I’m running Itunes on my PC. Not Safari, though.

Microsoft Office is often given as a reason for staying in the fold, because it unites Mac and PC office workers in a common set of formats. Common formats are a good thing. But there’s a Linux equivalent: OpenOffice, which was originally Xerox’s StarOffice, commercial software turned into open source. The fact that MSOffice’s formats are well-known, and it even provides interchange formats like XML, means that OpenOffice can do a pretty competent job on Office documents.

I’ve found that there’s software available for all the categories on Linux, but generally not nearly as many choices within the categories. Except for Web server software, it’s generally not as polished as the commercial Windows/Mac equivalents. But on the Web best-of-breed lives on Linux. Period. I used Microsoft’s Web technology for a decade, and I’ve used Linux for half a decade now, and it’s no contest.

Well, mcfly, I know you don’t have the control over your work environment that Tom and I do, so the above may seem a bit gratuitous. If you’re content you’re content. I’m not criticizing your choice by presenting the alternative, but if it encourages you to push a little like you did with JQuery, that’s cool. Then my work here is done…

Basically, I’m moaning about something I’ve got no right to moan about. To paraphrase the old saying, “no one ever got fired for knowing Microsoft.” When it comes to paying my mortgage and buying groceries, my skills with proprietary systems have served me well. If one is going to get locked in, getting locked into MS technology isn’t the worst possibility.

Does this sound like rationalizing? I honestly can’t tell. Meh, doesn’t matter. I’m at peace with it. Could be worse…I could be a cabby with a masters in Medieval French Lit…

The rest of my family use Macs, and they just plain work too. I’m not one of those “Mac/PC” fanatics. My stuff needs a PC, theirs doesn’t. That’s all there is to it.

But then, I’m a “user,” not a “programmer,” as they say in the system. Might be a different thing when you have to construct the stuff.

You’ve made a few tentative steps in the right direction. jQuery is the first JavaScript library of which I approve, and which I don’t think I could do better myself. Now that is high praise indeed The Zone’s running on jQuery…I use Ajax to download message bodies and forms, and that’s what Eri’s talking about in the earlier post just below.

I know it’s hard to scrape the Microsoft off your shoe. I live and breath Linux servers these days, but I still do my coding and admin and everything else on a tired old Windows XP box. XP? Yeah, that’s how much I love Microsoft. I’ll go to great lengths to have only the minimal contact with Windows I need to get by, and to avoid sending a penny to Rome…er, I mean Redmond…if I can help it.

LINQ? What? But I put on my Google Omniscience Goggles and now I know it’s Yet Another SQL Replacement. Yeah, the world really needed RDO and ADO and ADODB and now LINQ. WTF is it with Microsoft that they have to own every damn thing?

There’s really nothing Microsoft has an absolute monopoly on…except the loyalty of corporate America. Sounds more like your challenge isn’t the technology per se, but that you seem to work in a “Microsoft shop”, aka The Nethermost Circle of Hell.

Poor bastard.