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Evolution Reaches A New Milestone
dalutong writes "Ximian has recently released Evolution v1.2 to the masses. New features include (among other ones that don't affect me as much) optional Emacs and XEmacs bindings in the email composer and much faster mailbox indexing (and thus loading.) It's nice to know evolution hasn't stopped."
Evolution has reached a new milestone
Does that mean there was a beneficial mutation?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
I beat the Slashdotting by grabbing this a mere hour ago :-)
The blurb fails to mention the one new feature which makes this release very worthwhile, at least for me... Sound support! You can now have it play a sound on receipt of any incoming mail. Even better, you can use sounds as actions in filters, so you can set it up to not beep at you every 30 seconds when you receive spam or mail list traffic.
Also of note is the increased feeling of polish moving from 1.08. I really can't wait for the 1.4 release when it's ported to Gnome 2.
"It's nice to know evolution hasn't stopped."
If you try to download it from Kansas, you'll get a 404 telling you that evolution never existed.
I think Evolution is VERY comparable to Outlook. I love some of the features that it has that Outlook lacks. For instance the ability to view HTML formatted mail but not download embedded images off the net. This means no more dot clear images tracking the message and no auto-run scripts doing dirty deeds.
;)
VFolders, a method of storing searches in a folder view format, are very nice. I must confess though, I don't use it much. I only have 5 VFolders configured.
Calendaring and contact management is great too, though I can't speak for Exchange interoperability with the Calendar, I feel confident based on Evolution that the connector would be good too.
As a whole I strongly recommend Evolution. It is an Outlook killer. Unfortunately though, it doesn't forward Melissa, Code-Red, Anna Kourikova, I Love You.....
They just renamed it "Intelligent Design"
(rim-shot)
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Isn't it nice when you're having a discussion on IRC about Evolution needing to be ported to GTK2, you Google for the time line and get a post from July saying it'll be worked on after Evolution 1.2.
Then, I thought "well, I'll read the latest months news on the Evolution mailing list" and see this announcement.
Lo and behold, a trip to Slashdot, and what has just been posted.
This all happened between my morning and lunchtime Slashdot reading! Woo, the universe is on fire today. Perhaps if I think about Duke Nukem Forever it'll be out by next Tuesday.
Applause to Ximian for their new release and to the GTK2 developers everywhere. Gnome 2 is turning KDE users' heads.
I see Evolution as a great example that open-source cannot be end-all solution to the world's software problems. A big reason is usability: open-source doesn't have the resources to research and develop effective UI. Usability experts, consumer studies, prototype testing and well-designed feedback loops are all needed to design user interfaces that are intuitive and efficient.
It takes for-profit companies, with a lot of money to throw at the problem, to design original and effective UI's. Evolution neatly copies Microsoft Outlook's user experience. It's a good thing that MS put all that work into designing the UI, and didn't give Ximian any guff over using it.
From the cover-my-ass dept: I'll admit that there are some exceptions. But by and large, the UI on open-source sucks unless they are copied from for-profit software, such as Outlook (for Evolution), NEXTStep or Windows (for various Window Managers), Wordperfect/MSWord (various word processors). And before somebody says that you don't need UI--Random J User cannot effectively use text-console programs without a lot of training.
(Pay no attention to the trolls. They're probably just 15 year old immature boys).
I've used pine for the last 8 years, and it's a great program. I still consider it easier-to-use then Evolution. I've switched between Pine and Evolution a dozen times in the last 2 years. My fingers still autotype the Pine keybindings.
Several things that Evolution has over Pine:
- It's not just an email program. It's also a Contact Manager (Pine only has an addressbook), a Calendaring program, and a Todo list.
- Pine does not display message threads very well
- More intuitive message filters
- Simpler to setup multiple mail accounts
- It displays HTML and Graphics appropriately. My friends/coworkers keep sending me HTML email (HTML can be useful in email sometimes), and Pine munges 1/5 of the messages...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
when people can import their outlook data files (.pst files etc) complete with calender, contacts lists, tasks and of course email.
I *know* one can export outlook data files to imap (uh, correct me if I'm using the wrong acronym there) and then re-import them to unix mail format (theres a howto on this), but, importantly;
this causes *EVERYTHING* to appear as an email item, including calender entries, contacts lists everything comes across as a piece of email. Which I regard as a lot less than useful...
Some might say thats better than nothing, I say *phhfft*
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"With pine I can use all the keyboard shortcuts I'm used to. To each his^H^H^Hher own, I guess."
Is that why you're using ctrl+6+h instead of a backspace key?
This explains the split between Emacs and Lucid Emacs and the journey to Emacs/XEmacs in more detail than you ever could have wanted.
Hmmm....
"its nice to see that Evolution hasn't stopped"
And when I clicked on the link, I got an ad for Helix DNA.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
What we really need is a large forum for communicating User Interface ideas to programmers. The problem with OSS is that it tends to expect /everybody/ to be able to pick up the code and remove the horrible from apps. This just isnt the case. /normal/ users, not programmers, not even just people who prefer OSS, just users of programs to, basically, complain. Until the OSS Community has a real and good forum for complaining, we arent going to see programmers taking notice and fixing things like UI problems.
It's true, we can't afford consultants and experts to tell us what 70% of potential customers would like to see, but we do have this whole internet out there, and something should be done to harvest the feedback.
Not saying that no options are out there right now, only that the current options arent working, and there needs to be better ways for
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All