I just tried OpenOffice Writer 1.1.0 (Debian/unstable) on a P4/2.4 and it took 4 seconds from launch to accepting input. Recent versions load much faster than 1.0 and before.
I use Gnus strictly in IMAP mode, so I don't have longer delays that any other client I've tried. As far as features, Gnus wins over everything I've tried by a large margin. Every six months or so I'll get a wild hair and decide to try out the current crop of mail and news apps.
First, I spend about 10 minutes with KNode, Pan, etc., and run back to Gnus - I really wish those developers would check out the competition from time to time. They're all nice enough, and easy to use, but lack any serious functionality.
Then I run through KMail, Thunderbird, Evolution, etc. Those are getting close to adequate, but not quite:
KMail won't filter IMAP articles. This makes it useless at work where I'm connecting to an Exchange server and don't have any server-side filtering available.
Evolution seriously lacks. For one, it has no concept of folder-specific preferences. I subscribe to many mailing lists and have different.sigs, different From: headers, and sometimes different PGP keys depending on which folder I'm currently in - Evolution is just painful in this setup.
I was pleasantly surprised by Thunderbird. My main gripes were that 1) it doesn't have any way (that I know of) to save sent messages in non-default settings. I have a few project-specific folders (i.e., working with Bob in one, Tom in the other, Pete in the third, etc.) and when I reply to messages in those folders, I want my reply filed in those folders for easy threading; and 2) it isn't integrated with either Gnome or KDE (which is expected, but not ideal for my setup), so I have to maintain a parallel address book.
Mutt is supposedly feature-equivalent or nearly so to Gnus, and since Gnus is a significantly better newsreader than the alternatives, I like having a single mail/news interface. If I wasn't so into Usenet, I'd probably look more closely at Mutt.
I had purchased a Samsung 19" CRT one Fall. It wasn't a flat-screen, but it was one of the nearly-flat models popular at that time. About 6 months later (after I'd lost the receipt, of course), the flyback started whining and popping whenever the monitor came back from DPMS standby. After a few months, it wouldn't even hold reasonably low resolutions (1280x1024) without fuzzing and horrible edge distortion.
Knowing that I lost the warranty, I called Samsung's tech support to see how much it'd cost to get it fixed. I explained the problem to the service tech and she asked for the serial number from a label on the back to start the RMA process. I noticed that the date of manufacture was the previous October, and I was calling in late August / early September. The rest of the conversation went like:
Me: Hey, this has a one year warranty, right? I don't have a receipt, but wouldn't it be impossible for me to've had it for more than a year, since it was only made 10 months ago?
Her: Sounds reasonable. We'll cross-ship a new one to you if you'll pay for the return postage on the old one.
Me: Sweet!
Not only did they cross-ship, but the model I owned was EOLed, so they replaced it with a SyncMaster 900NF (Trinitron) at no charge.
I don't work for Samsung, but I do make darn sure to buy their stuff when it's an option and to tell people about their service whenever it comes up.
I'd say that it's kind of appalling that NNTP doesn't support compression and encryption
My feed is tunneled over a compressed SSH connection to my upstream.
It'd also be a be neat if PGP signature use was a bit more common on Usenet.
That's becoming more common, except that some people absolutely schiz out when they see attached signature ("THIS ISN'T A BINARY GROUP!!1!"). Alan Connor in comp.os.linux.misc is a good (well, bad) example.
The relegation of many NNTP users to mail clients. Sorry, but a dedicated newsreader is much better than a mailreader in every instance that I've seen.
Ever tried Gnus? It's by far the best mail and best news client I've ever used.
A few killer features that Web forums like Slashdot support are not present on Usenet. The big one, of course, is moderation.
Gnus uses adaptive scoring to highlight articles that match my prior reading patterns. I like it better than moderation-by-mob, but that's personal preference.
Usenet was used shamelessly for email address harvesting for a long time.
True, but I really don't think the web is significantly better.:)
You know, every time I hear that name, I think of the numerous cars sitting on blocks in my cousin Jimmy's yard (or field - what do you call a fenced-in area around a house with prairie grasses three feet high?). Man, I hated going there as a kid, although the black velvet string-art sailboat on the living room wall was pretty cool, and the black velvet bullfighter was kind of spiffy to a six year old.
Camino. Bleah. I'd rather just as soon use "Brat" or "Ranchero", and "Gremlin" wouldn't be much worse.
Wrong. If you want to compare like with like, then it'd be more accurate to say that you can't choose your license whenever you link to QT or the Linux kernel.
If your application is a userspace interactive thingy, then you can't use QT unless you release your source under the GPL or you pay Trolltech for a non-GPL license.
If your application is a kernelspace driver thingy, then you can't use Linux unless you release your source under the GPL or you pay Linus for a non-GPL license.
Note that I'm not saying you can't make a binary kernel module, any more than you couldn't make a proprietary server application that's accessed by a Free QT frontend. In either case, you can't write non-GPL code that includes portions of either the QT libraries or the Linux kernel without convincing the respective copyright holders to sell you a license.
So, Linux is exactly as Free or non-Free as QT. You can't make proprietary QT apps without paying, and you can't make proprietary kernel branches without paying.
How do I enable tabs in Xterm? Also, I can't seem to find the menu item for the configuration editor so that I can have one Xterm setup for shell sessions and another for, say, Nethack, without editing a bunch of X resources.
In other words, they don't do the same things. For me, Konsole is much faster since I can skip through sessions on different tabs without hunting around for a different window. Terms like "fast" and "slow" don't make any sense when the items being compared don't have the same featureset.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't eat a Triple Decker Bacon Burrito with Cheese (and a Diet Coke) for lunch every day. Any bidet capable of cleaning up the aftermath of the average American diet would be more powerful than I'd want close to my rear. Heck, I imagine we'd buy Charmin With Oxy-Clean if it were available.
one should spend the minimum amount on a processor that they feel comfortable with
I have a simple method for picking CPUs:
Go to Pricewatch and find the lowest prices for each of the processors in the range I'm interested in that's from a store I recognize and have good dealings with.
Make a mental graph of speed vs. price.
The graph usually looks like a nearly-flat line at the low end, and a nearly vertical line at the high end. Imagine something like f(x) = x^4 for x in [0, 4]; where x 1, the line is steep.
Buy the CPU whose price is at the cusp.
"Ditto" for the rest of your comments about memory and drives. The local Office Max keeps running periodic sales of WD 120GB SE (8MB cache) drives for $59, so I upgrade the drive(s) in one of my systems every six months or so.
I run 2 PPro 200 boxen. They are up 24/7/365. I find that linux keeps it lean
Sure does! And FreeBSD (my server OS of choice, but not by a huge margin) does also.
However, even my home servers spend more time running applications than kernel code. I run a Zope webserver, LDAP, a decent-size IMAP setup, and a few other services that don't require huge amounts of horsepower averaged over time, but that really make use of a nice CPU over short bursts. I probably only serve 5000 to 10000 web hits per day, so I could technically get away with a system that could manage pushing out a page every 8 to 16 seconds, but site visitors would get horribly annoyed at the sluggishness of their session.
That's why I have reasonably modern CPUs in my little home server. I don't do any video encoding or protein folding, but I want enough processing power to lower the latency of the services I host.
I agree with you in principle, but you have to understand that the one thing the US government is tremendously experienced with is moving around massive volumes of paper. They've spent 200 years building a huge infrastructure around the idea of paper trails.
Now, in the last 10-15 years it's become reasonable to use electronic means to move around large amounts of data between normal sites - that is, those not custom-built around mainframe systems like the original ARPAnet. The government seems to be making strides toward adapting to the new technology, but you have to understand that those giant traditional paper distribution networks can't just be replaced overnight. I'm sure that there are a lot of instances where, at this exact moment in time, it's actually cheaper and more efficient for office "A" to transmit information to office "B" using paper as a carrier medium.
Remember, "Rome" wasn't built in a day (Heh! An on-topic pun! Ain't I the clever one?). It'll take a while to remodel it to suit the current technology.
The government uses a lot of OCR - more than you would believe. Standardizing on one exact font description makes it far easier to build an OCR engine optimized for speed and accuracy, which in turn saves time and taxpayer dollars. It doesn't seem that unreasonable.
Yep. "RAID 5" is the desktop computing equivalent of whaletail spoilers on a Sentra - the people using it think they're the [insert 1337 slang for "cat's pajamas"] but those in the know are quietly enjoying their slightly more expensive but far better Mustangs and striped mirror volumes.
To really feel a part of American society, you must lose all knowledge of the world. Forget where Poland is.
I know this is a troll, but I've heard these arguments enough to know that quite a few people actually think this way.
OK, my counter: find Kentucky on a US. OK, now New Hampshire. How did the settling of Arizona differ from the Western-immigration fueled growth of the railroad towns in Missouri?
For some reason, Europeans like to think of the United States as one amorphous region on a map. Bluntly, it's not. Poland has as much in common with England as Louisiana has with Wyoming, but noone claims that non-Americans are ignorant for not knowing the distinct histories of the vastly different states. The common bond is that most Americans speak English as their native tongue, but everything else is as different between two states in the US as between two "states" in the European Union.
So, enough with the "ignorant American" jokes. Sure, there's a lot we don't know (and aren't interested in) about your history, and there's a lot you don't know (and aren't interested in) about ours. Drop the smugness.
One bit of advice: if you have any interest, sign up now for a network feed in a different timezone.
Good advice, but be aware that you may not be allowed to get the networks you want over the dish. I live equidistant to Omaha, NE and Sioux City, IA. Although I'm in Nebraska, the FCC considers my city to be in the Sioux City viewing area. Because of this, I can only get local stations over my dish if they're from Sioux City, even though no SC channels are available over the dish and all Omaha channels are. Worse, since I can technically receive NBC and CBS via antenna (no matter that the picture quality is abyssmal), the FCC won't allow me to "buy" those networks from other cities (although I can (and do) buy FOX and ABC out of Dallas).
Dish Network has an online list of cities where local coverage is available. If you live in one of these cities, then you can get all of your channels via satellite. If you're not, then you may be able to buy some or all of the channels from other cities.
I live in the upper Midwest (northeast Nebraska) and have a Dish Network DVR. My thoughts:
I haven't used a TiVo, so I can't directly compare the DVR. However, instead of recording a specific program, you set timers for a specific time slot, just as you would on a VCR. If a show you normally watch gets rescheduled, then the DVR will cheerfully record whatever happens to be on that channel at the normal time. If the show is extended for some reason (a special one-hour episode of a 30-minute sitcom, for example), then you'll only get the part broadcast during the normally scheduled time. Still, it works great, is a snap to use, and I otherwise absolutely love it.
If you have kids, being able to pause live TV is the difference between being able to take a break to change a diaper and missing part of the show. I will not go back to not having a pause button. Just won't do it. I love that more than any other feature.
We get lots of snow and thunderstorms. I have lost signal exactly twice in 18 months, each time due to a massively powerful supercell. I've never lost signal due to rain, ice, wind, or any of the other FUD reasons that the cable guys overhype. On the one hand, it's bad to lose reception when you most want it, i.e. when you're trying to decide whether to go into the tornado shelter. On the other hand, if conditions are so bad that we lose reception, then we need to be in the tornado shelter anyway. Besides, our cruddy cable got water into the system during a few torrential downpours, so we would've lost cable during those times anyway.
In short, other than the fact that we live in a small town and don't get local TV over the dish (although we expect to soon), I can't think of a single thing I miss from our cable days. The service is cheaper, the picture quality is better, the DVR rocks, and the reception is excellent. I won't be switching back.
I understand that many of you uber-users expect that every admin should know all the ins and outs of every server/program
That would be silly. I'm an admin, and there are a lot of servers and programs that I know nothing able - and many I've never even heard of, I'm sure.
But I darn well expect you to know about the services you provide before you turn them loose on the net. Don't know how to secure Sendmail/Exim/Exchange/whatever? Fine, but keep it off the net until you do or until you hire someone that does.
If you have the actual shrink-wrapped product CD with appropriate holograms, this isn't an issue.
That's right. Because no software houses suffer from hacked networks. Because all sub-contractors are trustworthy. Because the source used to generate a CD is inherently more secure than a source used to generate a downloadable file.
Do you know that Microsoft is the only party that ever touches their data before it gets pressed and shipped? If you thought so, you're wrong.
Would using a wire make the transmissions inherently more secure? Barring wierd quantum devices, of course not. VPN-over-WiFi is exactly comparable to VPN-over-wire. You have to assume that your physical media will be compromised when you design these networks.
you can do this with anything by assigning alias to sites with %s for the search term
The aggravating part is that this almost always works, except when "%s" happens to end with a "/" (and maybe other characters). I have a keyword named "valid" that sends the following URL to the W3C validator. It's very handy for testing - when you want to validate a page, go to the address bar and stick "valid " at the beginning. Then, realize that you forgot to delete the trailing "/" and get a popup: "The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded"
Other than that, it's great. I have keyword searches for PHP docs, stock prices, and all sorts of other stuff.
be-fan, I tend to like what you have to say. You're usually interesting and I enjoy your comments. However, would you please start using standard Slashdot quoting conventions? It's very hard to tell where your words start and end when you use "---" as a separator, particularly when you have several interleaved blocks of text.
Instead, would you be so kind as to wrap the text your quoting in <em> tags, and use <p> to set off the individual paragraphs? It'd make your comments a lot easier to read.
No. It affects SSL and non-SSL connections. Basically, if the URL starts with https?:// and includes a "@", then MSIE will now block it.
The implications are just - well - amazing. If you'd been using Apache's "Basic authentication" in.htpasswd to password-protect directories, and were used to sending out URLs like http://user:pass@myserver.example.com/myAccount/ , then you get to re-write your authentication system.
Microsoft, you pig-headed freaks, WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!? That's been an RFC standard [1] and in common usage for YEARS! And you just up and rip it out without any significant warning at all?
On the plus side, I'm now officially deprecating MSIE as a supported platform for internal company web applications. If I write a standards-compliant application, and it happens to work under IE, great - if not, don't complain to me about it, because I simply don't care anymore. If users want to use non-standard junk, let them deal with the hassle on their own.
[1] Yeah, the RFC recommends against it for security reasons. Within a controlled environment that's a non-issue.
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I just tried OpenOffice Writer 1.1.0 (Debian/unstable) on a P4/2.4 and it took 4 seconds from launch to accepting input. Recent versions load much faster than 1.0 and before.
First, I spend about 10 minutes with KNode, Pan, etc., and run back to Gnus - I really wish those developers would check out the competition from time to time. They're all nice enough, and easy to use, but lack any serious functionality.
Then I run through KMail, Thunderbird, Evolution, etc. Those are getting close to adequate, but not quite:
Mutt is supposedly feature-equivalent or nearly so to Gnus, and since Gnus is a significantly better newsreader than the alternatives, I like having a single mail/news interface. If I wasn't so into Usenet, I'd probably look more closely at Mutt.
I had purchased a Samsung 19" CRT one Fall. It wasn't a flat-screen, but it was one of the nearly-flat models popular at that time. About 6 months later (after I'd lost the receipt, of course), the flyback started whining and popping whenever the monitor came back from DPMS standby. After a few months, it wouldn't even hold reasonably low resolutions (1280x1024) without fuzzing and horrible edge distortion.
Knowing that I lost the warranty, I called Samsung's tech support to see how much it'd cost to get it fixed. I explained the problem to the service tech and she asked for the serial number from a label on the back to start the RMA process. I noticed that the date of manufacture was the previous October, and I was calling in late August / early September. The rest of the conversation went like:
Me: Hey, this has a one year warranty, right? I don't have a receipt, but wouldn't it be impossible for me to've had it for more than a year, since it was only made 10 months ago?
Her: Sounds reasonable. We'll cross-ship a new one to you if you'll pay for the return postage on the old one.
Me: Sweet!
Not only did they cross-ship, but the model I owned was EOLed, so they replaced it with a SyncMaster 900NF (Trinitron) at no charge.
I don't work for Samsung, but I do make darn sure to buy their stuff when it's an option and to tell people about their service whenever it comes up.
My feed is tunneled over a compressed SSH connection to my upstream.
It'd also be a be neat if PGP signature use was a bit more common on Usenet.
That's becoming more common, except that some people absolutely schiz out when they see attached signature ("THIS ISN'T A BINARY GROUP!!1!"). Alan Connor in comp.os.linux.misc is a good (well, bad) example.
The relegation of many NNTP users to mail clients. Sorry, but a dedicated newsreader is much better than a mailreader in every instance that I've seen.
Ever tried Gnus? It's by far the best mail and best news client I've ever used.
A few killer features that Web forums like Slashdot support are not present on Usenet. The big one, of course, is moderation.
Gnus uses adaptive scoring to highlight articles that match my prior reading patterns. I like it better than moderation-by-mob, but that's personal preference.
Usenet was used shamelessly for email address harvesting for a long time.
True, but I really don't think the web is significantly better. :)
You know, every time I hear that name, I think of the numerous cars sitting on blocks in my cousin Jimmy's yard (or field - what do you call a fenced-in area around a house with prairie grasses three feet high?). Man, I hated going there as a kid, although the black velvet string-art sailboat on the living room wall was pretty cool, and the black velvet bullfighter was kind of spiffy to a six year old.
Camino. Bleah. I'd rather just as soon use "Brat" or "Ranchero", and "Gremlin" wouldn't be much worse.
If your application is a userspace interactive thingy, then you can't use QT unless you release your source under the GPL or you pay Trolltech for a non-GPL license.
If your application is a kernelspace driver thingy, then you can't use Linux unless you release your source under the GPL or you pay Linus for a non-GPL license.
Note that I'm not saying you can't make a binary kernel module, any more than you couldn't make a proprietary server application that's accessed by a Free QT frontend. In either case, you can't write non-GPL code that includes portions of either the QT libraries or the Linux kernel without convincing the respective copyright holders to sell you a license.
So, Linux is exactly as Free or non-Free as QT. You can't make proprietary QT apps without paying, and you can't make proprietary kernel branches without paying.
In other words, they don't do the same things. For me, Konsole is much faster since I can skip through sessions on different tabs without hunting around for a different window. Terms like "fast" and "slow" don't make any sense when the items being compared don't have the same featureset.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't eat a Triple Decker Bacon Burrito with Cheese (and a Diet Coke) for lunch every day. Any bidet capable of cleaning up the aftermath of the average American diet would be more powerful than I'd want close to my rear. Heck, I imagine we'd buy Charmin With Oxy-Clean if it were available.
I have a simple method for picking CPUs:
"Ditto" for the rest of your comments about memory and drives. The local Office Max keeps running periodic sales of WD 120GB SE (8MB cache) drives for $59, so I upgrade the drive(s) in one of my systems every six months or so.
Sure does! And FreeBSD (my server OS of choice, but not by a huge margin) does also.
However, even my home servers spend more time running applications than kernel code. I run a Zope webserver, LDAP, a decent-size IMAP setup, and a few other services that don't require huge amounts of horsepower averaged over time, but that really make use of a nice CPU over short bursts. I probably only serve 5000 to 10000 web hits per day, so I could technically get away with a system that could manage pushing out a page every 8 to 16 seconds, but site visitors would get horribly annoyed at the sluggishness of their session.
That's why I have reasonably modern CPUs in my little home server. I don't do any video encoding or protein folding, but I want enough processing power to lower the latency of the services I host.
Now, in the last 10-15 years it's become reasonable to use electronic means to move around large amounts of data between normal sites - that is, those not custom-built around mainframe systems like the original ARPAnet. The government seems to be making strides toward adapting to the new technology, but you have to understand that those giant traditional paper distribution networks can't just be replaced overnight. I'm sure that there are a lot of instances where, at this exact moment in time, it's actually cheaper and more efficient for office "A" to transmit information to office "B" using paper as a carrier medium.
Remember, "Rome" wasn't built in a day (Heh! An on-topic pun! Ain't I the clever one?). It'll take a while to remodel it to suit the current technology.
The government uses a lot of OCR - more than you would believe. Standardizing on one exact font description makes it far easier to build an OCR engine optimized for speed and accuracy, which in turn saves time and taxpayer dollars. It doesn't seem that unreasonable.
Yep. "RAID 5" is the desktop computing equivalent of whaletail spoilers on a Sentra - the people using it think they're the [insert 1337 slang for "cat's pajamas"] but those in the know are quietly enjoying their slightly more expensive but far better Mustangs and striped mirror volumes.
I know this is a troll, but I've heard these arguments enough to know that quite a few people actually think this way.
OK, my counter: find Kentucky on a US. OK, now New Hampshire. How did the settling of Arizona differ from the Western-immigration fueled growth of the railroad towns in Missouri?
For some reason, Europeans like to think of the United States as one amorphous region on a map. Bluntly, it's not. Poland has as much in common with England as Louisiana has with Wyoming, but noone claims that non-Americans are ignorant for not knowing the distinct histories of the vastly different states. The common bond is that most Americans speak English as their native tongue, but everything else is as different between two states in the US as between two "states" in the European Union.
So, enough with the "ignorant American" jokes. Sure, there's a lot we don't know (and aren't interested in) about your history, and there's a lot you don't know (and aren't interested in) about ours. Drop the smugness.
Good advice, but be aware that you may not be allowed to get the networks you want over the dish. I live equidistant to Omaha, NE and Sioux City, IA. Although I'm in Nebraska, the FCC considers my city to be in the Sioux City viewing area. Because of this, I can only get local stations over my dish if they're from Sioux City, even though no SC channels are available over the dish and all Omaha channels are. Worse, since I can technically receive NBC and CBS via antenna (no matter that the picture quality is abyssmal), the FCC won't allow me to "buy" those networks from other cities (although I can (and do) buy FOX and ABC out of Dallas).
Dish Network has an online list of cities where local coverage is available. If you live in one of these cities, then you can get all of your channels via satellite. If you're not, then you may be able to buy some or all of the channels from other cities.
In short, other than the fact that we live in a small town and don't get local TV over the dish (although we expect to soon), I can't think of a single thing I miss from our cable days. The service is cheaper, the picture quality is better, the DVR rocks, and the reception is excellent. I won't be switching back.
That would be silly. I'm an admin, and there are a lot of servers and programs that I know nothing able - and many I've never even heard of, I'm sure.
But I darn well expect you to know about the services you provide before you turn them loose on the net. Don't know how to secure Sendmail/Exim/Exchange/whatever? Fine, but keep it off the net until you do or until you hire someone that does.
That's right. Because no software houses suffer from hacked networks. Because all sub-contractors are trustworthy. Because the source used to generate a CD is inherently more secure than a source used to generate a downloadable file.
Do you know that Microsoft is the only party that ever touches their data before it gets pressed and shipped? If you thought so, you're wrong.
Would using a wire make the transmissions inherently more secure? Barring wierd quantum devices, of course not. VPN-over-WiFi is exactly comparable to VPN-over-wire. You have to assume that your physical media will be compromised when you design these networks.
The aggravating part is that this almost always works, except when "%s" happens to end with a "/" (and maybe other characters). I have a keyword named "valid" that sends the following URL to the W3C validator. It's very handy for testing - when you want to validate a page, go to the address bar and stick "valid " at the beginning. Then, realize that you forgot to delete the trailing "/" and get a popup: "The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded"
Other than that, it's great. I have keyword searches for PHP docs, stock prices, and all sorts of other stuff.
Instead, would you be so kind as to wrap the text your quoting in <em> tags, and use <p> to set off the individual paragraphs? It'd make your comments a lot easier to read.
Personally, I'd be pissed at your parents for naming you "postmaster".
... or shutdown (if you don't believe in an afterlife).
The implications are just - well - amazing. If you'd been using Apache's "Basic authentication" in .htpasswd to password-protect directories, and were used to sending out URLs like http://user:pass@myserver.example.com/myAccount/ , then you get to re-write your authentication system.
Microsoft, you pig-headed freaks, WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!? That's been an RFC standard [1] and in common usage for YEARS! And you just up and rip it out without any significant warning at all?
On the plus side, I'm now officially deprecating MSIE as a supported platform for internal company web applications. If I write a standards-compliant application, and it happens to work under IE, great - if not, don't complain to me about it, because I simply don't care anymore. If users want to use non-standard junk, let them deal with the hassle on their own.
[1] Yeah, the RFC recommends against it for security reasons. Within a controlled environment that's a non-issue.