My work box -- Windows on the publishing world

The Daily News isn't known for being on the technological bleeding edge. Not three years ago, we were all cursing Windows 98 for crashing with a single Explorer window open. We were running 400 MB Celerons (not bad) with 32 MB of RAM (very bad).

When we got a new publishing system a couple years ago, that meant new PCs to go with it. They are Dell Optiplexes with Pentium 4 processors at 3 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. Not even a full GB. But I can't complain. With XP, everything runs great. Except for those unexplained instances where everything slows to a crawl.

Aside from our networked publishing system (Unisys Hermes, for those who follow such things) and the antivirus package (can't remember what it is at the moment), every last thing is freeware or shareware.

The company installed OpenOffice. I added The GIMP and IrfanView for image editing and EditPad Lite for text editing. That's pretty much it.

So much of what I do happens via Web interface (software applications as services) that at this point I don't really need to run any applications that aren't available in better and freer versions on the Linux platform.

The exception is one of our Web-based apps that, for some reason, requires Internet Explorer. Even on Mac. Yes, you have to use an outdated, security-compromised browser that Microsoft abandoned years ago in order to make the application work. I'm glad that most of my SAAS work is now on the Clickability Web publishing system, which supports both IE and Firefox.

My big revelation this week is that Clickability works much better on Firefox than on IE. Now even on Windows, where I've continued to use IE heavily even up until this very week, I'm migrating over to Firefox (and away from Outlook and toward Thunderbird as well). See, all this use of Linux just makes you want to use the same apps, even when you must work in Windows.

And it goes both ways. I always say that the best way to get people using free, open-source software is to give them applications on their current platforms. OpenOffice, AbiWord, Thunderbird, Firefox, the GIMP -- use them in Windows and Mac OS X, and it's that much easier and way less foreign to switch to the Linux or BSD operating systems and still be using your new, free favorites.

Only the Daily News' Unisys Hermes publishing system has no open-source client solution. (The product was recently purchased from Unisys by newspaper-system giant Atex, I just learned. I don't know what effect that has on anything. But I bet SAAS is even coming to the print-publishing world, and future newspaper systems will be even less reliant on specialized client software and run on any system that has a compatible browser.)