Yesterday I posted about my quick and dirty clean up of Ernesta Drinker's journal.
A few hours later, on the other side of the planet, Microsoft announced a slew devices, including the Surface Book, which is being touted by some journalists as a MacBook Pro killer.
Well I have a MacBook Pro (well, work bought it for me, and it's actually 5 years old and overdue for replacement), but all my work fiddling with Ernesta Drinkwater's book was carried out on an even more elderly Dell Latitude running Linux.
It's Linux that made it possible, because of it's rich toolset, though I could have done it on my MacBook via a terminal window because of OS X's BSD heritage.
Windows? - well given I used perl for a lot of it I could have done it by running the scripts from the command line but it would have been a bit of a hassle.
And that's something that tends to be forgotten. There are those of us who use machines for work, and quite often what we have on our desks is driven by our software requirements for work, and how effective that makes us.
If I was cynical, the only reason I have Microsoft Office is because I once had to write a set of grant proposals using a template that didn't work in Libre Office.
Necessity is the mother of software choice, not how fast or sexy your hardware its ...
A few hours later, on the other side of the planet, Microsoft announced a slew devices, including the Surface Book, which is being touted by some journalists as a MacBook Pro killer.
Well I have a MacBook Pro (well, work bought it for me, and it's actually 5 years old and overdue for replacement), but all my work fiddling with Ernesta Drinkwater's book was carried out on an even more elderly Dell Latitude running Linux.
It's Linux that made it possible, because of it's rich toolset, though I could have done it on my MacBook via a terminal window because of OS X's BSD heritage.
Windows? - well given I used perl for a lot of it I could have done it by running the scripts from the command line but it would have been a bit of a hassle.
And that's something that tends to be forgotten. There are those of us who use machines for work, and quite often what we have on our desks is driven by our software requirements for work, and how effective that makes us.
If I was cynical, the only reason I have Microsoft Office is because I once had to write a set of grant proposals using a template that didn't work in Libre Office.
Necessity is the mother of software choice, not how fast or sexy your hardware its ...
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