On April 21, Richard Erlacher wrote: ...and if you take that route, you'll get what you're looking for. Commercial software. If you're fine with that, more power to you. Of course Emacs isn't good at word processing, because it's a text editor. It's also not very good at schematic capture, for the same reason. ;) You're missing the whole point. "UNIX software vendor". Mainstream software in the UNIX world is FREE. It's the commercial stuff that's the oddball in this world. I mean it in the most general of ways. You trust your data to a PC? Well, that's your risk, not mine. ;) I'd say that's pretty unusual...and having been in the thick of the ISP industry from its beginning, I feel I can say that with some authority. More power to them, even if they do make...questionable choices. And before you take exception to that...if I were to describe to you a commercial construction firm that made nice buildings and had a good reputation, but they used Volkswagen Beetles to haul their lumber and cinderblocks and radio-controlled tanks to do their welding and riveting, wouldn't you have something to say about that? Is your work THAT unusual? I'm now VERY curious to know what you do. EVERYONE I know personally who does electronic design work (save for maybe two) uses some UNIX variant to do it, except for FPGA stuff we discussed earlier. That constitutes about twenty people. I think this very clearly proves the point that we tend to see the stuff in "our own worlds" very clearly, but the stuff *outside* our own areas of experience seem very distant or even nonexistant. In my world, Winodws and PeeCee hardware is weird, overpriced, proprietary stuff that's difficult to find and not very widely used. Everyone...and I mean EVERYONE in my peer group runs UNIX of one sort or another. A few have these esoteric Windows boxes for playing video games, but not many. That said, I respect the fact that your experience differs from mine, and that you have a different point of view...and because of this, I read your comments with interest, and learn from them. I've done it for twenty years. Most of the stuff I've written runs on 20+ different operating systems...it doesn't run under Windows, but that's irrelevant, because it's one proprietary, non-standards-compliant platform that most people in my industry don't use. (See comments about "our own worlds" above) NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD, or about twenty different packaged distributions ("distros" for the kiddies) of Linux. All free, most of mission-critical quality. ...and the people who buy UNIXWARE get what they deserve...screwed. Support for >2GB filesystems has been standard equipment in modern free operating systems for something like eight years. What is their excuse? Do you honestly think software development for pure profit, where quality suffers to enhance margins, bugs rarely get fixed, and developments in technology are largely ignored, where programmers write the bare minimum to get their paychecks and leave by 5pm, is "better" just because the suits of the world buy anything that Microsoft tries to sell them? "Better" is paying through the nose for products versus getting better stuff for free? I'll tell you what...YOU pay attention to the "market" and do what the suits tell you to do...I have work to do, and I'm going to use the best tools available...regardless of what the "market" thinks I should use. If any computer on your home network has EVER crashed, lost data, munged something, or behaved unpredictably for anything other than an age- or ac-power-related hardware failure, then my point has already been made for me. And I really, truly hope I've misinterpreted you. -Dave -- Dave McGuire "Mmmm. Big." St. Petersburg, FL -Den