I just read jonkatz's appeal for an intelligent discussion on this topic, and given that about 80% of the discussion thus far is katz-bashing, I'll try to add something constructive. I'll try to summarize Katz' long-winded argument. Also, I'll snip out the random disconnected thoughts that tend to throw people off (and I don't agree with).
Summary:
Our society has just recently accomplished an incredible feat - we've mapped all of the human genome. The potential applications of this are mind-boggling - both good and bad. In the future, we may use this information to forever eliminate all sorts of afflictions, like hereditary mental illness and cancer.
However, this is a potential dark side to this technology too. What's to stop Joe Average from demanding that his baby be "perfect"? What happens to natural-born babies in a society that increasingly contains genetically-modified humans. Will we create for ourselves a caste system, where only the poor will forever be doomed to perform menial labour? Science-fiction authors have long warned of such dangers - from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or even H.G. Wells' Time Machine.
Our society has never dealt with such issues, and is, in all likelihood, ill-prepared to deal with them today. We need to educate people to understand the ramifications of this technology and we musn't allow powerful corporations to be motivated to use it for profit only.
Seriously, Jon does have a point here, it's just hard to discern among all the forced comparisons and pseudo-evidence he presents. I also think Jon is a little Ameri-centric. There are many researchers world-wide with the ability and the know-how to use this map. Don't assume that just because the US has unlocked the code, they're the only ones who know how to use it.
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I don't know what frightens me more...
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 1
... the fact that Jon is starting to make more and more sense, or that I even agree with him on some points. =)
A couple things, Jon. In Mary Shelley's original novel, the monster is not named Frankenstein. His creator is Dr. Frankenstein, and the monster is simply known as Frankenstein's monster.
Also, please, please stop making wild assertions without any evidence at all. To boot:
No presidential candidate has ever made technology a serious campaign issue, unless it's to warn about sex online or to urge the distribution of V-chips and blocking software to protect children from techno-driven culture. Only a handful of educational institutions in America teach technology well, or even at all, concentrating mostly on keeping kids away from dirty pictures online. Discussions surrounding the ethics of technology are unheard of outside very few academic circles. Only a handful of Americans even know what the genome project is, let alone what it might unleash. Online, 15-year-olds who master Linux boxes think they understand technology itself, and it's curious, often erratic and ominous history. In America, the best minds in the country are holed up in California think tanks dreaming up wireless phones and hand-held computers that access sports scores 24/7 so that fans won't have to bother to turn on the car radio for results or wait two minutes for their e-mail or stock prices.
At best, everything you mention is vehemently debatable, much less fact. You yourself contradict the first statement - that no presidential candidate has ever used technology as an election issue. For every poor school there's a forward-thinking institution. I don't know what you're trying to demonstrate with that 15-year-old Linux users comment - except perhaps that you've forgotten your grammar ("its", not "it's"). And seriously, for every researcher at Ericsson working on WAP, there's another working at eliminating malaria.
You could spawn a two-hour debate with just that paragraph alone, and yet you use it as though it were irrefutable evidence in your favour.
Personally, I find the possible applications of the genome mapping to be disturbing. I don't want to be pushed aside by some technologically created wunderkind in 30 years. But you have to remember, the jury is still WAY out on the nature-vs.-nurture debate. Even with the best genes in the world, you can still turn out to be socially inept or dumber than a bag of hummers. =)
All in all, my rating of this JonKatz article: 6/10: good effort, needs improvement.
Folks like you and I are in a great position to take advantage of the entrenched and relatively clueless MIS toadies' fears - we can take the risks (minor) they are unwilling to and reap the rewards (tremendous) they were blind to. Not a bad place to be at all.
Hehe... you're preaching to the converted here. =) I'm not about to blindly accept the first off-the-shelf solution that's thrown at me because I like to think I know better.
What the original post is saying is that Linux will never get accepted by Joe Middlemanagement unless some high profile companies get behind it. I happen to agree. Moreover, I think there already are some big-time companies lending credence to Linux. IBM, for example, is a huge boon to the Linux movement. HUGE. I don't think people appreciate enough how important it is to have big names like that go to bat for you.
The image IBM has created for itself is very powerful. That little blue line-drawing is gold. There are other established giants in line to push Linux too. Until they get enough of an association of Linux with reliability, you can't expect the average guy who's never seen Linux in action to recommend it.
There are many companies in more than one industry out there that aren't about to throw out the old way of doing things just because there's a new player on the block.
When the two biggest computer manufacturers hesitate in adopting something like this it adds validity to something that many of us have been suspecting for quite some time. Namely that Linus' attachment to the Linux & Open Source communities has hurt Transmeta's chances of being taken seriously by big business.
No it doesn't. All it confirms is that Compaq and Dell aren't about to risk their credibility on an unproven product. Saying that Linus is the reason for Compaq's reluctance is like insisting that worms don't fly because there's birds in the air. First, let the worms grow wings, and then see what happens.
Personally, I don't think Linus has enough of the recognition factor among MIS managers to make much difference either way. At least not the ones who buy from Compaq and Dell.
Linux needs a strong marketing presence funded by capital (not free time). This needs to be handled by a professional marketing agency (not hobbiests (sic)). We need to work on our image if we wish to succeed.
Agreed. No sane MIS toadie is going to risk his neck on Linux. It's like one of those "problem-solving flowcharts" that every self-respecting geek owns. If something breaks, always have someone to point the finger at. If you're the guy who brought in Linux to the company, suddenly you're at the bottom of the blame chain. Bad place to be.
No, just kidding, you wouldn't need more beer. See, a beer-optical pump would use regular water and the interaction of the pump water and the signal-bearing beer would be such that the output of the pump would be pure beer - not diluted, just more beer. A beer amplifier.
Installing repeaters would only slow the network down dramatically, as it would mean that the fiber optic signal would have to travel through electronics at some time, and thus, it would be slowed enough to make using fiber optics at all pointless.
Not necessarily, electro-optic repeaters, if you use WDM, can probably process signals in parallel without that much delay at the repeater.
Not only that, you said yourself work is being done on purely optical switches. I mean, a switch is basically a smart repeater, so if you can make an optical switch, by definition you can make an optical repeater.
I didn't say there was a lake of Beer on the mountain. =) But for the sake of the analogy, if you did have a Beer Lake on the mountain, and you had rivers of beer, then the portable Niagara Falls would NOT dilute the beer. It would simply create more beer. This is why optical pumps are special.
Now IANALP (I Am Not A Laser Physicist) but the best analogy for an optical repeater I can think of off the top of my head is this: imagine a lake on a mountain. The lake has several rivers which flow down the mountain and each of these rivers splits off into smaller creeks and rivers. By the time you get down the mountain, you might not have much other than a small trickle of water. Now imagine you had a portable Niagara Falls that you could place at the base of the mountain to feed into the small stream. All of the sudden you've got a huge waterflow again and still in the same direction as the original stream. This is what optical repeaters do.
These repeaters use something called an optical pump. It's basically a high-powered silicon laser that's injected into doped silica fibre. The process of pumping injects energy into the fibre and because of some fancy physics it happens to do so in phase with the original signal.
The trouble with repeaters is that they're dumb. They'll amplify signal and noise equally.
Given that you work for Microsoft, I can understand why you'd be spouting the dot-truth that so thoroughly disgusted anyone with even a simple understanding of the facts.
But anyways, having worked with all the OSes mentioned above, I can tell you why Sun is still great. Their server solutions work. And work _great_. You don't have to be a magician to make Solaris run well on Sun hardware. And if you ever do mess anything up, you call up Sun's tech support and they help you fix it. Contrast with Microsoft $9/min tech support - "Oh no, you don't have to call back, I'll wait while you reinstall Office". Or with Linux support, which until recently has consisted mostly of IRC, Usenet and FAQs (this is great for the hobbyist and someone with time on his hands, but for the sysadmin whose mission-critical database just went down, it's not quite a sure thing that you'll get your system up in no time). Availability. Guaranteed availability.
Of course, there's a price to be paid for the kind of solutions and service Sun provides. Their high-end stuff is priced accordingly. Why? Well, because there are obviously enough people in the world willing to pay for it. It's the beauty of the market economy. For the same reasons that Windows hasn't yet died a long-overdue death (and somehow controls the home OS market), Sun continues to sell mission-critical hardware for a premium: people think it's worth it.
Besides, you can hardly say that the Linux/Netfinity solution here is cheap. $1 million. And I'm pretty sure that's not all hardware.
I guess they should have gone with Windows 2000, the price/performance leader.
Hey man, I'm with you. I never said anything about this being a precedent setting case for Internet parody.
All I was trying to say is what a lot of other people have stated quite nicely. Namely that this guy was clearly using the association between PETA and peta.org to generate hits on his site.
That's why the judge ordered him to stop using peta.org. He didn't put a gag order on him, the guy still has his website available. All he needs to do is get a new domain name, like maybe tastyanimals.org or something.
Do I think it's silly? Sure I do. Do I still dislike the extremist views of PETA? Absolutely. Do I think Mike Doughney is a hero and posterboy for repression? Hell no.
The best one is probably the one they're all based on, the one published in Nature (annoying free registration). Judging from the responses so far, I think most people are missing the point. This isn't just another neural network in hardware. They've created a mixed-signal IC which makes decisions based on analog information. With just a cursory glance, my understanding is that these are digital neurons, but their outputs are scaled using analog circuitry that's controlled by the inhibitor neuron (this is probably wrong, feel free to correct me).
Regular neural networks still work on digital information only. These things, apparently, do not. That's why it's a big deal.
I do have a problem with this statement in the Wired article though:
The chip -- believed to be the first hybrid digital and analog electronic circuit -- has been hailed as a breakthrough in "neuromorphic" engineering.
Claiming that these guys have pioneered mixed-signal design is just a little bit of a stretch. Do your research, Wired. =)
All the Academy is doing is locking itself out of the opportunity to be trailblazers, recognizing innovative new artists. Instead, they'd rather stick to their tried-and-true formula. Good for them.
Isn't it kind of funny though that movie studios themselves are looking for ways to deliver their films to theatres using the Internet? =)
Man, Slashdot has got to do more researching of the stories they post.
At the very least, offer PETA's press release. They claim that Michael Doughney (peta.org) fraudulently claimed that People Eating Tasty Animals was a non-profit organization, was clearly diluting the PETA trademark and was gaining commercial benefit from such dilution. Not only that, but he also holds many other "parody" websites.
It's one thing to make light of these guys, but it's another thing to profit from their names - that is very clearly infringement.
He's letting the same people who felt no compunctions at all about letting Quasimodo ride off into the sunset with Esmerelda or the Little Mermaid avoid becoming seafoam make his books into a movie?
This will be redundant given the other replies, but I'll add a few comments of my own.
1. Speed is a non-issue. The 486 _easily_ handles all the packets going through, even when NAT-ing. I've got one IBM NE2000 card and a D-link 10/100 with a Realtek chipset. BSDs actually have two fairly mature methods for setting up NAT. They're easy to configure, even if you only have the man pages at your disposal. Having never used FreeBSD, I had my gateway up and running within a day. I had absolutely no problems with FreeBSD. For the most part I was running this machine sans monitor or keyboard. I did all my administration remotely (well, except for once when I accidentally flushed the firewall ruleset). I was able to run X apps on a remote display all without problems. I even got a little adventurous and set up my own mail server using sendmail. No performance problems at all. And this is a Frankenstein 486-66 with 24 megs ram.
2. Serendipity. I was just pissed at Redhat for failing to install and/. ran a story on FreeBSD that day. So I grabbed the ISO online and liked it right off the bat. The ability to upgrade the OS via ftp made sense in a machine where I planned to remove the CD-ROM. To be honest, I didn't look too much at OpenBSD, simply because I wasn't too concerned about the security/stability issues at the time. I didn't plan to have the system running for very long (ended up running it for 5 months) and I just wanted to give BSD a whirl.
3. Remember that *BSD is a BSD-Unix implementation. As such it differs in some ways from SVR4 Unix like Linux or the newer Solarises (?). For the most part, I find that it's not really all that different. The kernel is incredibly easy to modify and compile. I built several custom kernels, all using only vi and make. No need for fancy graphical kernel configuration. Not only that, but FreeBSD (not sure about the other BSDs) has a dynamic kernel. For example, I can compile the kernel without CD-ROM support (I mean _without_, not as a module) and when I try to access the CD-ROM, it will dynamically load the Cd-rom module. Neat stuff.
All in all, for someone with a little Linux/Unix know-how, BSD is very easy to install and run. Personally, I think it's a lot more mature than any of the Linux distributions I've seen and much easier to configure and run stably.
We've had some of these electronic gov't services for a while now. For example, you can apply for and get updates on your student loans (administered by the gov't) online or check traffic cameras. Check out the Ontario gov't web site. Lots of neat stuff like Jon is talking about.
I even filed my income taxes online this year.
Other things like driver's license renewals and fine payments can be done all over the place at electronic kiosks the gov't puts at malls and downtown.
There's only one problem with having gov't services online - there's no one to yell at when you get hosed. And good luck talking to a real human being when you call into an IVR system. =) Welcome to the 21st century.
Someone should work on developing an IVR that listens to your gripes and placates you while waiting for a real person. THAT would sell big time. =)
I'm just curious to know. Do Intel's engineers do all of their design and simulation on Pentiums running Windows? Or do they secretly buy some Sun SPARCs or HP PA-RISC machines?
I've had some minimal experience with some Cadence tools running on Solaris workstations. I wonder if they could possibly run as well under Windows.
First off, <disclaimer>let me say that GNU-Linux is great, it's raising a big stink for Open Source and Free Software and that visibility and credibility is needed</disclaimer>. However, I have to agree with AC. The better known distros of BSD that I've tried have all been vastly easier to configure than any of the Linux distros. The Linux community tends to support bleeding-edge, often even before fixing present problems. On that token, however, I seriously think that Joe Clueless is far better off with FreeBSD or OpenBSD. It's relatively easy to use and has excellent support for established hardware.
I personally had to ditch efforts to run Linux on a DEC 486 I picked up after it was decommisioned at my school. Just about everything on this PC was in awful shape, from the RAM to the HDs to the BIOS. Nevertheless, I managed to install FreeBSD 3.4 on the first shot! After a little tinkering, I had this box running _beautifully_ as a cable-sharing gateway with a few auxillary services.
IMHO, BSD has really gotten the shaft in terms of public opinion. If you ask me, it really is the better operating system. It just doesn't have the hordes of fanatics. =)
Check out www.sysinternals.com. They have tons of stuff that will help you identify and kill rogue dlls and hidden background processes, even in Win98. These guys actually know what they're doing.
Uhhh...What does IMAP support have to do with rendering web pages?
Not much, except that Mozilla does both. I haven't really been able to find many good/free IMAP mailers for use under Windows. There's Eudora (costs money), Outlook (need I say more?), Netscape Messenger (tends to do nasty things sometimes) and a few other commercial or lesser known products.
The bonus is that Mozilla looks like it will be able to do both browsing and mailing quite nicely.
I would glady buy... that "mystical golden goose" that will some day come swooping in and be able to render pages fast and in complience, have a light feel, use a decent widget set, not try to second guess my decision to use Pine for my mail..."
A cursory glance at the Mozilla home page would tell you that SSL support is being implemented in Mozilla with something called PSM 1.1 for Mozilla.
Well, Shockwave... I guess you've got me there, no use browsing the web without it. =)
Java's a good point, too. I will definitely miss the animated banners and scrolling marquees that proliferate throughout the web. Granted, there are a few sites that use Java and JavaScript well. I don't know, guess I'll play it by ear. If I encounter a site that absolutely must use Java, then I'll switch back to Navigator.
My point (aside from being a sarcastic bastard) is that the vast majority of my web browsing is stuff that Mozilla supports. I use IMAP for mail and Mozilla's mailer is finally beginning to look presentable.
Why not try it out now? Report bugs and make it better? Because I can't see yet another bad picture album?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, Jon does have a point here, it's just hard to discern among all the forced comparisons and pseudo-evidence he presents. I also think Jon is a little Ameri-centric. There are many researchers world-wide with the ability and the know-how to use this map. Don't assume that just because the US has unlocked the code, they're the only ones who know how to use it.
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A couple things, Jon. In Mary Shelley's original novel, the monster is not named Frankenstein. His creator is Dr. Frankenstein, and the monster is simply known as Frankenstein's monster.
Also, please, please stop making wild assertions without any evidence at all. To boot:
At best, everything you mention is vehemently debatable, much less fact. You yourself contradict the first statement - that no presidential candidate has ever used technology as an election issue. For every poor school there's a forward-thinking institution. I don't know what you're trying to demonstrate with that 15-year-old Linux users comment - except perhaps that you've forgotten your grammar ("its", not "it's"). And seriously, for every researcher at Ericsson working on WAP, there's another working at eliminating malaria.
You could spawn a two-hour debate with just that paragraph alone, and yet you use it as though it were irrefutable evidence in your favour.
Personally, I find the possible applications of the genome mapping to be disturbing. I don't want to be pushed aside by some technologically created wunderkind in 30 years. But you have to remember, the jury is still WAY out on the nature-vs.-nurture debate. Even with the best genes in the world, you can still turn out to be socially inept or dumber than a bag of hummers. =)
All in all, my rating of this JonKatz article: 6/10: good effort, needs improvement.
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Hehe... you're preaching to the converted here. =) I'm not about to blindly accept the first off-the-shelf solution that's thrown at me because I like to think I know better.
What the original post is saying is that Linux will never get accepted by Joe Middlemanagement unless some high profile companies get behind it. I happen to agree. Moreover, I think there already are some big-time companies lending credence to Linux. IBM, for example, is a huge boon to the Linux movement. HUGE. I don't think people appreciate enough how important it is to have big names like that go to bat for you.
The image IBM has created for itself is very powerful. That little blue line-drawing is gold. There are other established giants in line to push Linux too. Until they get enough of an association of Linux with reliability, you can't expect the average guy who's never seen Linux in action to recommend it.
There are many companies in more than one industry out there that aren't about to throw out the old way of doing things just because there's a new player on the block.
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That setup can't possibly be good for anyone - least of all the driver.
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No it doesn't. All it confirms is that Compaq and Dell aren't about to risk their credibility on an unproven product. Saying that Linus is the reason for Compaq's reluctance is like insisting that worms don't fly because there's birds in the air. First, let the worms grow wings, and then see what happens.
Personally, I don't think Linus has enough of the recognition factor among MIS managers to make much difference either way. At least not the ones who buy from Compaq and Dell.
Agreed. No sane MIS toadie is going to risk his neck on Linux. It's like one of those "problem-solving flowcharts" that every self-respecting geek owns. If something breaks, always have someone to point the finger at. If you're the guy who brought in Linux to the company, suddenly you're at the bottom of the blame chain. Bad place to be.
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No, just kidding, you wouldn't need more beer. See, a beer-optical pump would use regular water and the interaction of the pump water and the signal-bearing beer would be such that the output of the pump would be pure beer - not diluted, just more beer. A beer amplifier.
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Not that it doesn't apply... it's just that purely optical repeaters would re-generate the signal in addition to amplifying it.
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Not necessarily, electro-optic repeaters, if you use WDM, can probably process signals in parallel without that much delay at the repeater.
Not only that, you said yourself work is being done on purely optical switches. I mean, a switch is basically a smart repeater, so if you can make an optical switch, by definition you can make an optical repeater.
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These repeaters use something called an optical pump. It's basically a high-powered silicon laser that's injected into doped silica fibre. The process of pumping injects energy into the fibre and because of some fancy physics it happens to do so in phase with the original signal.
The trouble with repeaters is that they're dumb. They'll amplify signal and noise equally.
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But anyways, having worked with all the OSes mentioned above, I can tell you why Sun is still great. Their server solutions work. And work _great_. You don't have to be a magician to make Solaris run well on Sun hardware. And if you ever do mess anything up, you call up Sun's tech support and they help you fix it. Contrast with Microsoft $9/min tech support - "Oh no, you don't have to call back, I'll wait while you reinstall Office". Or with Linux support, which until recently has consisted mostly of IRC, Usenet and FAQs (this is great for the hobbyist and someone with time on his hands, but for the sysadmin whose mission-critical database just went down, it's not quite a sure thing that you'll get your system up in no time). Availability. Guaranteed availability.
Of course, there's a price to be paid for the kind of solutions and service Sun provides. Their high-end stuff is priced accordingly. Why? Well, because there are obviously enough people in the world willing to pay for it. It's the beauty of the market economy. For the same reasons that Windows hasn't yet died a long-overdue death (and somehow controls the home OS market), Sun continues to sell mission-critical hardware for a premium: people think it's worth it .
Besides, you can hardly say that the Linux/Netfinity solution here is cheap. $1 million. And I'm pretty sure that's not all hardware.
I guess they should have gone with Windows 2000, the price/performance leader.
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All I was trying to say is what a lot of other people have stated quite nicely. Namely that this guy was clearly using the association between PETA and peta.org to generate hits on his site.
That's why the judge ordered him to stop using peta.org. He didn't put a gag order on him, the guy still has his website available. All he needs to do is get a new domain name, like maybe tastyanimals.org or something.
Do I think it's silly? Sure I do. Do I still dislike the extremist views of PETA? Absolutely. Do I think Mike Doughney is a hero and posterboy for repression? Hell no.
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Regular neural networks still work on digital information only. These things, apparently, do not. That's why it's a big deal.
I do have a problem with this statement in the Wired article though:
Claiming that these guys have pioneered mixed-signal design is just a little bit of a stretch. Do your research, Wired. =)
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Isn't it kind of funny though that movie studios themselves are looking for ways to deliver their films to theatres using the Internet? =)
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At the very least, offer PETA's press release. They claim that Michael Doughney (peta.org) fraudulently claimed that People Eating Tasty Animals was a non-profit organization, was clearly diluting the PETA trademark and was gaining commercial benefit from such dilution. Not only that, but he also holds many other "parody" websites.
It's one thing to make light of these guys, but it's another thing to profit from their names - that is very clearly infringement.
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He's letting the same people who felt no compunctions at all about letting Quasimodo ride off into the sunset with Esmerelda or the Little Mermaid avoid becoming seafoam make his books into a movie?
Please say it ain't so...
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1. Speed is a non-issue. The 486 _easily_ handles all the packets going through, even when NAT-ing. I've got one IBM NE2000 card and a D-link 10/100 with a Realtek chipset. BSDs actually have two fairly mature methods for setting up NAT. They're easy to configure, even if you only have the man pages at your disposal. Having never used FreeBSD, I had my gateway up and running within a day.
I had absolutely no problems with FreeBSD. For the most part I was running this machine sans monitor or keyboard. I did all my administration remotely (well, except for once when I accidentally flushed the firewall ruleset). I was able to run X apps on a remote display all without problems. I even got a little adventurous and set up my own mail server using sendmail. No performance problems at all. And this is a Frankenstein 486-66 with 24 megs ram.
2. Serendipity. I was just pissed at Redhat for failing to install and /. ran a story on FreeBSD that day. So I grabbed the ISO online and liked it right off the bat. The ability to upgrade the OS via ftp made sense in a machine where I planned to remove the CD-ROM. To be honest, I didn't look too much at OpenBSD, simply because I wasn't too concerned about the security/stability issues at the time. I didn't plan to have the system running for very long (ended up running it for 5 months) and I just wanted to give BSD a whirl.
3. Remember that *BSD is a BSD-Unix implementation. As such it differs in some ways from SVR4 Unix like Linux or the newer Solarises (?). For the most part, I find that it's not really all that different. The kernel is incredibly easy to modify and compile. I built several custom kernels, all using only vi and make. No need for fancy graphical kernel configuration. Not only that, but FreeBSD (not sure about the other BSDs) has a dynamic kernel. For example, I can compile the kernel without CD-ROM support (I mean _without_, not as a module) and when I try to access the CD-ROM, it will dynamically load the Cd-rom module. Neat stuff.
All in all, for someone with a little Linux/Unix know-how, BSD is very easy to install and run. Personally, I think it's a lot more mature than any of the Linux distributions I've seen and much easier to configure and run stably.
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I even filed my income taxes online this year.
Other things like driver's license renewals and fine payments can be done all over the place at electronic kiosks the gov't puts at malls and downtown.
There's only one problem with having gov't services online - there's no one to yell at when you get hosed. And good luck talking to a real human being when you call into an IVR system. =) Welcome to the 21st century.
Someone should work on developing an IVR that listens to your gripes and placates you while waiting for a real person. THAT would sell big time. =)
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I've had some minimal experience with some Cadence tools running on Solaris workstations. I wonder if they could possibly run as well under Windows.
Anybody?
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I personally had to ditch efforts to run Linux on a DEC 486 I picked up after it was decommisioned at my school. Just about everything on this PC was in awful shape, from the RAM to the HDs to the BIOS. Nevertheless, I managed to install FreeBSD 3.4 on the first shot! After a little tinkering, I had this box running _beautifully_ as a cable-sharing gateway with a few auxillary services.
IMHO, BSD has really gotten the shaft in terms of public opinion. If you ask me, it really is the better operating system. It just doesn't have the hordes of fanatics. =)
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Oh, and it's all freeware. =)
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Not much, except that Mozilla does both. I haven't really been able to find many good/free IMAP mailers for use under Windows. There's Eudora (costs money), Outlook (need I say more?), Netscape Messenger (tends to do nasty things sometimes) and a few other commercial or lesser known products.
The bonus is that Mozilla looks like it will be able to do both browsing and mailing quite nicely.
I would glady buy ... that "mystical golden goose" that will some day come swooping in and be able to render pages fast and in complience, have a light feel, use a decent widget set, not try to second guess my decision to use Pine for my mail..."
Guy, isn't that Opera? =)
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My point (aside from being a sarcastic bastard) is that the vast majority of my web browsing is stuff that Mozilla supports. I use IMAP for mail and Mozilla's mailer is finally beginning to look presentable.
Why not try it out now? Report bugs and make it better? Because I can't see yet another bad picture album?
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