Penny Hero (dot) Net

Reading digg and jumping to Wil Shipley’s blog post slamming Larry Bodine’s essay on why he hates Macs… is hazardous to my attention span.

Yes, if you insist on running a ten-year-old browser on your Mac instead of any of the five or so alternatives, some web sites may not work. In other news, if you spread rotten shit on a hot dog, it doesn’t taste as good.

Can’t… stop… laughing.

Basically, it’s a case of Bodine being both totally incompetent and a crappy writer. None of his claims are substantial or substantiated, it’s obvious to anyone who knows ANYTHING about technology that his few “real” complaints are actually Microsoft’s fault, and not Apple’s, and he implies that the things people claim are great about Macs (like the whole “less viruses” and stuff) are not true, but doesn’t address one way or another if he had a problem with it.

Anyway, i’ll let you read the article yourself. It links to Bodine’s essay.

I’m just… very disappointed that someone like this is a member of any kind of Law Technology News Editorial Advisory Board, although his other title is “Law Firm Marketing Consultant”…(oh and he can be reached at Lbodine@LawMarketing.com btw.)

Macworld shares the happy OO news.

Microsoft Office alternative, OpenOffice, will ship in a native version for OS X next month.

You have NO IDEA how happy this makes me. It’s soo difficult for me to run OO on my mac, because NeoOffice and running X11 take up too many resources and slow everything down. NeoOffice is really buggy for me and has been both when I was using Tiger and Panther. It was just awful. Friends have tried to help me, have told me to stop complaining and buy some $20 word processor… no one seemed to understand my pain.

I’ve blogged about my wordprocessor pain before and it resulted in some big discussion, which basically added up to “you’re screwed because no one writes FOSS for OSX.

Well, I needed free, I needed open source, and I needed it to be stable. I especially needed this as an English major. And next month, I’ll finally have it!

Well, I wish this’d been released a few months ago. :) Sure would have helped… haha.

someone explain to me why there isn’t a decent FREE wordprocessor for OS-X? Note: Neo-office and OpenOffice (with x11) don’t count. Edit: web-based stuff like writely and thinkfree also don’t count. Edit again: I forgot Abiword. It behaves similarly to neo-office only worse. so it also doesn’t count.

It seems that there is enough demand that someone would have developed something natively by now.

wtf.

I need to write my paper and I’m sick of waiting HALF AN HOUR for my mouse-clicks to register in NeoOffice.

Edit for the third time: Let me rephrase my question… I’m not really looking for suggestions on what to use instead of these ones. I’d really like to know why there isn’t a good opensource free alternative for mac like there is with windows and linux. Is it because they have to use java? Is it because mac is hard to program for? are there licensing hurdles that make it hard to write stuff for mac?

I’ve learned the hard way that there are no (legal) alternatives to the problematic options I mentioned above. I’d really like someone smarter than I am to help me understand why.

Can someone explain why OS X’s Finder reports 700mb cds as 660? I found a way to work around this (here) and burn cds that are larger than 660, but it’s through the terminal, and involves creating an iso. What I really want is for the Finder to correctly recognize the size of a blank cd so that I can use the GUI.

If the Finder is just stupid like this, and i shouldn’t be using it to burn cds, are there free alternatives to it?

Update: I’m now using YuBurner as my burning software of choice. Seems to be working nicely.

I still want to kick OSX though. And I had so much trust in it. :(