Looking at your arguments, I generally don't agree. However, interestingly enough, I agree with your conclusions.:-)
1) It adds little or no value.
I'm just now using HTML coding to emphasize what I'm quoting and what's new text (mine). Agreed, this could be done using quote marks in mail, but the usage of <I> and <B> makes me able to add readability value. More if we start using lists and their markup instead of ASCII. I'm sure you've seen what quoted lists look like after a few generations.
You know, I'm not talking about using <H1><FLASH> here. Just the kind of editing you'd find in a book.
2) It wastes bandwidth
I just looked at one of my mails here. The headers were 1634 bytes; the mail body was 1000. Ergo, header information in short mails make up a larger portion, relatively speaking. Also, note that I'm not talking about posting MsWord documents in HTML - those are bulky. I'm talking about bold and italic tags, the occasional HR, and embedding a sig in FONT SIZE 1.
Everything consumes bandwidth. You're putting personal opinions here as to which bandwidth is "wasted" and which is not. At some point, this needs a drilldown as to how much bandwidth feature X uses vs. its extra value for the communication; at this point, when looking at manually composed mails, we're talking about 5% maximum size increase. I really don't think that is worth crying murder over; energy is better spent elsewhere (such as reducing those damn headers).
3) Not all mail readers cope with HTML properly
This was what the entire discussion was about, and I think is a valid point. However, if you were to stop using a standard every time a new client emerged which did not support it, you'd have a hard time using any standards at all. You have to make blind assumptions about the capability of your recipient vs. the message you want to convey. This happens every day. For example, you typically assume that a person you address for the first time understands English. Every now and then, this turns out to be not true. These occasions do not and should not stop you from using English.
4) HTML spam is much worse than plain text spam.
Agree wholeheartedly. However, mostly I find this to be due to overformatting and making the mail an angry fruit salad. I've seen HTML spam with good HTML usage, too.
Regardless, you don't have to convince me spam is bad. I use SneakEmail to cope with this. Excellent service IMHO. And free. I never get spammed any more to my primary addresses.
5) I have a big, fast connection now, but I didn't two weeks ago. Until two weeks ago, i had a 33.6 dial up connection with 'phone charges per minute. HTML mails sucked then because they're bigger, and they almost invariably come with img tags
Ok, so now you're talking about HTML mail in general, and not the ones I send. Like I said, my markup generally adds a max of 100 bytes to an e-mail message, and again, I believe this to be a good tradeoff for the increased formatting.
At the company where I work, people always use HTML or rich text messages. It didn't take long before I started to dislike plaintext, which I'd used 15 years before that - mostly in FidoNet, actually.
That said, I do think that everyone should feel free to send mail in whatever format they want. Of course, everyone also has the right to request that people communicate with them in a different format. Kind of like if I started speaking Japanese to you - I'd expect you to ask me to speak English.
Hm. You know what? It actually looks like we've been in agreement most of the time.:-)
For several years now, I have received the occasional e-mail about how I should never write e-mail in HTML, but stick to plaintext. This has usually been followed by how Microsoft doesn't care about standards (I use an MS client), raah raah raah, and the key argument is that everybody should always be able to read your information. To me, that argument is about equivalent to "nobody on the highway is allowed to drive faster than the slowest car". If we enforced people to be compliant with all standards, we'd effectively kill progress. Even though we may not like the current trend of progress, there is still always change going on.
Anyway, here we have the exact same thing, only lockout on purpose rather than implicitly by upgraded technology, targeted against a specific client. This guy is saying outright that "Sorry if you can't read my e-mail, here are a bunch of alternatives", just like I use to do when people complain they can't read HTML.
The chief difference is that I don't send HTML mail out of malice, I do it because I think it adds value to the mail (I can format for readability more than I can in 76-column ASCII). This guy croaks certain clients because he doesn't like the clients, or rather, their maker. He's giving people trouble on purpose, and boasts about it.
That is just amazingly stupid.
Crystal Falcon
There are only two things infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not so sure about the universe. --Albert Einstein
This explanation of the word's origins, while popular, is an afterconstruction.
The word shares grammatical origins with stundom, i.e. timely. The word lagom would thus mean "lawly", "lawfully", or more relaxed, "according to convention".
Not at all. While I understand your reflection, being a native Swedish speaker that now speak English, I can say that the only thing the two words have in common is that they specify a quantity.
Moderate means "an amount, but not too high an amount -- don't stretch it", sort of.
The Swedish lagom, however, means "just the right amount for the occasion". I would disagree with Michael's definition of lagom being a wide space; rather, it is a rather precise term, one of careful judgment of what is precisely the correct amount. When I go on my motorcycle on the highways, for example, a lagom speed for me is 260-270 km/h; this could hardly be considered a moderate speed.
Actually, I cheat - I already generate my sound outside of the computer box. I have a SB Live! card that's digitally connected to a Cambrigde Soundworks Digital (the DTT3500) - the 5.1 analog sound is generated in that box, 7 feet away from the computer.
From the Cambridge Soundworks box, there's just speaker cables.
I've been looking for something like this for a while. Not to get my connectors externally, that's not an issue (I can get any extensions I like). To me, the key issue here is that the sound-generating circuits get out of the RF-wise nightmarish environment inside a computer case. There's so much induction going on you simply don't want to generate sound there.
So this is definitely something for my next desktop.
...I'm a lot more annoyed about their way of pushing artificial sweeteners (i.e. aspartame) that people are supposed to EAT, despite ninety-plus well known medical effects ranging from rashes to blindness.
See http://www.dorway.com/ (yes, spelled like that) for some light on this... the site is rather one-sided, but the facts I have checked have held water. Shocking to say the least, and corporate greed at its worst.
When refering to decibels, every 3dB means 2X the power
Not quite. It's +10dB for a factor ten increase (exactly and by definition). So while your statement that +3db means a doubling of the power, that's a fair approximation for quick estimates, but not more than an approximation.
Looks like many people here missed the point. One key reason to care about what goes up and comes down is that 99.9% of all ammunition is depleted during training, on your own soil.
One perfectly valid scenario would be to have, say, 75% efficient nontoxic training grenades which are replaced by 100% efficient war grenades when the time comes to go to war. This is already done with live vs. blank rounds, nothing saying the practice can't be extended.
And if I could say so, I would rather have that 99.9% market share of environmentally friendly training weapons, than the.1% higher-tech more-lethal toxic-in-the-making weaponry.
One half of this discussion concerns how reliable mainframes are. The other half concerns how quick reliable systems boot, must boot, or should boot. People seem to universally agree that the two are holistically connected.
Well, guess what: a mainframe takes HOURS to boot. It runs forever, but it also takes forever to start. I used to run a military-grade telco switch that took about three hours from powerup to in-service. How is that for a boot time?
Sigh, I miss my Commodore 64. Flick the switch and you were set to go.:-)
Hell... I live in Scandinavia and I'm having one hell of a trouble dissipating the heat from my two P4s out of my apartment, they're overdoing that heating part badly.
Anybody got some good advice on getting rid of heat? Right now I've stuffed my boxes in a closet (to get rid of the noise) and put some fans in there for ventilation, but the heat just creeps into neighboring rooms (as predicted -- though it gets way too hot in those rooms). A regular AC is too weak to deal with this, a friend of mine tried that.
What's your favorite domestic heat dissipation solution?
So, excellent. Now let's see what happens if we contact the following ISPs with a Cease-and-Desist letter regarding unspecified copyright infringements and require immediate disconnection under the DMCA:
The ISP of U.S. Congress,
The ISP of MPAA,
The ISP of whitehouse.gov,
and the ISP of the Senate.
I wonder if something will happen to the DMCA then?
Baud is a measure of number of signal changes per second. Each change in signal may transmit the value of one bit, or more often, several bits.
bps is just that - bits transmitted per second.
To illustrate the difference, a 2k4 modem transmits 4 bits per signal change and operates at 600 baud.
300bps modems transmitted 1 bit per change in signal, and could therefore correctly be called 300 baud modems. This practice of rating modems by "n baud" carried on afterwards with faster modems, often if not always used erroneously.
In other words, what you want is a Microsoft "Stinger" Smartphone. It doesn't run Linux, but you can run PocketPC apps on it, meaning there's dev tools for it bloody everywhere.
Discourage is one thing. Prosecute, judge, and enact penalty in one swift stroke - without the defendant even being aware of it, done with automated processing - all without giving the defendant a chance to even speak for him or herself, as per the clauses of the Sacred Contract - is another thing quite entirely, and frankly, quite horrible.
The Peta prefix, modifying by 10^15, is written in uppercase P. The author here is using a lowercase p prefix, which means pico, or 10^-15.
Technically, this means the author got the article 30 magnitudes off.:-) We haven't been using millibytes for some time, much less micro- or picobytes...
No, the reason Saddam is still around is that he has one of the best personal protections on this planet. Don't tell me you think the Allies didn't try?
The reason why the Geneva Convention is pretty much ignored by the US is that it fights countries who ignore its spirit.
No, the reason the convention is pretty much ignored by the US is that they signed with a condition - the US will not respect the convention against non-signatories.
None of the other states have stated a similar reservation, noting that the purpose of the convention is respect of human life. And besides, I wasn't thinking so much of Yugoslavia and Iraq (hell, Iraq was mostly hit with precision weaponry anyway) as of Vietnam (carpet bombing, anyone?) or Cambodia (ever wondered why you don't see any civilians from American aircraft?).
No, I'm not defending using your own population as shields. It is utterly cowardly and I hold such people in no respect whatsoever. OTOH, the U.S. have plenty of weaponry that can be used against these targets with devastating precision (such as Tomahawks).
I strongly disagree with your opinion that any country's military that kills civilians deserves to have its own non-military slain. In both cases, these are people who have likely done nothing wrong and just want to get on with their lives. Saying that they deserve to die because of what somebody else did to other people is... well, I don't get the supposed sense of justice.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want to waste your team reading what I write, why did you bother replying in the first place?
Looking at your arguments, I generally don't agree. However, interestingly enough, I agree with your conclusions. :-)
:-)
1) It adds little or no value.
I'm just now using HTML coding to emphasize what I'm quoting and what's new text (mine). Agreed, this could be done using quote marks in mail, but the usage of <I> and <B> makes me able to add readability value. More if we start using lists and their markup instead of ASCII. I'm sure you've seen what quoted lists look like after a few generations.
You know, I'm not talking about using <H1><FLASH> here. Just the kind of editing you'd find in a book.
2) It wastes bandwidth
I just looked at one of my mails here. The headers were 1634 bytes; the mail body was 1000. Ergo, header information in short mails make up a larger portion, relatively speaking. Also, note that I'm not talking about posting MsWord documents in HTML - those are bulky. I'm talking about bold and italic tags, the occasional HR, and embedding a sig in FONT SIZE 1.
Everything consumes bandwidth. You're putting personal opinions here as to which bandwidth is "wasted" and which is not. At some point, this needs a drilldown as to how much bandwidth feature X uses vs. its extra value for the communication; at this point, when looking at manually composed mails, we're talking about 5% maximum size increase. I really don't think that is worth crying murder over; energy is better spent elsewhere (such as reducing those damn headers).
3) Not all mail readers cope with HTML properly
This was what the entire discussion was about, and I think is a valid point. However, if you were to stop using a standard every time a new client emerged which did not support it, you'd have a hard time using any standards at all. You have to make blind assumptions about the capability of your recipient vs. the message you want to convey. This happens every day. For example, you typically assume that a person you address for the first time understands English. Every now and then, this turns out to be not true. These occasions do not and should not stop you from using English.
4) HTML spam is much worse than plain text spam.
Agree wholeheartedly. However, mostly I find this to be due to overformatting and making the mail an angry fruit salad. I've seen HTML spam with good HTML usage, too.
Regardless, you don't have to convince me spam is bad. I use SneakEmail to cope with this. Excellent service IMHO. And free. I never get spammed any more to my primary addresses.
5) I have a big, fast connection now, but I didn't two weeks ago. Until two weeks ago, i had a 33.6 dial up connection with 'phone charges per minute. HTML mails sucked then because they're bigger, and they almost invariably come with img tags
Ok, so now you're talking about HTML mail in general, and not the ones I send. Like I said, my markup generally adds a max of 100 bytes to an e-mail message, and again, I believe this to be a good tradeoff for the increased formatting.
At the company where I work, people always use HTML or rich text messages. It didn't take long before I started to dislike plaintext, which I'd used 15 years before that - mostly in FidoNet, actually.
That said, I do think that everyone should feel free to send mail in whatever format they want. Of course, everyone also has the right to request that people communicate with them in a different format. Kind of like if I started speaking Japanese to you - I'd expect you to ask me to speak English.
Hm. You know what? It actually looks like we've been in agreement most of the time.
Crystal Falcon
Gaah!
For several years now, I have received the occasional e-mail about how I should never write e-mail in HTML, but stick to plaintext. This has usually been followed by how Microsoft doesn't care about standards (I use an MS client), raah raah raah, and the key argument is that everybody should always be able to read your information. To me, that argument is about equivalent to "nobody on the highway is allowed to drive faster than the slowest car". If we enforced people to be compliant with all standards, we'd effectively kill progress. Even though we may not like the current trend of progress, there is still always change going on.
Anyway, here we have the exact same thing, only lockout on purpose rather than implicitly by upgraded technology, targeted against a specific client. This guy is saying outright that "Sorry if you can't read my e-mail, here are a bunch of alternatives", just like I use to do when people complain they can't read HTML.
The chief difference is that I don't send HTML mail out of malice, I do it because I think it adds value to the mail (I can format for readability more than I can in 76-column ASCII). This guy croaks certain clients because he doesn't like the clients, or rather, their maker. He's giving people trouble on purpose, and boasts about it.
That is just amazingly stupid.
Crystal Falcon
There are only two things infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not so sure about the universe. --Albert Einstein
This explanation of the word's origins, while popular, is an afterconstruction.
The word shares grammatical origins with stundom, i.e. timely. The word lagom would thus mean "lawly", "lawfully", or more relaxed, "according to convention".
Not at all. While I understand your reflection, being a native Swedish speaker that now speak English, I can say that the only thing the two words have in common is that they specify a quantity.
Moderate means "an amount, but not too high an amount -- don't stretch it", sort of.
The Swedish lagom, however, means "just the right amount for the occasion". I would disagree with Michael's definition of lagom being a wide space; rather, it is a rather precise term, one of careful judgment of what is precisely the correct amount. When I go on my motorcycle on the highways, for example, a lagom speed for me is 260-270 km/h; this could hardly be considered a moderate speed.
Actually, I cheat - I already generate my sound outside of the computer box. I have a SB Live! card that's digitally connected to a Cambrigde Soundworks Digital (the DTT3500) - the 5.1 analog sound is generated in that box, 7 feet away from the computer.
From the Cambridge Soundworks box, there's just speaker cables.
Crystal Falcon
I've been looking for something like this for a while. Not to get my connectors externally, that's not an issue (I can get any extensions I like). To me, the key issue here is that the sound-generating circuits get out of the RF-wise nightmarish environment inside a computer case. There's so much induction going on you simply don't want to generate sound there.
So this is definitely something for my next desktop.
...I'm a lot more annoyed about their way of pushing artificial sweeteners (i.e. aspartame) that people are supposed to EAT, despite ninety-plus well known medical effects ranging from rashes to blindness.
See http://www.dorway.com/ (yes, spelled like that) for some light on this... the site is rather one-sided, but the facts I have checked have held water. Shocking to say the least, and corporate greed at its worst.
When refering to decibels, every 3dB means 2X the power
Not quite. It's +10dB for a factor ten increase (exactly and by definition). So while your statement that +3db means a doubling of the power, that's a fair approximation for quick estimates, but not more than an approximation.
As an aside, rasing the power to 100 Mw only gets us another 3 or 4 db at best
That should be mW, not Mw. Uppercase M is for Mega, and 100 megawatts is a lot more than a 3 or 4 dB gain...
I have a GEForce 2Ultra... do you know if XP supports the Matrox card?
Looks like many people here missed the point. One key reason to care about what goes up and comes down is that 99.9% of all ammunition is depleted during training, on your own soil.
.1% higher-tech more-lethal toxic-in-the-making weaponry.
One perfectly valid scenario would be to have, say, 75% efficient nontoxic training grenades which are replaced by 100% efficient war grenades when the time comes to go to war. This is already done with live vs. blank rounds, nothing saying the practice can't be extended.
And if I could say so, I would rather have that 99.9% market share of environmentally friendly training weapons, than the
This society is fucking amazing sometimes. :-)
:-)
One half of this discussion concerns how reliable mainframes are. The other half concerns how quick reliable systems boot, must boot, or should boot. People seem to universally agree that the two are holistically connected.
Well, guess what: a mainframe takes HOURS to boot. It runs forever, but it also takes forever to start. I used to run a military-grade telco switch that took about three hours from powerup to in-service. How is that for a boot time?
Sigh, I miss my Commodore 64. Flick the switch and you were set to go.
Hell... I live in Scandinavia and I'm having one hell of a trouble dissipating the heat from my two P4s out of my apartment, they're overdoing that heating part badly.
Anybody got some good advice on getting rid of heat? Right now I've stuffed my boxes in a closet (to get rid of the noise) and put some fans in there for ventilation, but the heat just creeps into neighboring rooms (as predicted -- though it gets way too hot in those rooms). A regular AC is too weak to deal with this, a friend of mine tried that.
What's your favorite domestic heat dissipation solution?
I wonder if something will happen to the DMCA then?
"Optimize for lines faster than 56k" must have been the most self-conflicting phrase I've seen today.
Baud is a measure of number of signal changes per second. Each change in signal may transmit the value of one bit, or more often, several bits.
bps is just that - bits transmitted per second.
To illustrate the difference, a 2k4 modem transmits 4 bits per signal change and operates at 600 baud.
300bps modems transmitted 1 bit per change in signal, and could therefore correctly be called 300 baud modems. This practice of rating modems by "n baud" carried on afterwards with faster modems, often if not always used erroneously.
In other words, what you want is a Microsoft "Stinger" Smartphone. It doesn't run Linux, but you can run PocketPC apps on it, meaning there's dev tools for it bloody everywhere.
Check it out for yourself.
They're appearing in Sweden, too. Funny thing I drive a motorbike without a front license plate. :-)
Discourage is one thing. Prosecute, judge, and enact penalty in one swift stroke - without the defendant even being aware of it, done with automated processing - all without giving the defendant a chance to even speak for him or herself, as per the clauses of the Sacred Contract - is another thing quite entirely, and frankly, quite horrible.
When I read your thoughts here, two questions pop into my mind immediately:
1) Just what the hell are you smoking?
2) Why ain't you sharing?
Oops, got the pico prefix wrong... milli -3, micro -6, nano -9, pico -12, femto -15, atto -18. Pico is 10^-12, not 10^-15.
I believe SI added two more prefixes on both sides for 21 and 24 magnitudes, but hell if I can remember those...
The Peta prefix, modifying by 10^15, is written in uppercase P. The author here is using a lowercase p prefix, which means pico, or 10^-15.
:-) We haven't been using millibytes for some time, much less micro- or picobytes...
Technically, this means the author got the article 30 magnitudes off.
No, the reason Saddam is still around is that he has one of the best personal protections on this planet. Don't tell me you think the Allies didn't try?
The reason why the Geneva Convention is pretty much ignored by the US is that it fights countries who ignore its spirit.
No, the reason the convention is pretty much ignored by the US is that they signed with a condition - the US will not respect the convention against non-signatories.
None of the other states have stated a similar reservation, noting that the purpose of the convention is respect of human life. And besides, I wasn't thinking so much of Yugoslavia and Iraq (hell, Iraq was mostly hit with precision weaponry anyway) as of Vietnam (carpet bombing, anyone?) or Cambodia (ever wondered why you don't see any civilians from American aircraft?).
No, I'm not defending using your own population as shields. It is utterly cowardly and I hold such people in no respect whatsoever. OTOH, the U.S. have plenty of weaponry that can be used against these targets with devastating precision (such as Tomahawks).
I strongly disagree with your opinion that any country's military that kills civilians deserves to have its own non-military slain. In both cases, these are people who have likely done nothing wrong and just want to get on with their lives. Saying that they deserve to die because of what somebody else did to other people is... well, I don't get the supposed sense of justice.