[Shacs] switching to mac - need some advice

[Kevin A. Estis]

31337 h4x0rs made you say:
>> I'm sorry.. I do have to hit upon this one point of contention:
>>   don't have to worry about "will my presentation or document look the
same
>>  on my screen as it does when I email it out to others?
>>
>> Doesn't that mean "if my recipient is on a Mac?"
>> I still find it frustrating on a PC to watch a QT .mov movie.
>> I keep my work PC up-to-date with the latest flavor of QT player, but who
>> has time at home for that mega-meg download?

No, what I was referring to was the ability to use a product such as MS
Word in OS X and know that whatever product I have to deliver will look
the same when my client views the document. Yes, PDF's can do that but
most enterprises don't have Acrobat Writer where the client can add
comment/changes to a document and send it back to me. Regardless of how
good StarOffice/OpenOffice, etc. are they do not have the same
capabilities as MS Word (due to licensing restrictions, etc.) and like it
or not MS Office is the "business application" of choice for most
enterprises. Therefore, if you are providing a client a contractual
deliverable (document) on a $100m contract you want to make sure the
client sees what you intend *how* you intended it...and to do to that you
generally have to use whatever product they use. Using a Mac allows me to
do that for most product deliverables (except for Visio or MS Project and
I have work-arounds for that) and still be able to do the stuff I need in
a BSD environment.

Regarding your issues with QT, etc. I tend to think of those along the
same lines as sites that create pages which are "IE Compliant" and don't
show up well in Firefox. Another similar issue, especially when it comes
to movie files, is the fact that many sites use Windows WMV files which
only work natively on a Windows system.

One last tip on the Mac thing...you may want to wait until after October
when Leopard comes out...else you'll have to pay for the upgrade.

Kevin





--
This signature was created on a Mac...therefore it should look better than
other signatures but will cost you more and doesn't really work in the
enterprise.
Kevin Estis
macinhack at shsu.edu