Sorry about the run-on paragraph; I finally decided to check all the preference pages and, sure enough, found that I could set "Plain Old Text" to the default.
Why it wasn't the default to begin with, I have no idea.
Sage advice. Out of a few dozen hard drives I've used in my own computers during the last ~decade, the only one I've had fail outright was a Travelstar notebook drive. I don't smoke, I clean my hardware semi-regularly, I keep the drives reasonably cool, and I always use battery backups and good PSUs. I also replace drives after four years or so, though not specifically for reliability - old drives are too slow for my desktops and too small to be useful in my network storage pool.
On the other hand, I know people who regularly go through drives; these are the people who usually shut their computers in cabinets with no ventilation whatsoever, would never think of cleaning the system, had their computer assembled by some relative who used the power supply bundled with the cheapass case, and "protect" their hardware with a no-name, decade old power strip. And a lot of them smoke.
And while I've never had a bad controller ruin an IDE or SATA drive, I've ran into quite a few drives that I thought had failed until I tested them independently of the controller. I learned years ago to avoid the cheap RAID controllers tacked on by motherboard manufacturers; in my experience they have an astonishing failure/data corruption rate.
I've been using VFEmail for years now. They offer IMAP on their free account (albeit with only a 50mb limit). It works great and has been more reliable than some paid services I could name.
If you had a separate program for calendaring, how would the email client signal the calendaring solution of the acceptance?
iCalendar's.ics and.ifb formats are already standards, so why not just make the email program handle them gracefully? Apple has been doing this with Mail.app and iCal.
To take it a step further, any app that communicates data via email should ideally install a small plugin in the email client for handling those messages. Clean, extensible.
I said more-or-less because there are still major email programs that don't support it - like Outlook. The mbox format is probably the best format out there right now, but if 90% of people can't use it then it doesn't do a whole lot of good.
I don't think the answer is in standardizing a format for stored email, though - it would be nice, yes, but good luck getting all the major players to implement it. Server-based mail systems like IMAP are far better in terms of availability and compatibility, and they happen to work today.
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows
on
Thunderbird in Crisis?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'll throw in the odd vote for Mail.app, for two features I just can't live without:
One, the aggregate Inbox - I can view all my inboxes at once without actually merging the folders. It's so handy to be able to see all my new messages at a glance, or separated into accounts, so quickly and intuitively.
Two, filtering IMAP messages by body text. I've tried half a dozen other email programs and none of them seem able to filter IMAP messages this way. I can't see any valid explanation why other clients refuse to do this. I can sort quasi-spam (ads from companies I've placed orders from, for example) far more effectively with body filters.
If Thunderbird could duplicate those two features I'd probably give up Mail.app. Thunderbird is far more extensible and has quite a few features Apple's client lacks, like good IMAP folder management and Bayesian filtering.
Yet both Thunderbird and Firefox feel largely stagnant these days - Firefox 3's promises seem nebulous and the release never seems to come any closer, and neither program is doing anything all that innovative in the meantime. The most impressive new feature I've seen in the past year (which wasn't an extension) has been Thunderbird's categories, which is itself is a copy of Gmail's keywords feature and rather similar to Mail.app's smart folders. What are the devs doing?
Why *should* an email program have *integrated* calendaring? A separate program like Sunbird makes more sense to me, as long as the programs work together seamlessly.
Which is not to say that Thunderbird and Sunbird work together particularly well, but I think they have the right idea, just like Apple with Mail.app + iCal + Address Book.
I will agree that nothing out there handles as well as Outlook yet, but that's because Microsoft has thrown massive resources at it. I think that any PIM software would be better implemented as a cluster of mini-apps, which each do one thing well, and communicate via a good set of APIs.
I've yet to find an email client that doesn't have a more-or-less proprietary format for storing messages. Thunderbird is IMHO the best client in that regard since the extensible architecture allows anyone to write a plugin to export mail in the format of their choosing.
But it's getting to be a non-issue, anyway. POP3 is dead. Seriously, unless you're still piddling around with your ISP-provided account your mail should be safe on a remote server - Gmail, SMTP, Exchange, etc.
Funny, I'm a Mac user and I thought the same thing. Port some of the bad and resource-hogging Vista features back to XP. When XP loses its performance and user rights advantages over Vista, more people will switch...
I do hate to break it to you, but you're about the dozenth person in this thread to reference that same exact event. I think your "joke" was ruined somewhere around the second post. Add to that the fact that maybe 5% of slashdotters, tops, even need to be reminded of that famous scene, and I think that any attempt at subtlety is moot.
As for my correction, I shouldn't need to explain that Scotty is Slashdot Hero Figure #1. Any attempt to extract him from the scene is considered an unforgivable offense here; like proposing the theory of evolution in sunday school, only far worse. Forgive me if I misinterpreted the joke, but from a first reading it sounds like you're attributing the spontaneous creation of the advanced material to mere hollywood "computer magic" and not, in fact, to the Great and Powerful Scotty Casting His Divine Engineering Light upon the Mac, and Bending the Logic Within to His Will - which is, of course, the accepted interpretation. I was merely acting to correct your - unintended, I'm sure - blasphemy as quickly as possible and maintain order on the site.
If, however, your joke was meant to imply that the inventors of the material had been helped by Scotty, but were now covering that fact up, I apologize, though you would have been well served to make it a tad clearer - say, by adding "They also, in hushed tones, told me not to believe anything I might have heard about a 'fat guy with a scottish accent'. "
Cheerio, then, and good luck in your future Slashdot adventures. Only keep in mind the Ten Commandments of Proper Slashdot Behavior:
I. Thou shalt remember the Scotty your Engineer.
II. Thou shalt have no Engineer before Scotty.
III-X. Really just a bunch more about Scotty, excepting a passing bit about CowboyNeal rather near the end.
I understand that they got hold of an old Mac (circa 1986 or so) and Scotty, who spoke into the mouse, and hit a few keys. Immediately a rotating 3D representation of the formula appeared on the screen.
It was a lot simpler than having to actually work it out for themselves.
"Retailers: In the interest of preserving your privacy, we'll all put your information into a single database instead of scattering it among lots of little ones."
Would it be too hard to name them: Intel [marketing name] [standard benchmark rating]?
Brilliant! We should create a standard benchmark for everything! Imagine if cars were named "Honda Ridgeline 1267" and "Toyota Corolla 1605" - you'd know which one was right for you just by comparing the rating!
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry about the run-on paragraph; I finally decided to check all the preference pages and, sure enough, found that I could set "Plain Old Text" to the default.
Why it wasn't the default to begin with, I have no idea.
Sage advice. Out of a few dozen hard drives I've used in my own computers during the last ~decade, the only one I've had fail outright was a Travelstar notebook drive. I don't smoke, I clean my hardware semi-regularly, I keep the drives reasonably cool, and I always use battery backups and good PSUs. I also replace drives after four years or so, though not specifically for reliability - old drives are too slow for my desktops and too small to be useful in my network storage pool. On the other hand, I know people who regularly go through drives; these are the people who usually shut their computers in cabinets with no ventilation whatsoever, would never think of cleaning the system, had their computer assembled by some relative who used the power supply bundled with the cheapass case, and "protect" their hardware with a no-name, decade old power strip. And a lot of them smoke. And while I've never had a bad controller ruin an IDE or SATA drive, I've ran into quite a few drives that I thought had failed until I tested them independently of the controller. I learned years ago to avoid the cheap RAID controllers tacked on by motherboard manufacturers; in my experience they have an astonishing failure/data corruption rate.
No...
You know, um, something strange happened to me this morning.
I've been using VFEmail for years now. They offer IMAP on their free account (albeit with only a 50mb limit). It works great and has been more reliable than some paid services I could name.
How fast are the fastest IDE drives nowadays for sustained, sequential transfers -- 50 MB/s or so?
I've seen newer 500GB IDE drives do 80MB/s at the start of the drive.
IDE and SATA are still equivalent for sequential transfers. Until drives reach sustained 100MB/s or 133MB/s, IDE won't be a bottleneck in that regard.
Not the right game, but don't forget this one.
iCalendar's
To take it a step further, any app that communicates data via email should ideally install a small plugin in the email client for handling those messages. Clean, extensible.
I said more-or-less because there are still major email programs that don't support it - like Outlook. The mbox format is probably the best format out there right now, but if 90% of people can't use it then it doesn't do a whole lot of good.
I don't think the answer is in standardizing a format for stored email, though - it would be nice, yes, but good luck getting all the major players to implement it. Server-based mail systems like IMAP are far better in terms of availability and compatibility, and they happen to work today.
I'll throw in the odd vote for Mail.app, for two features I just can't live without:
One, the aggregate Inbox - I can view all my inboxes at once without actually merging the folders. It's so handy to be able to see all my new messages at a glance, or separated into accounts, so quickly and intuitively.
Two, filtering IMAP messages by body text. I've tried half a dozen other email programs and none of them seem able to filter IMAP messages this way. I can't see any valid explanation why other clients refuse to do this. I can sort quasi-spam (ads from companies I've placed orders from, for example) far more effectively with body filters.
If Thunderbird could duplicate those two features I'd probably give up Mail.app. Thunderbird is far more extensible and has quite a few features Apple's client lacks, like good IMAP folder management and Bayesian filtering.
Yet both Thunderbird and Firefox feel largely stagnant these days - Firefox 3's promises seem nebulous and the release never seems to come any closer, and neither program is doing anything all that innovative in the meantime. The most impressive new feature I've seen in the past year (which wasn't an extension) has been Thunderbird's categories, which is itself is a copy of Gmail's keywords feature and rather similar to Mail.app's smart folders. What are the devs doing?
Why *should* an email program have *integrated* calendaring? A separate program like Sunbird makes more sense to me, as long as the programs work together seamlessly. Which is not to say that Thunderbird and Sunbird work together particularly well, but I think they have the right idea, just like Apple with Mail.app + iCal + Address Book. I will agree that nothing out there handles as well as Outlook yet, but that's because Microsoft has thrown massive resources at it. I think that any PIM software would be better implemented as a cluster of mini-apps, which each do one thing well, and communicate via a good set of APIs.
I've yet to find an email client that doesn't have a more-or-less proprietary format for storing messages. Thunderbird is IMHO the best client in that regard since the extensible architecture allows anyone to write a plugin to export mail in the format of their choosing. But it's getting to be a non-issue, anyway. POP3 is dead. Seriously, unless you're still piddling around with your ISP-provided account your mail should be safe on a remote server - Gmail, SMTP, Exchange, etc.
Sorry, Apple already owns the patent.
Funny, I'm a Mac user and I thought the same thing. Port some of the bad and resource-hogging Vista features back to XP. When XP loses its performance and user rights advantages over Vista, more people will switch...
(...to a Mac?)
I do hate to break it to you, but you're about the dozenth person in this thread to reference that same exact event. I think your "joke" was ruined somewhere around the second post. Add to that the fact that maybe 5% of slashdotters, tops, even need to be reminded of that famous scene, and I think that any attempt at subtlety is moot.
As for my correction, I shouldn't need to explain that Scotty is Slashdot Hero Figure #1. Any attempt to extract him from the scene is considered an unforgivable offense here; like proposing the theory of evolution in sunday school, only far worse. Forgive me if I misinterpreted the joke, but from a first reading it sounds like you're attributing the spontaneous creation of the advanced material to mere hollywood "computer magic" and not, in fact, to the Great and Powerful Scotty Casting His Divine Engineering Light upon the Mac, and Bending the Logic Within to His Will - which is, of course, the accepted interpretation. I was merely acting to correct your - unintended, I'm sure - blasphemy as quickly as possible and maintain order on the site.
If, however, your joke was meant to imply that the inventors of the material had been helped by Scotty, but were now covering that fact up, I apologize, though you would have been well served to make it a tad clearer - say, by adding "They also, in hushed tones, told me not to believe anything I might have heard about a 'fat guy with a scottish accent'. "
Cheerio, then, and good luck in your future Slashdot adventures. Only keep in mind the Ten Commandments of Proper Slashdot Behavior:
I. Thou shalt remember the Scotty your Engineer.
II. Thou shalt have no Engineer before Scotty.
III-X. Really just a bunch more about Scotty, excepting a passing bit about CowboyNeal rather near the end.
"Retailers: In the interest of preserving your privacy, we'll all put your information into a single database instead of scattering it among lots of little ones."
Perry Bible Fellowship
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/30
In their defense, the board just said they'd excuse him of his duties. They didn't say they'd give them back.
Some suspect there will be a nanotech virus in the cereal and you'll have to eat Sony breakfast every day to stay alive
I wonder which is creepier: That a penny arcade comic exists for every conceivable topic of discussion, or that I find myself able to recall them with nigh-perfect accuracy?
We know it's you, George. The grammar gave you away. Now go back to the oval office and stay there like a good boy.
If that paperclip where a person I'd shoot him in the fooking head.
Here's your chance: CNNNN
Would it be too hard to name them: Intel [marketing name] [standard benchmark rating]?
Brilliant! We should create a standard benchmark for everything! Imagine if cars were named "Honda Ridgeline 1267" and "Toyota Corolla 1605" - you'd know which one was right for you just by comparing the rating!
The buildings in a city will not get up and move around. Try telling that to Blizzard.