MAC: good or evil?

[Richard]

In short: Mac good

I'm another devoted Mac user and I can report having none of the problems
you speak of mind you I only browse the occasional Russian site but it
seems to work fine.

>--it does not recognize the text encoding of web pages;  you have to
>set it each time on a hit-or-miss basis.

This I think is a problem with Netscape 4 (Haven't tried IE) but to view
Cyrillic pages you need to apply a patch to allow it to read the encoding.
I don't this has anything to do with the Mac OS itself. I got this software
patch free from Brama's Ukrainain Gateway.

>--even if you do set the encoding, it doesn't always work

Whenever I've set the encoding it has always worked until I change it.

>--you can't make the fonts bigger by just clicking an icon, you have
>reset the default font-by-font, and then even that doesn't work most
>of the time.  Thus much ends up illegibly small.

I've never had this problem. Sounds like a cyber-urban legend?

>--some sites use screwy fonts that are geared solely towards PCs,
>e.g. the MakTimes font used on a lot of Macedonian sites.

I have not been to a Macedonian site so I cannot say but I have never run
into an internet font compatabilty problem anywhere ever. My Mac handles
fonts beautifully.

>Unfortunately our local (Tallinn) Mac dealer doesn't have a clue
>about any of this.  So my question is:  Are the new generation Macs
>really so bad, or is there some bit of software or some such thing that
>our dealer forgot to activate?

Sounds mostly like "anti-Mac-propaganda?" that usually goes like this:
"better-not-buy-one-since-its-not-a-PC-and-it'll-have-all-sorts-of-wierd-
-problems" in my experience usually told by people who run Windows who have
never even used a Mac and barely know how to run their PC or figure out
File Manager. Present company excluded of course ;-}

Buy the iMac I've tried one with OS 8.5 its very fast the ease of use and
features are far far ahead of Windows IMO. I wish I could afford one.

thats my 2 cents

Richard Gilmore