[ale] using ipod touch or iphone with linux

[George L. Allen]

> The last time that I thought windows was the best tool for the job was
> ~1999 when I didn't know any other OS. Since then I have only seen
> situations where windows was the _only_ tool for the job. For example
> programming a Keithley multimeter to act as a network appliance....

Labview? :)

Trying to find /any/ alternative tool was how I found linux - while trying to
write a paper in 1996 on Win 3.11, it GPF'ed one too many times, wiping out
everything. Since I couldn't boot anyway, I borrowed a friends copy of
slackware and never looked back.  Wrote my papers in HTML until I learned about
LaTeX...

Anyway - this may be sacrilige, but I'm actually starting to like Office 2007.
I have to use it at work, and if I could use latex+vim+git I would, but as it
is - Word has become less in-tolerable once I got used to the new interface.

The most glaring thing to me - is collaborating on documents - Word 2007 has a
kludgy 'merge' function, and can 'track changes' ... and with sharepoint you
can allow many people to use a document as a collective moshpit, but neither
compares to anything approaching what you could to with plain-text sourcefiles
and a revision control system.

It nags me particularly - because we work daily on structured documents, with
various sections written separately and pulled together. Which would be perfect
for either latex or xml. And yet we use word and cut-and-paste and email word
docs and 20mb powerpoints back and forth filling the server with cruft.

OOo may have some of this function - not sure - because when I have the option,
I revert back to latex. But it would be nice to have a gui based wordprocessor
that actually interfaced with git/hg/subversion directly. (No emacs doesn't count)

I'd also been trying to advocate wiki-use at work, but the F.U.D. runneth deep...