(Was: Re: Update on VMs under Linux?) Bill Lindley wrote: > Why run MS Word97 when you can run OpenOffice? I don't run MS Word97 when I can run OpenOffice. OpenOffice is not a replacement for MS Word. They are two different applications with limited compatibility. I use OpenOffice when I can, and Word when I have to: mainly, when I am involved in an exchange of Word documents that won't render in OOo. It will be nice when ODF becomes commonly used. I'm trying to promote it, but sometimes it's like trying to pay for things in pa'angas instead of dollars. For example, one of my sons is a student in ASU's BS in Nursing program. One of his courses provides Word templates for submission of work; and requires totally rigorously precise formatting in electronically submitted coursework. OOo (or Word97 for that matter) is not an option here: no WYSIWTG (What You See Is What Teacher Gets). He found Office 2007 for Home and Student at CompUSA for $140, that's three licenses. Not bad as a Cost of Not Flunking [TM]. Mom will use the other two licenses, so the cost is about $50 per. This is equivalent to the strangle-hold that big textbook publishers have on schools, but less expensive. If someone gives you a document with all sorts of graphics interleaved with text, and MS-specific fonts laid out to fill pages but not overflow, there's no way FOSS can fully break the MS encryption and render that document accurately -- as illustrated by the "behave like Word" sections of Microsoft's Office Open (sic!) XML definition. Meanwhile, my wife is a Microsoft customer, pure and simple. She works with it at work, she wants it on her desktop. She has bigger fish to fry than trying to straddle two sets of applications. I am currently struggling with her new Vista laptop. Microsoft has done it again: a Vista PC apparently won't share files with an XP PC without installing special software on XP. This is apparently just a trojan horse -- to install that software on XP, you have to do the whole "genuine" thing first, which I'd managed to avoid on the XP box to date. But she wants to share between her desktop and her laptop, so fine, I'll risk a false-negative and cave in to the "genuine" requirement. In the real world, Word is still Coin of the Realm. Hopefully the hold will be loosened over the next 10 years, but don't count on people who work *with* other people to give up Word very soon. And why else am I using Windows? Because I switched from CentOS to Ubuntu, and my Cisco VPN client that I need for work does not install on Ubuntu -- some header discrepancy that I can probably fix with a little hacking, but haven't yet. Other VPN solutions would be even more work to install. So I have to boot over to Windows for VPN access. Just like many other apps, this is something that works great *when* it works under Linux, but Just Works [TM] under Windows. The old wide-eyed question, "why use Windows", gets a little old for people who have to deal with other people and the requirements of organizations whose primary focus does not happen to be breaking the Microsoft monopoly. We should promote open standards and products wherever possible, but if someone is taking the trouble to dual-boot or use virtual Windows under Linux, we should probably give their intelligence the benefit of the doubt. Vic --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss