>Well...yes...hm. Couple of problems with this:
[paraphrased]
1. I gotta have a compatible machine.
2. I just can't afford a new computer.
Well then welcome to the joys of having TWO operating systems running on
the same computer. It is not only technically possible, but widely done to
have one machine, with one hard drive, segmented into two parts, one
running Windoze95 and the other running Linux. Most people that come from
a windows background run this.
>3. I've been using IBM stuff for..er..9.5 years (or so) now. I started
>on a Commodore, I moved to a 286sx16 the year they came out. My computer
>still has the same floppy drive and monitor from that original. I'm not
>an old dog or anything, but new tricks will decrease my productivity more
>than I can afford right now (we've got 3 months to develop a full campus-
>wide multimedia learning environment and webserver/site...and there are
>only a handful of us working on it...argh.)
Now this is a valid point. It does have a learning curve attached to it.
But if you are serious about delving into the guts of this wacky net thing
I encourage you to make the leap. Unix is a "power users" platform. While
tools like perl are available on windows (and even the mac in some strange,
munged form) they were concieved of and built for a unix environment.
As the only (apparant) production person for your department, you're going
to be asked to do lots and lots of repetative tasks, "Oh we forgot to put
height and width tags on any of the images on the site, you need to go
through and fix all 900 of them", or "Here's 20 tab sepparated fields, I
need you to turn these into tables for the html pages". These are the true
productivity killers. Tools such as perl makes short work of all those
idiotic tasks. Plus it will start to give you the insight on how to solve
all those problems that will begin to creep up once the project is up, and
you have wrangle those peskey documents.
OB Future discussion:
As we are entering this information culture age I expect to see a rise in
the craftman. People who have to do specific tasks will be making thier
own tools that they themselves craft to do the job best as they see fit.
The concept of one tool that has anticipated your needs and you can do all
your work in (Microsoft Office for example) will be replaced with tools
that allow you to build the correct tool to do the job, such as perl,
applescript, open doc, and the like. The industrial age goal of factories
that press out identical products will make way for more of a individually
crafted paridigm.
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