I was never an emulated ADM fan - but I found the real thing fantastic for reading/writing casual email. The keyboards were unusually pleasant and mono green text is by far the least obnoxious of CRT displays.
P.S. To the respondent who bothered to remark on the issues with this retro-tech - please realise the comment was half-tongue-in-cheek.
Once upon a time, an ADM-3A terminal looked like a very nice interface.
And just what, may I ask, is wrong with a 80x25 basic text only serial dumb term with clacky keyboard and green mono CRT?. I, like many people I know, have used ADMs (3E in my case) in preference to graphics terminals because the simple interface is pleasant when it is sufficient for the task at hand.
I like thunderbird 0.6 and 0.7 looks set to extend my good experiences with 0.6 - however (don't laugh) I'm not ready to give up Outlook just yet. As far as I'm concerned Thunderbird is a better mail client than Outlook in all but one respect.
I use email as a productivity tool - I send many emails to many people, on many topics - data entry speed is very important to me - and the clarity of my messages is very important to my recipients. I believe I can spell, and that my grammar is good - but this only means I can be sure my message 'hangs-together' when I've proof-read it a couple of times. When I use Word as my editor it corrects my silly typographic errors on the fly and detects and alerts me about many malformed sentences with its famous "wobbly green line" - which I find invaluable. I realise that as a grammar checker Word's is wanting, and that Thunderbird has a spelling checker... but I, for one, find these differences make using Thunderbird less productive than using Outlook.
Are there any plans to wire in a grammar/style checker? Will we ever see an "autocorrect" feature like Word's?
As silly as these two might sound, IMHO, they are the single biggest barriers to adoption of open source productivity tools.
Which, I suppose, is fantastic if you live, work and socialise in London.
Conversely, by virtue of London being the capital city, many of us country bumpkins occasionally need to venture from our hovels on the outskirts of Birmingham, Manchester or Bristol and visit London in person. British national rail infrastructure is a bad joke and you'd be surprised how difficult it is to get a London taxi to pick up on-time at a small hamlet in Somerset - not to mention the exorbitant cost!
Don't get me wrong, I do think that taking public transport is the best approach within London, however I firmly believe that the reason for adoption of the congestion charge in London (and it's consideration in other cities) is primarily because drivers are a easy target for additional taxation. I applaud projects which entice me out of my car by providing viable alternatives which make my journeys quicker; easier or less stressful - however I am deeply cynical that I'm actually faced with a policy ensuring that car journeys are the only viable option, but one for which substantial covert taxation can be recovered.
I'm very impressed with the vision required to implement a "low-power" entry level "ordinary" pc all on one board... VIA should be selling these by the boat-load... but for those of us who want to use their technology I still see a few remaining strategy issues:
The price of the VIA boards is impressive, however they need to consider system costs... because they are using a less-usual form factor many customers are faced with excessive costs for supporting bits-n-bobs. Many case/PSU combinations are more expensive then the motherboard and processor - and often 5 times the price of an ATX PSU/case... despite the smaller size and allegedly cost saving low-power requirements for the PSU. I'd like to see a partnership emerge to offer entry-level cases (preferably supporting more than 1 PCI card) for a competitive price.
While the specification and price of these all-in-one motherboards is impressive, I can see many applications for these boards with no need for video at all - let alone hardware MPEG functionality. Sure there are boards with low-spec video - but these also take low-spec RAM... isn't there a market for a board aimed at gateway or remote access applications?
I beg to differ - those messages are perfectly clear. Let me elucidate:
... may be legally privileged and/or confidential and is intended only for the use of the addressee(s).
The purpose of the message is to "use" the people to whom it has been sent. This clearly shows the solicitation of services, and as such gives permission to bill the sender for my time spent reading it.
No addressee should forward, print, copy, or otherwise reproduce this message in any manner that would allow it to be viewed by any individual not originally listed as a recipient.
I may do whatever I like with the message as long as I act in a role not associated with any of the addresses in the "To" and "CC" lines.
Thanks for your reply... I'm familiar with some of the material you mention... though (at least in the stuff I've read) there seems to be little discussion of what I consider the central 'hard' problem. I can find a lot of information about file system features, however I'm far more interested in a detailed analysis of state-of-the-art placement policy. I am extremely interested in strategies to avoid fragmentation and to enhance locality of reference between associated files (or other logical units of data) in order to devise systems where performance does not degrade over time. Is there published research into the effects of various placement strategies on long-term locality of references / fragmentation? Do some placement strategies always result in inherently stable systems where the emergent layout has desirable locality of reference, or are all reasonably simple strategies inherently unstable as volumes fill?
I like your thinking... though, I fear, exactly what you suggest will not be effective.
Another respondent suggested that the problem will be detecting the spam real-time - sure this will be a challenge - however I believe that there are many "sufficiently good" approaches. For example: a regexp would get many Viagra variants pretty quickly - ([vV]|(\/))[^A-z]*[iI|1][^A-z]*[aA@][^A-z][gG8][^A -z]*[rR][^A-z][aA@] would catch a good proportion of the 7-bit clean obfuscations and could easily be extended to catch the more obscure 'similar' characters too.
The real problem is that if all we do is slowly accept an incoming email, then the remote will not be using significant resources - and hence a multi-threaded mass-mailer would negate most of the benefits. However, your idea made me wonder... What would happen if we were to send a remarkably verbose delivery status message? This message could be a detailed 'terms of service' notification for non-white-listed correspondents. If this status message was (say) 1Mb, then this would rate-limit the number of remote interactions a mass-mailer could manage per hour. If the spammer were to use bespoke mass-mailing software which would not accept such a large delivery status message, then we could detect this and discard their message.
I'm looking for one - not trying to be argumentative... I couldn't care less about Be's FS, but I am interested in concepts surrounding file system design in general.
SMS in the UK at least is mainly an activity for teenagers. Old-fogies over the age of 25 typically find SMS an irritating, slow, overpriced "service" they'd rather avoid. I certainly find myself in that camp and also have little desire to be involved with "picture messaging" or similar gimmicks. Your 1600 minutes a month is serious phone usage - way over what I'd consider the norm. I estimate I use about 30 minutes a month on outgoing calls (with similar incoming.) and send/receive under 5 SMS messages. My mobile is most useful when it is fully functional and not ringing... for this type of use it is a godsend to only have to charge once a week!
I am pretty happy with my XP desktop for day-to-day tasks. In my opinion, the "Killer" feature of an MS desktop is grammar checking. I realise that Word is far from perfect in this regard - but it is better than nothing. It regularly alerts me to poorly constructed prose in hurriedly written documents. If this feature was matched (or preferably bettered) with FOSS, Linux could have my desktop from tomorrow.
I don't want a robot that can understand the emotional nuances of my speech, or detect irony, or do any complicated stuff. I can find humans in the street that will do a much better job, and anyway.
I don't see humans competing with robots for jobs - I see them doing the jobs we don't want or shouldn't be doing, and creating more jobs for humans. This is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions - that "Robots take jobs away". Robots help companies stay competitive (by helping produce better quality products at a lower cost, and allowing companies to meet the changing demands of customers); thus, robots help save jobs that otherwise may have been lost, and help create new jobs (although not always the same type of job).
This opinion flies against precedent. Humans already compete with machines for jobs - some might argue an early example being James Hargreaves' Spinning Jenny. This simple machine, and the more ambitious subsequent powered alternatives gave rise to significant conflicts of interest during the industrial revolution in the 18th century. These weaving machines certainly did take away jobs, and I see no reason why a similar pattern will not emerge again in future. It is self-evident that machines successfully competed for jobs in the past and won.
More interesting than the notion that jobs were "taken away" is that the technological advance radically changed the marketplace for labour. Few would argue today that our clothes should all be made by hand. The fact that jobs were "taken away" is simply not-relevant as it fails to take account of the wider context of employment and quality of life.
I can't speak personally about Pons, but I was amazed at Fleishman's gung-ho attitude. I attended a lecture he gate to the "Royal Society" in Southampton UK about a year or so after the collapse of the original claims. To be honest, even my most half-hearted fabrication of results for high-school chemistry put his case to shame. The evidence was laughable, his recording pathetic and the almost obviously dishonest results he was theorising about had spurious order-of magnitude arithmetic errors on his hand-drawn slides. It was unbelievable!
While academics at the event lambasted his unprofessional conduct - all I could say is that whatever Dr. Fleischman had been working on, it had no hope of supporting his highly unusual theories.
No... but I do have a sister who liked the AOL man's voice but now wishes to use her professional-looking domain without changing ISP.
AOL lost my business when it stole 4.99 twice from my switch card in 1994 and refused to address the complaint. This is a long story where I learned the advantages businesses with dubious or fraudulent business practices acquire by virtue of being based in Ireland.
Does this mean that someone (not I) who, for various reasons, wishes to use AOL can now make use of a personal domain email address? Until now it seemed that the absence of SMTP and POP3/IMAP4 support made it impractical to send email using a non-AOL email address over AOL dialup.
Dudette, never under estimate the importance of allure. A bloke might be involved in technically challenging work too, but seldom is he also appreciated for the size of his saggy-man-breasts.
Personally, I believe that a Gmail-like system but where there are no assumptions of privacy whatsoever would be particularly useful. If Gmail users could have previously assumed confidentiality, then moves to diminish privacy would leave a sour taste in my mouth... but not the converse. While my personal emails (handled by a privately maintained server) must remain private, I would find it very useful to be able to publish an email address (with no assumed privacy) but for which spam is neatly managed. I am happy for my communications with strangers to be 'in the open' - new contacts wishing should be happy to communicate in the open - at least until we mutually agree otherwise.
A question... I've asked this before without an appropriate answer.
If I'm writing a user-land program which memory maps a large file, modifies it in memory - then uses msync() to write to disk - what can be safely assumed?
Can I assume that the thread (or process?) calling msync() will block until the data is successfully written to stable storage?
Can I assume that in a sequence of calls msync()_1.. msync()_n that the writing of the data associated with msync_i implies that for all j<i that msync()_j has successfully completed?
Do I need to consider the specific storage hardware before I can draw any conclusions?
Can I influence the order in which pending writes are flushed from user space?
I hope that GMail is real - because it would solve a significant problem for me - though I'd really need GMail to support IMAP4 for my purposes...
I've three types of email I need to manage:
1) Secret, private emails - always with known contacts - encrypted. 2) Confidential email - again, known contacts only - stored only on my intranet - not sensitive - doesn't need encryption. 3) Public contact - frequently new or unknown contacts. Enquiries; replies from Usenet/mailing lists etc.
Types 1 and 2 are low volume and can be easily managed with current infrastructure. Tailored email addresses and white lists can virtually eliminate spam. Type 3, however, is a much bigger problem... because I can not easily control who contacts me. I think Gmail offers the hope of a solution here. For my purposes (at least) - given that Gmail would be used for initial contact only - I couldn't care less about the less than private nature of these communications. I don't really care if Google, law enforcement or even the government gets to see these messages - their content would be considered public. Provided that Gmail can be integrated into my current email system - such a service would offer an interesting and convenient alternative for "Type-3" email.
Cold telephone calls: "Thank you." . Or..."With whom do you wish to converse?"... generic 'personal call' answer... "I asked: with whom? I suggest not calling back until you know."... or if they say X... "I can leave a message for X - I assume they already have your contact details?"
Hard-selling: "For clarity, please put your best offer in writing - It will be considered alongside the other options next week."... any-old pressure technique saying why this is a bad choice..."What a shame. It sounds as if you're giving your competitors a significant advantage. You could be wasting your time - thanks anyway."
You seem to have confused me with one of your "users" - though I am amused that your attitude is so reminiscent of my dim and distant memories. Maybe you would feel more satisfied if you put the same effort into solving users' issues as you do into explaining why you feel addressing apparently real problems is too great a burden on your allegedly meagre resources? If you use your time and resources wisely you might be surprised at how much you can achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess where I met my ADM3e experience :-)
I was never an emulated ADM fan - but I found the real thing fantastic for reading/writing casual email. The keyboards were unusually pleasant and mono green text is by far the least obnoxious of CRT displays.
P.S. To the respondent who bothered to remark on the issues with this retro-tech - please realise the comment was half-tongue-in-cheek.
Once upon a time, an ADM-3A terminal looked like a very nice interface.
And just what, may I ask, is wrong with a 80x25 basic text only serial dumb term with clacky keyboard and green mono CRT?. I, like many people I know, have used ADMs (3E in my case) in preference to graphics terminals because the simple interface is pleasant when it is sufficient for the task at hand.
I like thunderbird 0.6 and 0.7 looks set to extend my good experiences with 0.6 - however (don't laugh) I'm not ready to give up Outlook just yet. As far as I'm concerned Thunderbird is a better mail client than Outlook in all but one respect.
I use email as a productivity tool - I send many emails to many people, on many topics - data entry speed is very important to me - and the clarity of my messages is very important to my recipients. I believe I can spell, and that my grammar is good - but this only means I can be sure my message 'hangs-together' when I've proof-read it a couple of times. When I use Word as my editor it corrects my silly typographic errors on the fly and detects and alerts me about many malformed sentences with its famous "wobbly green line" - which I find invaluable. I realise that as a grammar checker Word's is wanting, and that Thunderbird has a spelling checker... but I, for one, find these differences make using Thunderbird less productive than using Outlook.
Are there any plans to wire in a grammar/style checker?
Will we ever see an "autocorrect" feature like Word's?
As silly as these two might sound, IMHO, they are the single biggest barriers to adoption of open source productivity tools.
Which, I suppose, is fantastic if you live, work and socialise in London.
Conversely, by virtue of London being the capital city, many of us country bumpkins occasionally need to venture from our hovels on the outskirts of Birmingham, Manchester or Bristol and visit London in person. British national rail infrastructure is a bad joke and you'd be surprised how difficult it is to get a London taxi to pick up on-time at a small hamlet in Somerset - not to mention the exorbitant cost!
Don't get me wrong, I do think that taking public transport is the best approach within London, however I firmly believe that the reason for adoption of the congestion charge in London (and it's consideration in other cities) is primarily because drivers are a easy target for additional taxation. I applaud projects which entice me out of my car by providing viable alternatives which make my journeys quicker; easier or less stressful - however I am deeply cynical that I'm actually faced with a policy ensuring that car journeys are the only viable option, but one for which substantial covert taxation can be recovered.
I'm very impressed with the vision required to implement a "low-power" entry level "ordinary" pc all on one board... VIA should be selling these by the boat-load... but for those of us who want to use their technology I still see a few remaining strategy issues:
The price of the VIA boards is impressive, however they need to consider system costs... because they are using a less-usual form factor many customers are faced with excessive costs for supporting bits-n-bobs. Many case/PSU combinations are more expensive then the motherboard and processor - and often 5 times the price of an ATX PSU/case... despite the smaller size and allegedly cost saving low-power requirements for the PSU. I'd like to see a partnership emerge to offer entry-level cases (preferably supporting more than 1 PCI card) for a competitive price.
While the specification and price of these all-in-one motherboards is impressive, I can see many applications for these boards with no need for video at all - let alone hardware MPEG functionality. Sure there are boards with low-spec video - but these also take low-spec RAM... isn't there a market for a board aimed at gateway or remote access applications?
Captain obvious now asks: In what timeframe do we expect to see 0.9 released?
The purpose of the message is to "use" the people to whom it has been sent. This clearly shows the solicitation of services, and as such gives permission to bill the sender for my time spent reading it.
No addressee should forward, print, copy, or otherwise reproduce this message in any manner that would allow it to be viewed by any individual not originally listed as a recipient.
I may do whatever I like with the message as long as I act in a role not associated with any of the addresses in the "To" and "CC" lines.
Thanks for your reply... I'm familiar with some of the material you mention... though (at least in the stuff I've read) there seems to be little discussion of what I consider the central 'hard' problem. I can find a lot of information about file system features, however I'm far more interested in a detailed analysis of state-of-the-art placement policy. I am extremely interested in strategies to avoid fragmentation and to enhance locality of reference between associated files (or other logical units of data) in order to devise systems where performance does not degrade over time. Is there published research into the effects of various placement strategies on long-term locality of references / fragmentation? Do some placement strategies always result in inherently stable systems where the emergent layout has desirable locality of reference, or are all reasonably simple strategies inherently unstable as volumes fill?
I like your thinking... though, I fear, exactly what you suggest will not be effective.
A -z]*[rR][^A-z][aA@] would catch a good proportion of the 7-bit clean obfuscations and could easily be extended to catch the more obscure 'similar' characters too.
Another respondent suggested that the problem will be detecting the spam real-time - sure this will be a challenge - however I believe that there are many "sufficiently good" approaches. For example: a regexp would get many Viagra variants pretty quickly - ([vV]|(\/))[^A-z]*[iI|1][^A-z]*[aA@][^A-z][gG8][^
The real problem is that if all we do is slowly accept an incoming email, then the remote will not be using significant resources - and hence a multi-threaded mass-mailer would negate most of the benefits. However, your idea made me wonder... What would happen if we were to send a remarkably verbose delivery status message? This message could be a detailed 'terms of service' notification for non-white-listed correspondents. If this status message was (say) 1Mb, then this would rate-limit the number of remote interactions a mass-mailer could manage per hour. If the spammer were to use bespoke mass-mailing software which would not accept such a large delivery status message, then we could detect this and discard their message.
I wonder if anyone has tried this?
Can you suggest a better reference?
I'm looking for one - not trying to be argumentative... I couldn't care less about Be's FS, but I am interested in concepts surrounding file system design in general.
SMS in the UK at least is mainly an activity for teenagers. Old-fogies over the age of 25 typically find SMS an irritating, slow, overpriced "service" they'd rather avoid. I certainly find myself in that camp and also have little desire to be involved with "picture messaging" or similar gimmicks. Your 1600 minutes a month is serious phone usage - way over what I'd consider the norm. I estimate I use about 30 minutes a month on outgoing calls (with similar incoming.) and send/receive under 5 SMS messages. My mobile is most useful when it is fully functional and not ringing... for this type of use it is a godsend to only have to charge once a week!
I am pretty happy with my XP desktop for day-to-day tasks. In my opinion, the "Killer" feature of an MS desktop is grammar checking. I realise that Word is far from perfect in this regard - but it is better than nothing. It regularly alerts me to poorly constructed prose in hurriedly written documents. If this feature was matched (or preferably bettered) with FOSS, Linux could have my desktop from tomorrow.
I don't want a robot that can understand the emotional nuances of my speech, or detect irony, or do any complicated stuff. I can find humans in the street that will do a much better job, and anyway.
Coo - which street is that?
I don't see humans competing with robots for jobs - I see them doing the jobs we don't want or shouldn't be doing, and creating more jobs for humans. This is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions - that "Robots take jobs away". Robots help companies stay competitive (by helping produce better quality products at a lower cost, and allowing companies to meet the changing demands of customers); thus, robots help save jobs that otherwise may have been lost, and help create new jobs (although not always the same type of job).
This opinion flies against precedent. Humans already compete with machines for jobs - some might argue an early example being James Hargreaves' Spinning Jenny. This simple machine, and the more ambitious subsequent powered alternatives gave rise to significant conflicts of interest during the industrial revolution in the 18th century. These weaving machines certainly did take away jobs, and I see no reason why a similar pattern will not emerge again in future. It is self-evident that machines successfully competed for jobs in the past and won.
More interesting than the notion that jobs were "taken away" is that the technological advance radically changed the marketplace for labour. Few would argue today that our clothes should all be made by hand. The fact that jobs were "taken away" is simply not-relevant as it fails to take account of the wider context of employment and quality of life.
I can't speak personally about Pons, but I was amazed at Fleishman's gung-ho attitude. I attended a lecture he gate to the "Royal Society" in Southampton UK about a year or so after the collapse of the original claims. To be honest, even my most half-hearted fabrication of results for high-school chemistry put his case to shame. The evidence was laughable, his recording pathetic and the almost obviously dishonest results he was theorising about had spurious order-of magnitude arithmetic errors on his hand-drawn slides. It was unbelievable!
While academics at the event lambasted his unprofessional conduct - all I could say is that whatever Dr. Fleischman had been working on, it had no hope of supporting his highly unusual theories.
Thanks for the info... I will return to my "Pick a proper ISP" advice. :-)
No... but I do have a sister who liked the AOL man's voice but now wishes to use her professional-looking domain without changing ISP.
AOL lost my business when it stole 4.99 twice from my switch card in 1994 and refused to address the complaint. This is a long story where I learned the advantages businesses with dubious or fraudulent business practices acquire by virtue of being based in Ireland.
Does this mean that someone (not I) who, for various reasons, wishes to use AOL can now make use of a personal domain email address? Until now it seemed that the absence of SMTP and POP3/IMAP4 support made it impractical to send email using a non-AOL email address over AOL dialup.
Is there a correlation between percentage cocoa solids and the coercive power of chocolate?
Dudette, never under estimate the importance of allure. A bloke might be involved in technically challenging work too, but seldom is he also appreciated for the size of his saggy-man-breasts.
Well said - on the closet front - that is.
Personally, I believe that a Gmail-like system but where there are no assumptions of privacy whatsoever would be particularly useful. If Gmail users could have previously assumed confidentiality, then moves to diminish privacy would leave a sour taste in my mouth... but not the converse. While my personal emails (handled by a privately maintained server) must remain private, I would find it very useful to be able to publish an email address (with no assumed privacy) but for which spam is neatly managed. I am happy for my communications with strangers to be 'in the open' - new contacts wishing should be happy to communicate in the open - at least until we mutually agree otherwise.
If I'm writing a user-land program which memory maps a large file, modifies it in memory - then uses msync() to write to disk - what can be safely assumed?
I hope that GMail is real - because it would solve a significant problem for me - though I'd really need GMail to support IMAP4 for my purposes...
I've three types of email I need to manage:
1) Secret, private emails - always with known contacts - encrypted.
2) Confidential email - again, known contacts only - stored only on my intranet - not sensitive - doesn't need encryption.
3) Public contact - frequently new or unknown contacts. Enquiries; replies from Usenet/mailing lists etc.
Types 1 and 2 are low volume and can be easily managed with current infrastructure. Tailored email addresses and white lists can virtually eliminate spam. Type 3, however, is a much bigger problem... because I can not easily control who contacts me. I think Gmail offers the hope of a solution here. For my purposes (at least) - given that Gmail would be used for initial contact only - I couldn't care less about the less than private nature of these communications. I don't really care if Google, law enforcement or even the government gets to see these messages - their content would be considered public. Provided that Gmail can be integrated into my current email system - such a service would offer an interesting and convenient alternative for "Type-3" email.
Cold telephone calls: "Thank you." . Or..."With whom do you wish to converse?" ... generic 'personal call' answer... "I asked: with whom? I suggest not calling back until you know." ... or if they say X... "I can leave a message for X - I assume they already have your contact details?"
Hard-selling: "For clarity, please put your best offer in writing - It will be considered alongside the other options next week."... any-old pressure technique saying why this is a bad choice..."What a shame. It sounds as if you're giving your competitors a significant advantage. You could be wasting your time - thanks anyway."
You seem to have confused me with one of your "users" - though I am amused that your attitude is so reminiscent of my dim and distant memories. Maybe you would feel more satisfied if you put the same effort into solving users' issues as you do into explaining why you feel addressing apparently real problems is too great a burden on your allegedly meagre resources? If you use your time and resources wisely you might be surprised at how much you can achieve.