Here is a guy that doesn't like PCs at all, only using them to get info about cars and ask me where we should meet for lunch on Sunday, and a text-based MUA works better for his needs than a GUI one. Someone who gets the volume of email that you do may want to take a closer look at an MUA with the efficiency, flexibility, and power of Mutt.
Generally, those who are less computer-savvy prefer to have a text-based interface and a less complex program. I use the power of Outlook. I have multiple rules to automatically put e-mail into the appropriate folders based on sender (e.g., listserver), receiving address, sender, content, etc. I make extensive use of the ability to drag and drop messages into folders. I value the ability to click on a column to change the sorting order.
I do find Mutt interesting and may consider it for an older knock-around laptop that really is too sluggish and memory-limited for a modern GUI. I also might consider it for my mother, who just doesn't get the whole GUI interface thing.
Does your email come written with pictures or hieroglyphs?
Yes. I often get e-mail with pictures attached. I also get e-mail with HTML formatting and, whether you are an HTML fan or not, the formatting it allows can make for a much more readable document.
More importantly, the text-based nature of MUTT means that I would lose the ability to use GUI features like mouse-based operation, cut & paste, and so forth.
I just wanted to say "thanks" for the effort you put into that post -- even if you think that, because I am 42, that I "barely understand the internet and how it works.";-) Does using the Arpanet back in '78 count?
I think that we were composing replies at the same time as we hit many of the same points that the rude little troll didn't understand. Your post was intelligently worded and quite effective. If you weren't posting anonymously, you'd be on my Slashdot "friends" list. Thanks again.
You're probably too used to Outlook to switch, but have you tried Sylpheed yet?
Outlook is new to me. Outlook Express had a much different UI.
Sylpheed looks interesting, elegant, and powerful. But I'm really not comfortable trusting my e-mail to a version 0.X e-mail client with screen shots in Japanese. I will keep an eye on it though. I'm always looking for something better.
I agree with you on most points, but calling OE "reliable" is not one of them.
Different people have different experiences. Yours may not be typical (or mine may not). For me, it was reliable. I think that most users don't experience the problems that you describe for, if they did, I believe that there would be much more "chatter" on the net about it.
Oh....and the import functions suck.
I agree and extend that to most e-mail programs. E-mail database storage formats should have been standardized years ago. This crap of 50 different formats is incredibly annoying.
No, it's not "bunk." It's a factual representation of my experiences.
Use a real MUA, like mutt.
Mutt is text-based, can't easily import the messages that I already have, and does not work under Windows -- which is the primary OS that I use personally and professionally. Therefore, it does not meet my needs.
It's also no more "real" than any of the more sophisticated e-mail clients that I mentioned.
I don't know if you've tried it, but I have 1 POP and 2 IMAP servers I connect to with thousands of messages, and it works just fine.
I tried Mozilla's mail client and was underwhelmed, but perhaps we have different needs and priorities. If you're happy with it though, congrats on finding an e-mail client that you like.
It might be that the problem is not with the import function of the other mail clients, but with the OE mail database, which could be corrupt in some subtle way.
If the database is corrupt, then I expect the importing programs to tell me so via some kind of error message. If OE can find the messages in the database, then so should the programs that import the messages. Netscape found all of the messages, so it's not like they were unrecoverable.
I can deal with the concept of a corrupted database. What I cannot deal with is a program that silently fails.
Do you remember the time that MS charged a monthly fee to use IE?
Back when I paid for Netscape Gold?
Do you think that people would have switched to IE from Netscape if the companies charged $20-whatever/mth?
No, and Microsoft realized that. They recognized that the advertising power of being able to control the homepage and bookmarks far outweighed any fee that they might get for the browser. So they gave it away in a successful effort to take over the market and now use it to push MSN, other products, and sell bookmark placement to other firms.
How exactly are they leveraging their monopoly to do this? Windows doesn't come with anything related to Hotmail or MSN, idiot.
You are an ignorant turd, aren't you? Windows puts MSN icons on desktops, they make MSN the ad-splattering homepage for IE, they repeatedly ask if you have, or want to sign up for, a Hotmail account. Try reading this before you make more of a fool of yourself.
Exactly. Neither MSN or Hotmail are bundled, so they're irrelevant, and you're completely incapable of thought.
You are so incredibly stupid that it is no wonder that you post anonymously. If you had read the article, you would have seen that it said: It is consumer email in an early iteration, and our investment in the consumer space is now focused around Hotmail and MSN. That's where we're putting the emphasis in terms of new investment and new development work."
That means that Hotmail or MSN sign-up will be a big part of Windows install, that both MSN and Hotmail will be even more prominently pushed through IE (remember, IE ships with MSN as its homepage), and consumers will be left to either do the easy thing and sign up for MSN/Hotmail or try to hunt down an e-mail client and another service.
You're completely ignorant of the common user. Most common users I know are smarting than you, even, because at least they're capable of rational thought.
You wouldn't know an intelligent person if they hit you in the face -- and I'd like to be the guy to prove that. You calling me stupid is like Woody Allen calling Arnold Schwarzenegger wimpy.
OE was bundled,
And won't be any more.
that's how it's relevant to your post.
Wrong. We are talking about what happens now that OE is End Of Life, not what Microsoft did in the past.
MSN and Hotmail are services, so can't be bundled
Yes, services can be bundled with the OS. When the install asks if you want to sign up for a Hotmail account, the browser's homepage is an ad for MSN, the desktop includes a sign-up-for-MSN icon, and the system automatically starts up MSN Messenger, that's pushing the services down the users' throats and leveraging the monopoly power of Windows to do so. Are you even aware that:
AOL made a deal with Compaq to place an AOL icon on the desktop, and pay Compaq $35 for each AOL account sign-up it generated. In response, Microsoft announced that any OEM who put icons on the desktop must also put on an icon for MSN (Microsoft's service that competes with AOL) and Microsoft Media Player. That put AOL in the position of paying for Microsoft's advertising. Compaq stated that they will have no choice but to comply because of Microsoft's monopoly power. The Justice Department even investigated this as part of their anti-trust case against Microsoft.
I'm assuming this was modded funny because it's so stupid.
If that was how messages were rated, yours would have been a +5 Funny.
Bundling software was illegal because everyone uses Windows, so they were leveraging their monopoly.
And now they want to leverage their monopoly on Windows to get people to use Hotmail and MSN -- two Microsoft online services that compete with other companies' offerings.
Not everyone uses MSN, in fact probably less than 1/4 of computer users do, so it's not illegal.
There was a time when "probably less than 1/4 of computer users" chose Internet Explorer as their browser, but Microsoft's bundling of that browser changed that.
If OE sucks, then the consumer is free to change to something else.
No they are not. The average consumer does not know where to find another mail client. They don't know how to install it. They don't know how to configure it. They think that 99% of the software downloaded over the net has viruses in it or is part of some clever ploy to steal their credit card number. They are scared that installing new software will "break" their computer and that they will have to take the computer back to Best Buy, pay the service department $150, and then find out that the "tech" wiped their hard drive and did a fresh install of Windows to "fix" the problem. If it's so damned easy to "change to something else", why did Netscape go ballistic when Microsoft started bundling IE with Windows and why is IE now the dominant browser?
But your last sentence makes no sense anyway in the context of this discussion. The point of this discussion is that Microsoft is discontinuing OE and is, instead, pushing future Windows users to sign up for MSN/Hotmail. So there won't be a version of OE, whether it sucks or not.
Maybe this will cause peopel to realize that Internet Explorer and Outlook Express AREN'T the only way to use the internet. With any luck, mozilla and its ilk should be seeing a lot more customers once the EOL for Internet Explorer 6 and Outlook Express 6 hits
My primary browswer is Mozilla. My second choice is Opera. Internet Explorer is a distant third. I've got bootable Linux, *BSD, and BeOS OS systems. I'm no Microsoft shill.
For e-mail clients, I had been using Outlook Express and just switched to Outlook in the last week. I have fairly demanding e-mail needs with several domains, multiple e-mail addresses, list subscriptions, and so forth. I tried quite a few shareware and public domain e-mail clients and found all of them lacking in one critical way or another. The list included the Mozilla e-mail client, Eudora, PocoMail, The Bat, and Pegasus Mail. Most had usability issues.
At least two of the clients pretended to have imported all of my messages in all of the folders (probably about 70,000 messages for the last 7 years sent and received) only to have failed to import a substantial portion of them. No error messages were displayed during the import process. Sorry, but that's a no-go. I'm unwilling to give up my message archive for professional and legal reasons. Nor am I willing to trust a program that would silently fail in that manner.
In those years, I have never contracted a virus, trojan horse, or worm through Outlook Express. I kept it patched and up-to-date. I had it set to use the "Restricted Sites" security setting which disabled such things as scripting, Java, ActiveX,.NET, and so forth. I normally kept OE6 set to display messages as plain text, disabling HTML. I've heard plenty of whining about Outlook Express security, but the majority of "security" issues were caused by idiots opening executable attachments.
All of that said, I'm not blind to the faults of Outlook or Outlook Express. It was idiotic for Microsoft to include scripting of any kind for incoming messages. What were they thinking? Making an e-mail client that would retrieve from web sites without the user's permission was responsible for many people telling spammers "hey, my address is live!" The inability in OE to pick up from multiple mailboxes and have each go to its own folder is a glaring fault. There are, of course, other flaws and foibles.
All in all, though, Outlook Express was a damned good e-mail client for me. It had a well-designed user interface, was reliable, and served my purposes, and those of millions of other users, very well. Maybe this will spur on the development of other clients to the point that they rival or exceed Outlook Express, but right now, OE6 is still one of the best Windows e-mail clients available.
Since an XP 1800 is much faster than a thrift store computer, it is concievable that paying $200 instead of $50 would be a good idea, since you would save more money than the cost difference in the power bill in about a year. That, of course, assumes the 1800 is maxing out it's processor for 2 hours every day, so the slower computer would have to be left on that much longer, which is probably a bit of an extreme asumption, but I'm just making a point.
But we both know that the average gigahertz-plus PC spends 99+% of its time waiting for user input, disk I/O, or network traffic -- especially when the computer is in the hands of a kid. It's not like a computer that's five times as fast will let him produce homework five times faster, play games five times faster, or download five times as much porn per hour.
"Look! Santa brought you a new computer for Christmas."
"What are you talking about? I built the computer just like it said on Slashdot. And there's no such thing as Santa."
Remember, no more than 2 hours a day because of the electric bill."
"So why didn't Santa bring you enough money to pay the electric bill?"
---
Yes, lying is no way to bring up a kid and you gave two darned good examples.
I suggest something more like:
"Son, we're proud of you for building your own computer, but no more than two hours per day. You need to spend time with your friends, keep up with your homework, and get exercise."
If parents were a little more open and honest about the need for outdoor activities, socializing, education, and exercise, the U.S. might not be a nation full of maladjusted, semi-literate, obese kids.
Just to be a smart ass, I just tested one... A power supply (with nothing connected) is drawing exactly 01watts.
I guess I should have said that a power supply that was "On" (vs. standby) mode. I'd guess that you hooked up an ATX power supply and didn't short the pins to turn it on.
Well, the problem with this, is that everyone is using the price of electricity in their area. You obviously don't live in CA, otherwise the price you quoted would be 50-100% higher. Yes, these people are incredibly electricly thrifty for some reason... Again, I'm not going to assume why.
Even if I was 100% off and the supply was drawing a full 400watts whenever on, we're still only talking 12 cents per day.
Well, that's the interesting thing... Power drain isn't really that much lower with older computers. Let's say they got a 200MHz system, that might require 10x as long to do the same ammount of work as the faster system, which would (in the long run) be more expensive.
I was referring to the initial cost of the computer, not the computer's power consumption. The parents are concerned about a few cents per day in electricity and the kid's got a computer that costs, at the least, hundreds of dollars. Something's wrong.
Years ago I purchased a kitchen gadget that slices and dices vegetables. It's especially good for onions and ten years later, I still use it when I have to dice four large onions for a batch of jambalaya. It cuts the time by a factor of at least four and results in no onion tears. It's cheap, shoddy, but still works fine probably ten years later.
So, yes, I have purchased something from an infomercial and been happy with it. I've never purchased anything else though and may never because the vast majority of it is complete, unadulterated junk. The thing you have to ask yourself: If the item I am seeing was made with the cheapest, shoddiest materials and labor available, would it be useful? If the answer is "yes", then you may have a winner.
And power supplies aren't exactly "basic knowledge".
Yes, that's basic knowledge. Watts, volts, amps, ripple, etc. is about as basic as you can get.
Perhaps in your day you "built" your own computers.
I did, and it's still "my day."
However, today you can buy fully assembled parts, and put your own together with just a screw driver. No sodering iron required.
You can bolt engines together by mail-ordering parts -- all with no knowledge of the effects of camshaft profiles, compression, bore to stroke ratio, spark advance, the advantages of forged (vs. cast) pistons, or what cross-bolted main bearings are for. What you bolt together will probably run. But it may be short-lived, unreliable, inefficient, and/or underperforming.
Just because you can do something does not mean that you should.
I've seen countless computers built by "screwdriver engineers" who had no real knowledge of the basics. Because they didn't understand the basics, they often bought components based on cost, advertising, or appearance rather than quality. Those computers often had cooling problems from inadequate heatsinks, thermal pads (rather than thermal grease), cheap, sleeve-bearing fans, and poor airflow (often with drives stacked one atop the other with no air-space in-between).
Other computers had low-quality power supplies that were either grossly under, or oversized. One person brought me a machine that only crashed during video game play. He was sure that the problem was the "crappy video card" -- actually the only good component in the whole system. I put a scope on the POS power supply and had him start gaming. The voltage sagged and got grossly noisy and, sure enough, the system crashed. I put in a decent supply and the system stopped crashing.
The PCs would often have poor-quality RAM (rather than Crucial/Micron, Mushkin, Corsair or some reputable DIMM manufacturer) that led to system instability. Many of the owners did not understand why the DIMM carrier is important. They would buy something with "Micron" RAM chips and then not think twice about the cheap carrier PC board. One builder proudly said that they insisted on "Micron" RAM. When I opened the machine, the DIMMS were no-name and the RAM chips on them were cheap, CAS-3 junk from some manufacturer other than Micron. You could have sold him the innards of a cordless phone as "Micron RAM" and he'd have believed it.
I've seen crappy motherboards with inadequate power supply filtration caps. One owner was astounded that I could look at a motherboard and see that the caps were undersized and too few in number. His several-times-per-day crashes ended when I replaced the motherboard with a reputable one.
If Dell built PCs the way that the average screwdriver engineer does, they would have gone bankrupt due to reliability and performane problems with their PCs.
The parents don't really care about the electricity bill. They just don't want their kid being exposed to all the pr0n and other evils on the internet for more than 2 hrs daily. He needs to get out and exercise, too.
If those are the reasons, then the parents should be honest with their son instead of claiming poverty. Lying is no way to raise a kid.
You say "That is also better than the test of ars-technica: put a scope on the powerline and show the ripple. This looks horrible, but if the power stays in spec there is nothing to worry about." Exactly! If the power stays in spec, there is nothing to worry about.
What? A power supply that is noisy and has a lot of ripple will usually make for a less stable system, regardless of whether the voltage remains within upper and lower limits. Power supplies that inject noise into a system will degrade system stability. With differing filtering caps all over the motherboard and PCI cards, the instantaneous logic "1" voltage seen by different chips can vary and can cause "glitches." While that's somewhat of an oversimplification, this is not the forum to give the equivalent of an EE course. Such noisy supplies can also lead to noisy analog I/O (audio signals in and out immediately come to mind -- perhaps some types of video, also).
Examining the ripple and noise with a scope is a very good way to evaluate a power supply. It costs money and takes design talent to create a clean output and it's a good way to tell when a power supply is substandard. I would much rather have a power supply with a clean output that was slightly out of voltage spec than one with ripple and noise which caused it to swing wildly between the upper and lower limits.
I have no idea, it could be from 1-400watts depending on the system.
The power supply itself, with nothing connected, will still draw more than one watt.
Your friend's parents are idiots.
More importantly, his friend is an idiot. His friend "built" the computer and then doesn't know that a 400W power supply doesn't draw 400W all of the time that it is on. If he doesn't even have basic knowledge like that, he has no business building PCs.
Better yet, they should try unplugging any devices that they aren't using, since most devices that are turned-off are still drawing 2-4 watts a piece 24 hours a day. Unplug 4 devices would recoup your friend's 2 hours of 'computer time'.
Something is seriously screwed up with this whole scenario. The kid has an Athlon XP1800+ system with a 7,200rpm drive and the parents are worried about him using a few cents worth of electricity per day? Even if their flawed supposition about the power draw was right, their limit is.8kwh per day (.4kw * 2 hours). That's about six cents worth of electricity per day or about $2 per month. If they can't afford more than $2 per month, the kid should be using something like a 200mhz Pentium MMX that his parents found at the thrift store for $40.
Same here. I replaced fried logic/interface boards on several MFM and RLL hard drives. This is also done by all of the data recovery firms when they get drives in with fried electronics.
I'm glad that the guy persisted and was successful. I'm sure that he's a clever guy. But this is just not "news for nerds." What's next? A story about how someone changed a program message using a hex editor or made his own printer cable using a soldering iron?
I was thinking more along the lines of a scientific calculator-like keypad. Something like one of those thumbpads but bigger and with number keys and functions.
While it might be cool, it would have to be as big as a calculator, so I'll just stick with my HP calculator AND my Palm.
it might be easier to make a programmible button or two on the keypad instead and have that bring up a menu. Heck, most scientific calculators I've seen do a similar thing for less common functions (2ndF, 3rdF, alpha, math, etc., etc.).
Yes, but look at an HP calc. All of the buttons are labelled. You don't have to remember if the function you need is a 2ndF, 3rdF, Shift, etc. You look till you find it and then hit the appropriate "shift" key to access it.
Sorry. I don't want to rain on your parade or be contrarian. I just feel that the existing calcs are unlikely to be supplanted by Palm software and accessories anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a guy that doesn't like PCs at all, only using them to get info about cars and ask me where we should meet for lunch on Sunday, and a text-based MUA works better for his needs than a GUI one. Someone who gets the volume of email that you do may want to take a closer look at an MUA with the efficiency, flexibility, and power of Mutt.
Generally, those who are less computer-savvy prefer to have a text-based interface and a less complex program. I use the power of Outlook. I have multiple rules to automatically put e-mail into the appropriate folders based on sender (e.g., listserver), receiving address, sender, content, etc. I make extensive use of the ability to drag and drop messages into folders. I value the ability to click on a column to change the sorting order.
I do find Mutt interesting and may consider it for an older knock-around laptop that really is too sluggish and memory-limited for a modern GUI. I also might consider it for my mother, who just doesn't get the whole GUI interface thing.
Does your email come written with pictures or hieroglyphs?
Yes. I often get e-mail with pictures attached. I also get e-mail with HTML formatting and, whether you are an HTML fan or not, the formatting it allows can make for a much more readable document.
More importantly, the text-based nature of MUTT means that I would lose the ability to use GUI features like mouse-based operation, cut & paste, and so forth.
I just wanted to say "thanks" for the effort you put into that post -- even if you think that, because I am 42, that I "barely understand the internet and how it works." ;-) Does using the Arpanet back in '78 count?
I think that we were composing replies at the same time as we hit many of the same points that the rude little troll didn't understand. Your post was intelligently worded and quite effective. If you weren't posting anonymously, you'd be on my Slashdot "friends" list. Thanks again.
You're probably too used to Outlook to switch, but have you tried Sylpheed yet?
Outlook is new to me. Outlook Express had a much different UI.
Sylpheed looks interesting, elegant, and powerful. But I'm really not comfortable trusting my e-mail to a version 0.X e-mail client with screen shots in Japanese. I will keep an eye on it though. I'm always looking for something better.
I agree with you on most points, but calling OE "reliable" is not one of them.
Different people have different experiences. Yours may not be typical (or mine may not). For me, it was reliable. I think that most users don't experience the problems that you describe for, if they did, I believe that there would be much more "chatter" on the net about it.
Oh....and the import functions suck.
I agree and extend that to most e-mail programs. E-mail database storage formats should have been standardized years ago. This crap of 50 different formats is incredibly annoying.
That's bunk, man.
No, it's not "bunk." It's a factual representation of my experiences.
Use a real MUA, like mutt.
Mutt is text-based, can't easily import the messages that I already have, and does not work under Windows -- which is the primary OS that I use personally and professionally. Therefore, it does not meet my needs.
It's also no more "real" than any of the more sophisticated e-mail clients that I mentioned.
I don't know if you've tried it, but I have 1 POP and 2 IMAP servers I connect to with thousands of messages, and it works just fine.
I tried Mozilla's mail client and was underwhelmed, but perhaps we have different needs and priorities. If you're happy with it though, congrats on finding an e-mail client that you like.
Tools -> Message Rules -> Mail -> New -> "Where The Message is from the specified account" -> "Move it to the specified folder" ..
Damn! You learned me sumthin' new. I thought "Where The Message is from the specified account" referred to the sender's address (as in "From:").
It might be that the problem is not with the import function of the other mail clients, but with the OE mail database, which could be corrupt in some subtle way.
If the database is corrupt, then I expect the importing programs to tell me so via some kind of error message. If OE can find the messages in the database, then so should the programs that import the messages. Netscape found all of the messages, so it's not like they were unrecoverable.
I can deal with the concept of a corrupted database. What I cannot deal with is a program that silently fails.
Do you remember the time that MS charged a monthly fee to use IE?
Back when I paid for Netscape Gold?
Do you think that people would have switched to IE from Netscape if the companies charged $20-whatever/mth?
No, and Microsoft realized that. They recognized that the advertising power of being able to control the homepage and bookmarks far outweighed any fee that they might get for the browser. So they gave it away in a successful effort to take over the market and now use it to push MSN, other products, and sell bookmark placement to other firms.
How exactly are they leveraging their monopoly to do this? Windows doesn't come with anything related to Hotmail or MSN, idiot.
You are an ignorant turd, aren't you? Windows puts MSN icons on desktops, they make MSN the ad-splattering homepage for IE, they repeatedly ask if you have, or want to sign up for, a Hotmail account. Try reading this before you make more of a fool of yourself.
Exactly. Neither MSN or Hotmail are bundled, so they're irrelevant, and you're completely incapable of thought.
You are so incredibly stupid that it is no wonder that you post anonymously. If you had read the article, you would have seen that it said: It is consumer email in an early iteration, and our investment in the consumer space is now focused around Hotmail and MSN. That's where we're putting the emphasis in terms of new investment and new development work."
That means that Hotmail or MSN sign-up will be a big part of Windows install, that both MSN and Hotmail will be even more prominently pushed through IE (remember, IE ships with MSN as its homepage), and consumers will be left to either do the easy thing and sign up for MSN/Hotmail or try to hunt down an e-mail client and another service.
You're completely ignorant of the common user. Most common users I know are smarting than you, even, because at least they're capable of rational thought.
You wouldn't know an intelligent person if they hit you in the face -- and I'd like to be the guy to prove that. You calling me stupid is like Woody Allen calling Arnold Schwarzenegger wimpy.
OE was bundled,
And won't be any more.
that's how it's relevant to your post.
Wrong. We are talking about what happens now that OE is End Of Life, not what Microsoft did in the past.
MSN and Hotmail are services, so can't be bundled
Yes, services can be bundled with the OS. When the install asks if you want to sign up for a Hotmail account, the browser's homepage is an ad for MSN, the desktop includes a sign-up-for-MSN icon, and the system automatically starts up MSN Messenger, that's pushing the services down the users' throats and leveraging the monopoly power of Windows to do so. Are you even aware that:
AOL made a deal with Compaq to place an AOL icon on the desktop, and pay Compaq $35 for each AOL account sign-up it generated. In response, Microsoft announced that any OEM who put icons on the desktop must also put on an icon for MSN (Microsoft's service that competes with AOL) and Microsoft Media Player. That put AOL in the position of paying for Microsoft's advertising. Compaq stated that they will have no choice but to comply because of Microsoft's monopoly power. The Justice Department even investigated this as part of their anti-trust case against Microsoft.
Now go away little boy.
I'm assuming this was modded funny because it's so stupid.
If that was how messages were rated, yours would have been a +5 Funny.
Bundling software was illegal because everyone uses Windows, so they were leveraging their monopoly.
And now they want to leverage their monopoly on Windows to get people to use Hotmail and MSN -- two Microsoft online services that compete with other companies' offerings.
Not everyone uses MSN, in fact probably less than 1/4 of computer users do, so it's not illegal.
There was a time when "probably less than 1/4 of computer users" chose Internet Explorer as their browser, but Microsoft's bundling of that browser changed that.
If OE sucks, then the consumer is free to change to something else.
No they are not. The average consumer does not know where to find another mail client. They don't know how to install it. They don't know how to configure it. They think that 99% of the software downloaded over the net has viruses in it or is part of some clever ploy to steal their credit card number. They are scared that installing new software will "break" their computer and that they will have to take the computer back to Best Buy, pay the service department $150, and then find out that the "tech" wiped their hard drive and did a fresh install of Windows to "fix" the problem. If it's so damned easy to "change to something else", why did Netscape go ballistic when Microsoft started bundling IE with Windows and why is IE now the dominant browser?
But your last sentence makes no sense anyway in the context of this discussion. The point of this discussion is that Microsoft is discontinuing OE and is, instead, pushing future Windows users to sign up for MSN/Hotmail. So there won't be a version of OE, whether it sucks or not.
Maybe this will cause peopel to realize that Internet Explorer and Outlook Express AREN'T the only way to use the internet. With any luck, mozilla and its ilk should be seeing a lot more customers once the EOL for Internet Explorer 6 and Outlook Express 6 hits
.NET, and so forth. I normally kept OE6 set to display messages as plain text, disabling HTML. I've heard plenty of whining about Outlook Express security, but the majority of "security" issues were caused by idiots opening executable attachments.
My primary browswer is Mozilla. My second choice is Opera. Internet Explorer is a distant third. I've got bootable Linux, *BSD, and BeOS OS systems. I'm no Microsoft shill.
For e-mail clients, I had been using Outlook Express and just switched to Outlook in the last week. I have fairly demanding e-mail needs with several domains, multiple e-mail addresses, list subscriptions, and so forth. I tried quite a few shareware and public domain e-mail clients and found all of them lacking in one critical way or another. The list included the Mozilla e-mail client, Eudora, PocoMail, The Bat, and Pegasus Mail. Most had usability issues.
At least two of the clients pretended to have imported all of my messages in all of the folders (probably about 70,000 messages for the last 7 years sent and received) only to have failed to import a substantial portion of them. No error messages were displayed during the import process. Sorry, but that's a no-go. I'm unwilling to give up my message archive for professional and legal reasons. Nor am I willing to trust a program that would silently fail in that manner.
In those years, I have never contracted a virus, trojan horse, or worm through Outlook Express. I kept it patched and up-to-date. I had it set to use the "Restricted Sites" security setting which disabled such things as scripting, Java, ActiveX,
All of that said, I'm not blind to the faults of Outlook or Outlook Express. It was idiotic for Microsoft to include scripting of any kind for incoming messages. What were they thinking? Making an e-mail client that would retrieve from web sites without the user's permission was responsible for many people telling spammers "hey, my address is live!" The inability in OE to pick up from multiple mailboxes and have each go to its own folder is a glaring fault. There are, of course, other flaws and foibles.
All in all, though, Outlook Express was a damned good e-mail client for me. It had a well-designed user interface, was reliable, and served my purposes, and those of millions of other users, very well. Maybe this will spur on the development of other clients to the point that they rival or exceed Outlook Express, but right now, OE6 is still one of the best Windows e-mail clients available.
Since an XP 1800 is much faster than a thrift store computer, it is concievable that paying $200 instead of $50 would be a good idea, since you would save more money than the cost difference in the power bill in about a year. That, of course, assumes the 1800 is maxing out it's processor for 2 hours every day, so the slower computer would have to be left on that much longer, which is probably a bit of an extreme asumption, but I'm just making a point.
But we both know that the average gigahertz-plus PC spends 99+% of its time waiting for user input, disk I/O, or network traffic -- especially when the computer is in the hands of a kid. It's not like a computer that's five times as fast will let him produce homework five times faster, play games five times faster, or download five times as much porn per hour.
"Look! Santa brought you a new computer for Christmas."
"What are you talking about? I built the computer just like it said on Slashdot. And there's no such thing as Santa."
Remember, no more than 2 hours a day because of the electric bill."
"So why didn't Santa bring you enough money to pay the electric bill?"
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Yes, lying is no way to bring up a kid and you gave two darned good examples.
I suggest something more like:
"Son, we're proud of you for building your own computer, but no more than two hours per day. You need to spend time with your friends, keep up with your homework, and get exercise."
If parents were a little more open and honest about the need for outdoor activities, socializing, education, and exercise, the U.S. might not be a nation full of maladjusted, semi-literate, obese kids.
Just to be a smart ass, I just tested one... A power supply (with nothing connected) is drawing exactly 01watts.
I guess I should have said that a power supply that was "On" (vs. standby) mode. I'd guess that you hooked up an ATX power supply and didn't short the pins to turn it on.
Well, the problem with this, is that everyone is using the price of electricity in their area. You obviously don't live in CA, otherwise the price you quoted would be 50-100% higher. Yes, these people are incredibly electricly thrifty for some reason... Again, I'm not going to assume why.
Even if I was 100% off and the supply was drawing a full 400watts whenever on, we're still only talking 12 cents per day.
Well, that's the interesting thing... Power drain isn't really that much lower with older computers. Let's say they got a 200MHz system, that might require 10x as long to do the same ammount of work as the faster system, which would (in the long run) be more expensive.
I was referring to the initial cost of the computer, not the computer's power consumption. The parents are concerned about a few cents per day in electricity and the kid's got a computer that costs, at the least, hundreds of dollars. Something's wrong.
Years ago I purchased a kitchen gadget that slices and dices vegetables. It's especially good for onions and ten years later, I still use it when I have to dice four large onions for a batch of jambalaya. It cuts the time by a factor of at least four and results in no onion tears. It's cheap, shoddy, but still works fine probably ten years later.
So, yes, I have purchased something from an infomercial and been happy with it. I've never purchased anything else though and may never because the vast majority of it is complete, unadulterated junk. The thing you have to ask yourself: If the item I am seeing was made with the cheapest, shoddiest materials and labor available, would it be useful? If the answer is "yes", then you may have a winner.
And power supplies aren't exactly "basic knowledge".
Yes, that's basic knowledge. Watts, volts, amps, ripple, etc. is about as basic as you can get.
Perhaps in your day you "built" your own computers.
I did, and it's still "my day."
However, today you can buy fully assembled parts, and put your own together with just a screw driver. No sodering iron required.
You can bolt engines together by mail-ordering parts -- all with no knowledge of the effects of camshaft profiles, compression, bore to stroke ratio, spark advance, the advantages of forged (vs. cast) pistons, or what cross-bolted main bearings are for. What you bolt together will probably run. But it may be short-lived, unreliable, inefficient, and/or underperforming.
Just because you can do something does not mean that you should.
I've seen countless computers built by "screwdriver engineers" who had no real knowledge of the basics. Because they didn't understand the basics, they often bought components based on cost, advertising, or appearance rather than quality. Those computers often had cooling problems from inadequate heatsinks, thermal pads (rather than thermal grease), cheap, sleeve-bearing fans, and poor airflow (often with drives stacked one atop the other with no air-space in-between).
Other computers had low-quality power supplies that were either grossly under, or oversized. One person brought me a machine that only crashed during video game play. He was sure that the problem was the "crappy video card" -- actually the only good component in the whole system. I put a scope on the POS power supply and had him start gaming. The voltage sagged and got grossly noisy and, sure enough, the system crashed. I put in a decent supply and the system stopped crashing.
The PCs would often have poor-quality RAM (rather than Crucial/Micron, Mushkin, Corsair or some reputable DIMM manufacturer) that led to system instability. Many of the owners did not understand why the DIMM carrier is important. They would buy something with "Micron" RAM chips and then not think twice about the cheap carrier PC board. One builder proudly said that they insisted on "Micron" RAM. When I opened the machine, the DIMMS were no-name and the RAM chips on them were cheap, CAS-3 junk from some manufacturer other than Micron. You could have sold him the innards of a cordless phone as "Micron RAM" and he'd have believed it.
I've seen crappy motherboards with inadequate power supply filtration caps. One owner was astounded that I could look at a motherboard and see that the caps were undersized and too few in number. His several-times-per-day crashes ended when I replaced the motherboard with a reputable one.
If Dell built PCs the way that the average screwdriver engineer does, they would have gone bankrupt due to reliability and performane problems with their PCs.
The parents don't really care about the electricity bill. They just don't want their kid being exposed to all the pr0n and other evils on the internet for more than 2 hrs daily. He needs to get out and exercise, too.
If those are the reasons, then the parents should be honest with their son instead of claiming poverty. Lying is no way to raise a kid.
You say "That is also better than the test of ars-technica: put a scope on the powerline and show the ripple. This looks horrible, but if the power stays in spec there is nothing to worry about." Exactly! If the power stays in spec, there is nothing to worry about.
What? A power supply that is noisy and has a lot of ripple will usually make for a less stable system, regardless of whether the voltage remains within upper and lower limits. Power supplies that inject noise into a system will degrade system stability. With differing filtering caps all over the motherboard and PCI cards, the instantaneous logic "1" voltage seen by different chips can vary and can cause "glitches." While that's somewhat of an oversimplification, this is not the forum to give the equivalent of an EE course. Such noisy supplies can also lead to noisy analog I/O (audio signals in and out immediately come to mind -- perhaps some types of video, also).
Examining the ripple and noise with a scope is a very good way to evaluate a power supply. It costs money and takes design talent to create a clean output and it's a good way to tell when a power supply is substandard. I would much rather have a power supply with a clean output that was slightly out of voltage spec than one with ripple and noise which caused it to swing wildly between the upper and lower limits.
I have no idea, it could be from 1-400watts depending on the system.
.8kwh per day (.4kw * 2 hours). That's about six cents worth of electricity per day or about $2 per month. If they can't afford more than $2 per month, the kid should be using something like a 200mhz Pentium MMX that his parents found at the thrift store for $40.
The power supply itself, with nothing connected, will still draw more than one watt.
Your friend's parents are idiots.
More importantly, his friend is an idiot. His friend "built" the computer and then doesn't know that a 400W power supply doesn't draw 400W all of the time that it is on. If he doesn't even have basic knowledge like that, he has no business building PCs.
Better yet, they should try unplugging any devices that they aren't using, since most devices that are turned-off are still drawing 2-4 watts a piece 24 hours a day. Unplug 4 devices would recoup your friend's 2 hours of 'computer time'.
Something is seriously screwed up with this whole scenario. The kid has an Athlon XP1800+ system with a 7,200rpm drive and the parents are worried about him using a few cents worth of electricity per day? Even if their flawed supposition about the power draw was right, their limit is
"We are registering a steadily increasing demand for Linux-based solutions from our custumers."
That should have read "costumers", as in those who make or supply costumes, as for plays or masquerades.
Remember, any bug you find that you don't report is likely to not be fixed in the next release if you don't report it.
I found a bug that I didn't report. Now that I have reported finding a bug that I did not report, that means that the bug will be fixed, right?
I was doing this stuff in the early 80's.
Same here. I replaced fried logic/interface boards on several MFM and RLL hard drives. This is also done by all of the data recovery firms when they get drives in with fried electronics.
I'm glad that the guy persisted and was successful. I'm sure that he's a clever guy. But this is just not "news for nerds." What's next? A story about how someone changed a program message using a hex editor or made his own printer cable using a soldering iron?
I was thinking more along the lines of a scientific calculator-like keypad. Something like one of those thumbpads but bigger and with number keys and functions.
While it might be cool, it would have to be as big as a calculator, so I'll just stick with my HP calculator AND my Palm.
it might be easier to make a programmible button or two on the keypad instead and have that bring up a menu. Heck, most scientific calculators I've seen do a similar thing for less common functions (2ndF, 3rdF, alpha, math, etc., etc.).
Yes, but look at an HP calc. All of the buttons are labelled. You don't have to remember if the function you need is a 2ndF, 3rdF, Shift, etc. You look till you find it and then hit the appropriate "shift" key to access it.
Sorry. I don't want to rain on your parade or be contrarian. I just feel that the existing calcs are unlikely to be supplanted by Palm software and accessories anytime soon.