[ILUG] openoffice.org

[Nick Murtagh]

On Saturday 02 February 2002 20:50, Matthew French wrote:

[snip]

> Finally, I believe all these arguments are valid for a CTO to use, and may
> even be a good reason for a small company to hold off on adopting Linux.
> But they are no reason for software developers to use MS technologies.
> C/C++ is available on Linux, and is better in many respects than
> Microsoft's offering. Why use C# when Java is a much better alternative?

Don't discount C# just because Microsoft invented it, especially given that
Miguel says Gnome 4.0 should be built on top of mono.

  http://www.go-mono.com/

> Visual Basic - give me Python or Java any day. And on the Microsoft
> platform you don't have shell scripting or perl. You have SQL server, but

Um what? 

  http://www.activestate.com/Solutions/Programmer/Perl.plex

You could achieve shell scripting through use of batch files (ugh) or
cygwin/bash at the very least.

> PostgresSQL is not a bad alternative if you can live without the GUI. Of
> course, I would fire any developer that suggested using IIS as a web
> server, (although I would demote one that suggested using Netscape
> Enterprise Server which is almost as bad).

Funnily enough, you can run PostgreSQL, apache, MySQL etc on windows
if you really want... If you feel your sys admin job is not exciting enough, 
installing IIS gives you something to look forward to everyday :)

One thing that's always bothered me though - how do Microsoft expect
you to run a webserver that has to be _rebooted_ every time you patch
it? This pretty much mandates some sort of high availability system to 
avoid 5 - 10 minutes of downtime every time a new security hole appears...
At least you can craft your own Code Red variant to patch and reboot 
remotely >:)