[geeks] Now what am I supposed to do with this?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Big Endian wrote:

> MP3s on the U10?  75 gigs is nothing to sneeze at, even if it is IDE.

If the fscking SunPCI could use > 2 GB partitions, -and- didn't coredump
when I run it across the network via X, I'd have dumped my PC a long time
ago for the few apps that I do need under Windows (I think I've narrowed
that down to "AutoCAD", but only because I want to learn it).

> How hard is doing word processing in LaTeX?  For those of us used to 
> things like Claris/Appleworks?

It's a completely different way of working.  It's like old-school HTML or
SGML, where you specify the construction of a document (this is the
beginning of a chapter, this is a cross-reference to here, this is a
bulleted-list, etc) rather than the formatting (indent here, bold, and
take the font up 3 points).

Plus, there's "math mode", which is something you don't have anywhere
else.  I've heard that Scientific Word comes close, but really, math mode
makes the MS Office "Equation Editor" look like the set of spiked
thumbscrews that it is.

The downside is that it takes a while to let loose of those DPW tendencies
that Word and Appleworks enforce in us.  The upside is that, when you do,
LaTeX produces -beautiful- documents, -and- you get all the benefits of
automagic cross-referencing and bibliographies.

> I've been trying to make my PC obsolete for 2 years now, I'm almost there.

I keep trying, but I keep coming back for the games.  How much damned CPU
do I need to emulate an SNES?  snes9x -kills- the Octane.

--Jonathan