than on the Mac. On the Mac, I can't
acquire scans directly into PhotoShop; I have to start the scan program
separately, save it as a picture file, then open the picture file in
PhotoShop. (Not to mention that the scan program is system-modal.) Sure,
PhotoShop has some scanning stuff in the Import submenu, but none of it is
compatible with the Mac drivers for this scanner. It seems there is no Mac
standard for scanning, analogous to TWAIN for Windows. Maybe I'm wrong -- I've
done no research on it yet.
One more example. Most Mac text editors *still* don't provide good keyboard
shortcuts. Most of them still don't provide hotkeys to go to the beginning and
end of the current line or document. When they do, it's not standard. And, the
way Shift-cursor works in most Mac text editors is very annoying: it always
enlarges the text selection, requiring you to start from scratch if you go too far.
I could go on and on. Most of my gripes are about little details, but details
are very important to me. And sure, there are still some advantages the Mac
has over the PC. But at this point, I vastly prefer the PC.
Please, do NOT start a whole long thread about this. It is off-topic already.
If you have something truly intelligent to say, please reply to me rather than
the list.
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