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Ya think that by v4.5, someone by now would have made an add-on so that pine can handle S/MIME certs, but nope... and this "feature" has been on the books since at least 1997.

According to Pine's history page, pine was conceived in 1989. The GPL first got its name in 1988 as documented here, and the GNU Project was first announced in 1983.

Btw, as a Pine user, I can assure you that the license doesn't allow all the freedom I want. The primary system on which I use Pine runs Debian. Due to pine's non-free license (and, likely, the advent of mutt), Pine fell out of active maintenance by Debian. So, I have to fetch and build the source myself outside the package system instead being able to apt-get security updates. Even prior to that, Debian switched to only distributing pine as a source package - apparently due to the Pine license change "clarifying" that distributing modified versions is forbidden.

I wouldn't go so far as to call the pine license Evil, but I think it is unfortunate. If there were a clone with the same interface, so as to not disrupt the long-time pine users on the system (including myself), I'd switch to it. As it stands, pine has about 7 years of finger memory going for it.

Pine was around BEFORE the GPL

1. it is difficult to setup
2. fetchmail SUCKS at IMAP and mutt SUCKS even more at it. IMAP is the way to check my inbox
3. SCREW list traffic. It sucks. It really sucks when you use mutt and IMAP alone. Pine does a much better job of this with its own inbuilt filters. However, I admit, I am using slrn and newsgroups more...

" Yes, but from that point they have a short period of time to bring you to a judge where they must convince him why they want to keep you."

I'm certain that's a comforting thought to Jose Padilla who's been imprisoned since May without a trial, access to a lawyer, a telephone call, or one moment without bright lights shining down on him. Yes, the man has to learn how to sleep with the lights on in his tiny cell in a military brig. Anyone who's read 1984 will recognize the rooms with the brights always on with no windows as belonging to the Ministry of Love. I've got news for you; our rights have been eroding for some time, and Sept 11 gave the resident president all the power he needed to bring about a landslide. I hope to God there's a major backlash and soon, or there won't be much left of this country for our children. They'll have to read about it in books, so long as the books they're reading don't make the government suspicious. Perhaps my children will one day turn me in to the FBI for being unamerican.

> I 1st got pine from mod.sources in 1986 and I've been using it ever since.

pine project history

Pine was originally conceived in 1989 as a simple, easy-to-use mailer for administrative staff at the University of Washington in Seattle.

EAD?

I've been doing threading in pine for quite a while. You just need to apply the threading patch which is available from various sources on the internet (like http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/info/f ancy.html. I've always wondered why the mainline pine didn't integrate it.

Well, not many people may realize it, but the UW has been working on a newer version of Pine then what was just released. Many schools have their own webmail program (UW had this really bad one for a while), but UW has been developing what it calls Webpine for a long time now accessable at webpine.washington.edu if you're a UW student (links to find out more are on the page. It works pretty well, when accessing my old UW email account, I generally log into webpine (I don't have shell access anymore so normal pine is out the window). Given time, and ways to speed the process up for those of us unfortunate enough to be on dialup (broadband isn't always the fastest for some parts of it either), and this could be really good. It's written at least partially in tcl.

is improved, but not new: it has been there in some form since at least version 4.30.

When a new user first runs pine, it asks them if they would mind sending an anonymous message that would count their use.

I still use pine. It's very very fast. Like searching for some text in a folder with 2500 messages is almost instantaneous. It also helps me cut through crap, reply quickly, and move on. Plus I don't have to use a mouse. I do have my priorities and just load up with 800 mg of Ibuprofen first!

I am old, 43, and suffering from RSI in a muscle in my right shoulder blade from using the mouse too much... However, that doesn't stop me from playing some decent first person shooters with my mouse.

Which reminds me, I was recently quoted in the newspaper here on a story about abandoning the mouse. My quote was ""If you tried to use keyboard commands for an online shooting game, you'd be dead before you could load your weapon," said Ken Weaverling, computer services manager at Delaware Technical & Community College."

I actually said "first person shooter" but the reporter changed it to "online shooting game." Still it was kinda neat even though people where I worked were wondering if they should call Tom Ridge's boys after me...

A quick search on the changelog reveals nothing improved about the years-old problems with Pine and S/MIME. It simply can't invoke plugins for GPG to check or generate messages that have the GPG signature as an attachment. Which means that 80% of the GPG-signed email that I get is useless and that Pine still does not handle the S/MIME RFC. (The other 20% is handled by patches or stopgaps.)
Sigh. I know Mutt is better, but I still use Pine 4.44. I just don't trust those scripts that add Pine keybindings to Mutt.. :)

Have you ever read the project history linked above: " Our goal was to provide a mailer that naive users could use without fear of making mistakes. We wanted to cater to users who were less interested in learning the mechanics of using electronic mail than in doing their jobs; users who perhaps had some computer anxiety". I think they have succeeded well, even now when everyone is used to having all the graphical bells and whistles my Mom - who had never used email before, learned pine quicker than outlook (she never learnt to use it, actually).

Pine is a really nice mail app, for sure. But I still think it has one of the quirkiest licenses of any source-available application out there. It specifically forbids development and support of branches of the codebase -- if I add a cool new feature that the maintainers refuse to add (web browsing, maybe), then I can't split off and make "Joe's Pine," I have to distribute a diff file with the original source tarball.

For really cool monorail tech, check out the Urbanaut. Its inventor is the designer of Seattle's original monorail. Why we in Seattle aren't going with his ideas for this new one, I don't know.

While the various larger distributions are geared towards multimedia functionality to different degrees, it obviously depends exactly what you want out of your box and how much you want to play with the guts (hardware and software). Many people would be happy with a DVD/VCD/mp3 player rather than a full-blown PVR, and I'm not sure how much freedom you'll get in this area with Media Center Pc's - I doubt this version of XP is designed around being able to rip, mix and burn ;) This is where some of the other Linux projects come in (some focussed on the embedded market only though). Maybe distribution in the classical sense was not the best of description for me to use, although projects like Flamethrower Linux are aiming for that - RedHat and Debian are working on multimedia based distributions, altho they are aimed more at the multimedia worker rather than player.

Projects like Dave/Dina, homeDVR, OpenPVR, MythTV and FreeVo aim at homebrew boxes somewhat akin to the Media Center idea and there are a myriad of sources for building boxes that do as much if not more than the Media Center. Flexibility is always good IMHO, and if you can start with a box that may just do DVD, DivX, CD's, mp3's and ogg, but expand it into a classic gaming machine running MAME et al as well as serving up content to the rest of your flat/house/hovel then that is "a good thing". More info at ding, eboxy.

Remember that Linux is used for commercial PVR's (and the Moxi Media Center) too and while there are companies that do these things commercially, that's normally a sign of open versions being around somewhere, especially if you like to get your hands dirty :) If you don't, then it won't be long before you new (or old) console will be able to fulfill many of these functions, again, they already can to a degree, if you don't mind hacking away a bit.

Yea, and it doesnt look cool. It looks like someone put todays tech into an 80s series vision of the future. And can it be called a palm anymway?

Next time i buy a PDA it will play Mp3s and answer calls in my teeth, display right on my retina and take input via a projected keyboard. Until then ill stay with my atari portfolio...

cu,
Lispy

Well, I think it's finally time for me to Quit Slashdot. You should, too.

Personal Rapid Transit doesn't require a monorail, but for travel between cities something like a "bullet train" would be faster. (Travel via PRT between cities might be possible if the cities are close enough that they've put in links between compatible PRT systems)

Maybe one day, people will get over the x% of your brain myth. Mayber, just maybe. Here.

I use mbx personally (NOT mbox) and it scales wonderfully. The mailbox is fully indexed to speed up searching and can be accessed simultaneously by various processes. See here for more information.

I am currently taking a class on Sustainable Resource Sciences. Last week we had a lecture on composting. I can't believe that people pay the city to take their yard waste away, and then pay someone else money to buy soil amendments for their garden.
Here are some other links my professor provided:
http://compostingcouncil.org/
http://www.oldgrowth.org/compost/
Or here is the lecture in pdf format

I am currently taking a class on Sustainable Resource Sciences. Last week we had a lecture on composting. I can't believe that people pay the city to take their yard waste away, and then pay someone else money to buy soil amendments for their garden.
Here are some other links my professor provided:
http://compostingcouncil.org/
http://www.oldgrowth.org/compost/
Or here is the lecture in pdf format

It's here: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/lang.html.

Um, what, exactly, does an immortal soul do? Name something that it provides, or function it performs, or some means that it makes its presence felt.

Damage to the brain damages self and consciousness in fundamental ways. People who suffer some kinds of strokes lose half their world, literally. They lose, for example, the concept of 'left'. They only eat half of what's on their plates. Ask them to imagine walking down their street, they only describe the houses on the right. Ask them to mentally "turn around", and they forget the houses they just described and start talking about the ones on the other side of the street.

Look up Broca's and Wernicke's Aphasia. People with Broca's aphasia can understand language, but can't speak. Damage another part of the brain, and you get Wernicke's aphasia, where they can speak, but can't understand. They speak in "word salad". They don't even realize they aren't making sense. Put two of them together and they'll have a whole conversation of nonsense.

The more you read up on neurological problems, the weirder it gets. (Almost any book by Oliver Sacks is good for this.) I don't know of an intellectual faculty that can't be damaged, if not eliminated, by damage to the brain.

If there is a soul, what can it do? Moreover, how can whatever's left after my brain is gone be called "me" in any real sense? Why should I care what happens to the soul when I die? All my memories, emotions, and consciousness seem tied up in my brain.

"To believe that consciousness can survive the wreck of the brain is like believing that 70 mph can survive the wreck of the car." - Frank Zindler

(This leads to a whole different problem with 'transmigrating' to a machine - that might be a perfect copy of me, but I would still be dead. But that's separate from any 'immortal soul' speculation.)

CD DA does NOT ... have any EDC and ECC mechanisms...

I'm afraid you're quite mistaken.

Red Book audio CDs (CD-DA) use data redunancy, error correction codes, and special damage-resistant encodings extensively. Something like a third of the data on the disc is just redundant codes to allow for perfect error correction in most cases.

It's a common misconception in the computer biz. Comparing high-level specs for CD-DA and CD-ROM does indeed fail to show any data redundancy for CD-DA and does show some for CD-ROM. However, the data redundancy in the high-level CD-ROM specs is additional redunancy, over and above what the Red Book standard mandates. The special Red Book encodings are all handled at a very low level by a CD-ROM drive's firmware, so they just don't get mentioned in OS-level API type docs, and thus a myth is born.

Here's a good overview.

I don't think you'd want to point Hubble at the Moon to "prove" to some bozo that there's space junk there. I'm no Hubble expert, but I do know a few things:

* The Hubble doesn't just sit there unused. Every minute -- every second -- of its time is reserved months in advance for research purposes.

* Even if the project were deemed worthy, it would probably cost more than $15k to make the project happen.

* The Hubble is designed to look at very, very, very faint objects. Close yourself in a dark room, look at the light bulbs, then flip the switch to turn them on. Ouch! Now, imagine if your pupils couldn't contract... and your retina was worth several hundred million bucks. Double ouch!

* If you believe in the Hubble telescope's images, there's a very, very strong chance that you believe that man has landed on the Moon already. Conversely, if you don't believe in the moon landing, why would you believe in the Hubble?

And as for aerial images... it was big news when spy satellites could spot an object as large as a car from orbit. Compare these numbers:

* Distance to Space Shuttle (Low Earth Orbit): 400 km

* Distance to Geosynchronous (med-high) Orbit: 27,000 km

* Distance to Moon: 384,000 km!

If the CIA/KGB can barely make out an object the size of a car from Earth orbit, how likely is it to see an even smaller object from 10 times as far?

*whew* A great intellectual exercise... too bad the target of NASA's informative pamphlet don't work that muscle.

Note that for local transportation, the problem isn't speed but coverage. I can't realistically take public transportation to work because it would take me far too long to get to the nearest station and because trains take far too long to get to the destination (because of a lot of stops).

For local transportation, another concept makes more sense to me: Personal Rapid Transit [1], [2]. Personal Rapid Transit consists of small passenger cabins (1-3 people) that you call to the nearest station and take to the station nearest to your destination, almost like a taxi or chauffeur. And unlike evacuated tube transports, they do not require a lot of digging or construction.

And, politically, personal rapid transit seems more promising in the short term: it's something that can be done at the local level.

isn't there a big chance that some bits would get corrupted?

Modern storage devices use error correction at a very low level. For instance, CD-ROM has three error-correcting codes: two in the CD layer and one in the sector layer. In addition, a partition could be written to multiple discs in a manner similar to RAID 5, such that every fifth disc stored an xor of the four previous discs.

Noticing this, I thought, what happens if I look up Slashdot in Google? Apparently, they consider it nearly divine to make it the lead source of news on the Vatican. But this is not actually the case. The sixth result encourages me to quit Slashdot. Can you imagine?

The Simultaneous Multithreading technology was coined as hyperthreading by Intel. It was originally developed at the University of Washington by one of my professors and some of her colleagues. Check out the SMT page for a brief overview of how it works and links to many technical papers describing it in more detail.

Not to mention the inherent value in a DVD.

I can get movies for $19 CDN. A quality DVD-R costs me $10 CDN. Then I have to futz about with horribly broken transcoding software. And in the end I have a crappy copy that may/may not work in some DVD players.

Blech.

I actually feel most movies are worth $19, unlike most CDs.

>ever heard of a portable DVD player that lets you watch DVDs in high quality on the go?

1 + 2 = Yes. :-) The sony glasstron is translucent too, so if you walk slowly, you might not bump into things...

Maybe you should do a little research before spouting off about how there are no useful distributed computing projects out there.

• 
  Ring Mouse
  
• 
  head mice
  
• 
  Reflective dot tracking
  

This is true, but the US would itself be breaching TRIPs and would thus be subject to action through the WTO's dispute resolution process, which has, amongst other things, the power to authorise countries to impose sanctions against "independently minded countries".

The dispute resolution process has already been used to prevent the US from creating exceptions to its copyright laws.

They'd better not call it "Atomic"

Definitely not. I work in the Nuclear Physics Lab (now known as CENPA) at my university and I can't tell you how much shit I get from people. They go nuts when they hear the word "nuclear" (or nucular to them ;). It's sad that people don't even understand physics enough to know that nuclear physics is the physics of the nucleus (and related thingies, of course). So sad....

Quit Slashdot Movement.

There are many different cues that contribute to our perception of depth: stereo, perspective, parallax, overlapping objects, shading and shadows and changes in accommodation and convergence of the eyes.

Those with one eye lack stereo (the strongest cue), but still have a decent amount of depth perception for surviving in the real world. It is only when attempting to use devices that rely soley on stereo to generate a pseudo-3D image that they have problems.

See this page for a more detailed discussion.

Invest in some skepticism.

Download PRISM and study its architecture. It makes a lot of use of the mediator pattern

Perhaps it's because all the technical people from the East end up in the West?

Look at the listing of graduate students in the CS department of any US university, and you notice a high percentage of them do not appear to be native-born.

examples:
The University of Washington
MIT
Stanford
...and the list goes on.

So, it's not that the East doesn't contribute, it's that Easterners come to the West before they contribute; and who can blame them? Wouldn't you rather be at a well-funded school in an industrialized nation that has the latest equipment than fighting off the roaches while hoping the power doesn't go out to the old VAX in some third-world university?

Here's the actual paper:

Here is a project I found a little while ago that is trying to create a Linux distro (actually just a graphical interface) for home theater multimedia devices to be displayed on the TV.

here is the homepage:
http://staff.washington.edu/jmgasper/index.htm

check out the screenshots here, pretty cool looking!:
http://staff.washington.edu/jmgasper/screenshots.h tm

Here is a project I found a little while ago that is trying to create a Linux distro (actually just a graphical interface) for home theater multimedia devices to be displayed on the TV.

here is the homepage:
http://staff.washington.edu/jmgasper/index.htm

check out the screenshots here, pretty cool looking!:
http://staff.washington.edu/jmgasper/screenshots.h tm

Why the hell would you make your Grandma use vi?! At least let the non-nerds use Pico.

Perhaps it's time to Quit Slashdot.org Today! Excerpt: I have friends who were once tremendously productive programmers, until they started reading Slashdot. Then, the endless stream of links, updated a dozen times a day no less (so you don't go once a day to get your fix; instead, you keep a window open and hit reload every twenty minutes or so), steadily seduced them, until they eventually became babbling idiots, dribbling saliva from the corners of their mouths, ranting on the forums about the relative merits of Karma Whores and Anonymous Cowards.

But geologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington in Seattle told the same publication that a model created by Martinez-Frias and his team showing ice can form on a clear day was an "important advance in that it thoroughly documents and provides an explanation for a spectacular phenomenon"

Dang. The link I was attempting to write was: this. Basically, even with glasses my vision is too valuable to take such risks.

Oh yeah, well mine is better.

What our narrator doesn't know is that "Grandma" (which is just a hacker alias) is really 1337:

Me: Oh come on now Grandma don't be coy. You know you've been secretly sshing into my servers to check your AOL mail via Pine.

Grandma: No, no dear. Pine is for wussies. I use mutt.

Grandma: You still in there?

Slashdot really sucks nowadays. There are better alternatives. I'm quitting /. now. You should, too. Check out

The Quit Slashdot Movement for some better quality "new for nerds" sites.