> "The real internet?" The WHOLE THING? Holy shit! That's an amazing phone. > Mine only lets me surf the web and check my email.:(
My Handspring Treo 300 has a copy of PalmVNC installed, so I can remotely access the FreeBSD machine that my work uses as a web/mail server. If I do this, then I have a cute 155x155 [graphical] desktop session that I can use to do anything that a FreeBSD box can do on the internet (that is, everything).
That's really power sapping, though, constantly transferring graphical updates to and from the phone. Usually, I just use one of two web browsers (Blazer and Eudora Web) for most stuff. I have a pop3 mail client on the Treo, but I usually use a webmail interface to IMAP for my mail. The Treo has an ssh1 client as well as clients for telnet and ftp. The ftp client can remotely install Palm apps, and there's also a program called "PalmTorrent" (NOT a bittorrent client!) that can download and install apps over http. Oh, and there's a usenet client called Yanoff that I use here and there. It's a bit slow, but it works. I have an SMB (Windows file share) client on it, but I think it acts like a shell interface, and I never really tried to work with it.
The neat thing is that I got this device for $150, and my $60/mo (including taxes) cellular plan includes over forty-thousand minutes of internet access each month for no additional charge.
PalmOS kicks ass for phones, imho. I'd be happy if the Sharp Zaurus had a variant that could run with this cellular plan (and with decent battery usage), though, since the TCP/IP apps on the Zaurus really, really rock a whole lot harder.
> The same thing with ATi/nVidia. Two players means they each get half the market.
I had actually heard that Intel was the market leader (or close to it) with their amazingly poor, bug-ridden, "Extreme Graphics" integrated chip, largely due to their use in Dell (and other vendor) home machines.
> For example, what happens if you don't like firefox, how do you move your new bookmarks back to IE?
Well, all applications *should* be responsible for importing from other formats. It *shouldn't* be the responsibility of anyone other than Microsoft to make an importer for MSIE from Netscape/Mozilla settings. But that's just my hippie cooperation freako side talking.;)
There are converters that can change between different formats. I've used bookmarkbridge, which synchronizes between Opera, Mozilla and MSIE. For the most part, it works, but I had to stop because MSIE had problems with certain entries. For example, some web pages had really long TITLE tags, and the bookmark entries in Opera had the full titles, and bb tried to convert them into file names, which sucked, because some of them had special characters (like slashes) that didn't work in file names.
Also, bookmarklets (and if you don't know what these are, look them up, because they absolutely ROCK!) can get messed up in such conversions.
Still, yeah, in the absence of an MSIE importer, a Mozilla exporter is probably really useful. Heck, I think that a built-in synchronizer would be a really brilliant idea (think of it -- uncertain users can just go back and forth between browsers, and any bookmark added to one browser will apply to the other!).
It's too bad that I know no XUL. My experience is pretty firmly rooted in Qt.:/
> FCI made a browser called Chameleon which offered enhancments to IE (and ads)... It had tabbed > browsing. The last update to that program was in 1999; but it was developed much earlier. The earliest I > can find Opera and tabs mentioned in the same sentence is 2002. But since I've never used Opera and > can't find a changelog for it... who knows.
The reason why you couldn't find anything is that you're using the wrong terminology. "Tabbed browsing" is a sexy marketing word that the Mozilla folks invented. It means "MDI with taskbar".
The first Opera had MDI, and it was running in 1994. I don't know if it had a taskbar that early, I think that there's little inventive difference between having the list of open documents in the "Window" menu versus having it in a toolbar.
> I am so happy that AMD is really giving Intel a run for their money. I remember when they had so > many problems with their first few processors. Now that their processors are strong and stable they > have a lot of 'followers'. Their processors are a great value and definately worth every penny.
Um. The first AMD processors were made in the early 1970s. The first AMD x86 (PC) processors were made around the time that IBM adopted the 8086 processor (the late 1970s, I think).
And, bah, AMD's processor designs (that is, after they stopped being a foundry for Intel's designs) have been stable since the K6. Their processors have been "strong" (that is, if by strong you mean having fast floating-point performance) for several years, starting with the introduction of the K7 (Athlon). They tend to have fewer catastrophic bugs than Intel processors. Any real stability problems have been caused by poor support by chipset manufacturers, and there were always stable options, if you were willing to avoid crappy motherboard manufacturers.
> Frozen Bubble? The screenshots look almost exactly like Bust-A-Move. I have to wonder just how bad the > Linux gaming scene is if the best it has to offer is an unlicensed copy of an old console series.
Bah, in '02 or '03, one of the most popular games for Windows was Snood, which was also a rip-off of Bust-A-Move. It just happens to be a fantastic puzzle game, and almost any adaptation of it is fantastic. Frozen Bubble is very artfully done, though.
Me? I like Gweled and Crack-Attack on the puzzle side. On the 3D side, you'll often find me playing gl-117, a fighter-pilot game. Flightgear is pretty cool, as well, though it's a simulator and not a game. I don't play too many games, though. I'm more of the type to take my pleasure from writing programs (I'd write games, but I suffer from ADD and depression, so I usually make a great start then drop it, cold turkey). Of course, I haven't owned a computer joystick since the 1980s, so this probably influences my lack of enjoyment of some types of games.
> I'd almost go along with this. We definitely need much stricter standards for driving. I think you > should need additional testing to be allowed to use a phone while driving, too. It's clear that most > drivers aren't capable of doing them both at the same time-- at least not safely.
The problem with this is that our working culture is put together in a way that millions of people *have to* drive a car in order to reach their place of employment, and millions of people *cannot* change jobs easily, even if they are strongly qualified.
If I had to use public transportation, it would mean about two hours of walking and perhaps forty minutes sitting on the train, round trip, per day, and that's assuming that the train arrives at a perfectly ideal time that matches up with my rigid work schedule. It wouldn't be cheaper, either, than driving.
I'm experienced with setting up and maintaining BSD, Linux and MSWindows servers as well as desktop software for these platforms. I've put together ISO900x documents, I can program in Perl and C++, I'm in decent enough shape to move around the occasional heavy object, I do a ton of tech support, I remotely administer machines a thousand miles away, I'm a master of combating spyware on Windows machines, I have a ton of other responsibilities, and I make just enough money after eight years to not quite move out of my parents' house. And job seeking for four years has yielded nothing.
So making licenses more difficult for people like me to acquire would essentially destroy our lives entirely. People like me would end up penniless at best. But we'd have lots of fun writing Special Relativity equations in the harsh winter snow with our freeze-dried fingers.
I recommend giFT. You can find it at gift.sf.net, and modern distros should have it in their repositories (try something like "urpmi gift" or "apt-get install gift" to see if it automatically installs from the internet). You can use different front-end clients with it, which is a nice feature. Apollon is the popular gui front-end, and giFTcurs is an excellent ncurses-based (works in text terminals, but has tabs and layouts like a gui app) front-end. It can be attached to FastTrack (that's the Kazaa network) as well as Gnutella and gift's own OpenFT network. It's possible that somebody will eventually add support for other P2P networks, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping.:)
There are no fully featured, complete applications which mimic KDE/GNOME programs like Konsole or gnome-terminal -- that is, no console/terminal programs that support MDI so that you don't need to waste real estate on the task bar for each of the many command line boxes you might open in MS Windows. I eventually was able to get KDE working in Cygwin, but it's pretty slow on this 550MHz PIII.
I set up ion (it took a *long* time to find a version that would compile on cygwin, though) in a fixed-sized X11 session and gave it konsole-like keybindings (so that I could Shift+Left and Shift+Right to move between terminal sessions. So it's like I have an MDI terminal app. It's normally bash, but I can also get it to run cmd.exe (though Tab completion and history is broken when I try to go into this mode).
It's very cool. I also used ion in Linux when my Duron-800 system started having capacitor problems on its motherboard (it would crash out of Win32 and X11 sessions using full-fledged window managers). I learned a lot about getting full functionality of my system in regular tty modes (fbtv, fbxine, aumix and giFTcurs rule!).
I haven't tried it in FreeBSD. I took too much perverse glee in having an employer give me carte blanche with respect to setting up our web/mail/wap/ldap/im server, so I was perfectly happy to load it up with a full KDE 3.2.3 and OpenOffice setup, even though it's a thousand miles away and not connected to a monitor(!).
Disclaimer: I actually did set up the server well, and I'm very good with keeping it running, to the point where it's reliably saved the employees from the *other* servers we use.
> How many hours a day (out of an 8 hour day) do you think you could hold something > (even of tiny mass like a mouse) in the air, away from your body.
For what it's worth, I have a Gyration mouse, with which you can control the screen by waving it about in air. The feeling is almost like using a laser pointer at a presentation, but I tend to get comfortable by tossing my arm at odd angles (like stretched back over the shoulder of my chair) while controlling the screen as normal. I have this mouse (which is heavier than a typical wireless mouse) up in the air the majority of the time, though I do have the option of putting it on my desk and using it as an optical mouse when I need to. Having optional modes like this do help against the difficulty you describe.
> I've even stopped using IE in favor of Moz on XP, and still got new spyware installed. So there's an > exploit in this browser as well. Has to be, as I don't Kazaa, or any shareware utilities.I'm pretty picky > about what I install, 99% commercial s/w.
Well, there actually is one exploit related to Mozilla, which was reported on recently on slashdot. It was a Windows vulnerability relating to the "shell" protocol, and Mozilla's tendency is to hand over unknown protocols to the OS (so that, for example, a call to some "irc://" url would open up mirc or something). The fix is really straightforward (it's a really tiny xpi extension that changes a simple javascriptish setting (or something along those lines) that disallows shell calls. Also, the most recent versions are immune to the problem.
Still, it's entirely possible that you were exploited without doing anything. There's a hole still out there, I believe, that lets external systems run arbitrary programs on your machine, which basically would allow any spyware to become installed, even if your machine is just sitting there.
Additionally, there are a couple classes of spyware that Spybot cannot really handle. Those'd be some of the BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) and the CoolWebSearch derivatives. Spybot would scan it and clean it and report that everything's totally clean, but then the surviving fragment of spyware would just redownload and reinstall crap all over again. "HijackThis" and "CWShredder" are excellent utilities for getting past this.
Hmm. Exceed? That's something like VNC for individual applications, is it? So your Windows box is effectively firewalled away from the internet, then? Interesting strategy.
Please reconnect your Windows machine back to the internet. People have been paying me actual money to clean off the spyware from their machines, and I'm starting to enjoy this. ^_^
> 1. The ability to open a new browser window and have the old page displayed in it, complete with its > history and URL in the address bar. Very useful if you want to fork your browsing path and go down > two different branches.
I just did that in Firefox. There are several extensions that add page cloning. I happen to use Tab Browser Extensions, which both clone pages and the instance's history. Yeah, the capability isn't in the base install, but the whole point of extensions are that you add these capabilities *only if you want them*.
> 2. The ability to open a new URL from the keyboard alone. All I have to do is hit Ctrl+O, type in the URL, > and hit Enter. On Firefox and Moz I have to navigate all over the UI, using F6 (which doesn't > always work) to try to get to the right part of the UI.
Now this is just trollish. Keyboard shortcuts are a *lot* easier in Firefox than they are in IE. there's a comparative rundown at "http://texturizer.net/firefox/keyboard.html". In this case, you'd hit CTRL+L to get to the URL bar. CTRL+L has been the standard way of opening a typed URL since the early 90s for most descendents of Mosaic, with the notable exception of Netscape 4.x. IE, NS2.x, NS3.x and all Mozillas use CTRL+L.
Additionally, CTRL+K brings you to the google field.
> 3. Google Toolbar. Much nicer than the moz/firefox alternative.
I honestly can't tell the difference between the IE Google Toolbar and the Mozilla Googlebar, except that Googlebar for Mozilla has more options and can integrate into the Multizilla pref bar.
For what it's worth, these days I use Opera and Konqueror more than I use Mozilla. But Mozilla is damned powerful and ridiculously flexible.
> Only those without any sense of decency, which is perhaps most sysadmins, but not all. Any admin who > aspires to being a good man would not invade other's privacy because they're 'just fscking currious'.
There are extreme bizarre cases. We have an old Netware IMS system for handling mail, and it just can't handle the huge amounts of traffic that the forty people here generate (well, in honesty, a huge amount of spam comes through here). So there are times that a few hundred messages get stuck in the spool. I have to move them out and examine each one's contents to see which messages need to be move back into the spool and which should just get deleted. Most are spam, but some are legit, so I have to look at the headers and take a quick glance at the body (to look for spamlike sentences, like words with spaces in odd places). So I tend to see snippets of personal communication here and there. I take no particular pleasure from it, but I have to do it.
Incidentally, this problem dramatically increased my push towards learning shell scripting and C++ programming. I created a pretty cool gui app that lets me browse these spool files and manage them, and I can work awk and sed to get rid of the bulk of messages by common elements (such as recovering any messages that are "From:" the company president).
> The vastly different look and feel, from one app to the other, > is one of the main problems, but it is never gonna go away...
I would never pretend that X is without its problems, but I think that this one is really exaggerated in importance. Granted, I compare against MSWindows and not Mac OS X, but I still maintain my point if only by way of stubbornness.
At work, I'm running Windows 2000, Office 2000, OpenOffice.org (to recover occasionally corrupted MS Word files), Opera, Mozilla Messenger, and xterm-on-ionwm-on-X11-on-Cygwin for Konsole-like functionality. There's also an accounting program custom built by some nigh incompetent outside developers. Every single one of these programs use a different widget set (even Office 2000, which is made by the same company as Windows 2000!), and the different widgets do not impede my productivity. They also don't make me shriek in terror when I look at them.
At home, I'm running KDE. Almost every program I run is KDE-based, so they have the same "Crystal" theme. On occasion, I run Opera, but the Qute theme that Opera is using pretty much meshes nicely with KDE's look, and both are Qt-based. The only other major widget sets I use are XUL (Mozilla apps) and gtk. I have gtk set to automatically use my KDE theme for its icons (a neat little tool called "GtkQt"), so gtk apps typically differ in only a few aspects, like button placement and 3D-ness of buttons. I choose to use a different look for Mozilla (Walnut), but if I wanted to, I could make it Qute, which would pretty much make my entire desktop experience homogenous.
But, you know what? There's actually a positive to having different programs running with different themes. If I see a wooden texture, I know I'm in my mail app without having to move my eyes around. If I see a bunch of buttons across the bottom of the app, I know I'm probably in KNode, my newsreader (I custom-placed the toolbar that way). If I see a vertical "tab bar" across the right side of the window, I instantly know that I'm at an Opera window. It's pretty neat. A different look can make it easier to instantly know where you are and what you're doing in your computer. I mean, would you paint your bedroom the same colour as your family room? (hint: brighter colours in the latter, subdued colours in the former)
> 3. Window peeling - this is kinda nifty. Instead of minimizing, resizing or moving your current window > to see what is underneath you 'peel back' part of the parent.
> That's what I always liked window managers that supported the "shade" feature.
Which ones haven't? I'm pretty sure that you can do it in all the major ones (KDE, GNOME, IceWM, Xfce... maybe not ratpoison, though), and I remember being able to do it in school a decade ago.
It's a neat feature. Double-click the titlebar and the whole window (except for the titlebar) disappears. Double-click again to bring the window back. In some distros, KDE is set up so that a shaded window will temporarily appear when you mouse over it, and resume shading when the mouse leaves. This is sort of the opposite effect of how peeling seems to do it.
> What kind of weird-ass window manager doesn't have a CLOSE widget on the windows?
Ratpoison doesn't have one. Well, it technically doesn't have windows, either. It's sort of like screen, but for X11. But it is pretty cool. I used it for a couple months when my old machine started deteriorating and periodically freezing. Full window managers would cause frequent freezes, but ratpoison would not.
> I like Firefox but I have to disagree. I spend alot of time implementing technologies I've never worked > with before so I spend alot of time scouring the web for information. I find the Opera broswer superior in > this case. Here are the reason I prefer Opera.
I use Opera primarily, as well, but I will counter some of your points here anyway.:)
> Having Find In Page on the tool bar. (Yes, you can hotkey is from other broswers I know)
Aside from the Find As You Type feature (which I think is what you're describing, and which Opera sort of does with links a la CTRL+J), the google search bar is also a Find In Page bar. You just click on the "G" icon to the left of the search field, and it gives a pull-down choice of search engines. One of these engines is "Find In This Page".
> Google on the tool bar (Yes I know Firebird has it)
Yeah, you can also add such a thing to regular Mozilla. Or you could just do it the classic Opera way and set up hotkeys so you'd type "g search for this phrase" in the URL field, and it'd come up with the search in google. Oh, and Mozilla also has a google side bar.
> The ability to layout all the tool bars just as I like them. (tabs at the bottom!)
Multizilla, *the* choice for the discriminating tabbed browser fan (hint: It has session management and unclosing and everything else). It supports tabs on the bottom. There is also an extension for Firefox before v0.9 that offers similar functionality but also lets you put tabs on the *sides*, as Opera also does. This is actually my preferred way of working in Opera (because I usually.
Also, Firefox gives you some control over placement of buttons. It's nothing compared to Opera, though. Only Konqueror comes close with respect to layout of toolbars and widgets. I'm not surprised that both are Qt based, since my own Qt coding experience tells me that Qt is insanely cool with respect to layout of widgets.
> z-axis of tabs are maintained based on the last time the user used each tab. If I have 5 tabs open while > working and I'm working with the 3rd and 5th tab and I close the 3rd tab I like the 5th tab to be showing, > not the one adjacent to the tab just closed.
Multizilla. "Edit --> Preferences --> Multizilla --> Tab bar --> Close tab will switch focus to the --> Previously selected tab". Oddly, it's greyed out right now, but I remember playing with the setting in the past.
> The print preview button. It helps print webpages that print like... You know what I'm getting at;)
Yeah? Click the little down arrow next to the printer button. Then click "Print Preview".
> The New button on the toolbar to open new tabs
"Edit --> Preferences --> Multizilla --> Tab bar --> Enable New Tab Button"
> Many more options dealing with popups.
Such as what? Mozilla and Firefox both allow you to block or unblock popups on a *per-site* basis. Opera does not. Mozilla (et al) pretty much has the same fine-grained javascript controls (block raising/shaking windows, etc..) as Opera. Mozilla was the *first* browser to have "intelligent" blocking, which is a clever way of saying "block popups unless it came from a mouse click". Mozilla will show an icon on the status bar and/or play a sound when it blocks a popup. Multizilla (and possibly Firefox by default) can force popups to open in a new tab instead of a new window. If anything, Opera is slightly *behind* with respect to popup blocking!
> Mouse gestures
OptiMoz. Easy to train new gestures. Default gesture for switching between tabs is better than in Opera. Firefox also has an extension for this ("All In One Gestures", I think it's called). As an aside, KDE's gesture system is pretty cool. You can apparently map gestures to keypresses in any particular application now. It's still a little buggy in the setup, though.
> Fine, but what's the point? 0.9 loads just as fast as IE
That's not always true. On many older systems, IE will load in two or three seconds, tops, while you might wait fifteen to twenty to get the first Firefox window up. This really, really sucks. In Mozilla, the "turbo" feature makes the first window load in four or five seconds, and that's *barely* acceptable.
> Pinstripe is not very ugly! I agree that is needs > polish; however, there is little wrong with it.
> The backlash is mainly due to inertia; most users - > like myself - just got used to Qute. When the Phoenix > switched from Orbit to Qute, I first thought it was a > horrible, horrible decision!
Daamn, it used to use Orbit? Wow. I don't think I ever liked that theme (I tried it on Opera, I think).
I have to agree with what you wrote. I took a liking to Qute *immediately* upon first trying it out. In fact, I even made my own little modification to it in Opera to suit my needs (I shrunk the "tab" height to enable more than 45 pages open in a window at one time). Qute is *great*. Every button is extremely distinctive, and the buttons make visual sense (like, for example, using arrows instead of triangles for back/forth). And it's slightly prettier than most themes. Qute looks good in KDE, and it looks good in Windows, so I can have a common look to my browser (well, ignoring that I use walnut whenever I go into Mozilla).
The problem with Pinstripe, other than it looks really out of place in both KDE and Windows, is that it's very bland. There's no distinctive use of colours for functional purposes (in Opera, for example, all the directional indicators have a black-outlined-green-on-white look, so my eyes can find them with the least possible effort).
I know that I can change the theme to whatever I want, but I really think that the default would be better with something that default users can easily become accustomed to (like Qute!).
> there are so many different widget libraries still in use. Suppose the user is running kmail in gnome, and > browsing with mozilla, with OO.o in the background. Hardly an uncommon situation. But > that's 4 different widget sets, and a lot of memory could be saved if all apps used the same widgets as > they do on Windows. Sadly, choice is often not good.
I don't know if this is truly representative. I'm running Windows 2000 right now, and almost every program is running with a different widget set. I have Mozilla (using XUL) for mail, Opera (using Qt) for web browsing MS Office (using Office widgets, which aren't native), an LDAP Browser (Java-based) and EditPad Lite (probably win32-native widgets, but how can I tell for sure?). This of course doesn't count the cmd.exe windows and the Cygwin/X11 session I have running on this box.
On Linux, I'm usually running one of two widget sets: XUL and Qt. It's rare that I go into anything else, because almost all the programs that I need to use are either based on KDE (or Qt, which KDE is based on) or happens to be one of the Mozilla components.
Still, I am always looking into ways of speeding stuff up. I'm playing with the idea of putting frequently loaded files into ramdrives, and the Gentoo prelink function seems interesting.
> What integration benefits do you mean? This is an honest question. Every year or so I try out the latest > Gnome and/or KDE, and discover they don't do anything for me other than eye candy (which I like, > but doesn't seem that important, and could probably be obtained in other simple > windowmanagers if I cared enough).
DISCLAIMER: When my old Duron-800 started breaking down, I had to eschew X11 pretty much altogether and run in the CTRL+ALT+F# virtual terminals for a couple months. I learned a valuable lesson and found that almost all my work (cone, pico, links, ssh) and play (image viewing with fbi, movie watching with fbxine, P2P on Kazaa's network with giftd and giFTcurs, playing some fullscreen graphical games like Falcon's Eye, television with fbtv) could be done without X11. So I *do* understand both sides of the argument.
The biggie for me is session management. When I shut down my machine (or just log out of KDE), the system remembers which applications I had open at the time. The next time I log into KDE, all those applications open up, and they all open in the specific places I had them when I last left them. So kate will open up with the source code I've been hacking lately, and konsole will open up with a few tabs, one of them already in the directory of that code so I can do some test compiles.
Another benefit is direct access to different networking protocols in the KDE file manager. I have a bookmark set to "sftp://my.server.name:~/public_html/" (well, something like that) so that I can directly open and edit my home page in kate. Yeah, that's not a great idea for professional websites, where you should be mirroring all the html/css/cgi/js files locally and synchronizing back and forth, but for a simple home page, it's great to just load it directly.
Also, in file dialogs, there are some places where tab completion isn't ideal. If you had to open some.c file out a thousand-file directory, and you didn't know the name, you'd have to "ls -1 ~/somedir/ | grep "\.c$" | less", then hunt around for the right name, remember it, *then* go back to retype it with tab completion. If the file dialog box, you just type the filter ("*.c") in the bottom editable text field, type the directory in the top editable field, then hit ENTER and double-click the right file that comes up.
I use tab completion all the time, though. It *is* really cool.
But eye candy is a humongous factor. I really, really like clicking the "3d" button on my bottom panel and seeing the desktop shrink away and turn into a spinning cube of virtual desktops. And I have knewsticker hogging resources all the time, and I have a cute little cat named Neko that plays around on the top of my active titlebar, hopping around and generally looking silly, courtesy of AMOR.
Incidentally, you *can* set KDE up with features similar to that of a tabbed window manager. ALT+F3, V, F will fullscreen any maximizable app, ALT+F3, V, N will get rid of any annoying titlebars and related decorations, and there is one window decoration that acts like tabs. It starts with a B, I think. Basically, if you have two or more windows in the same location, the titlebars of each will shrink and get placed next to each other, with one of them (the one in front) lit up. It's rather interesting, though I haven't played with it much.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
PS: I use ionwm on top of Xorg on top of Cygwin in Win32, because it's the only way I can get a decent MDI terminal window.;)
> > > Unless things change drastically, we predict that 80 percent of > > email will be spam by December this year, and it's very likely to go > > to 90 percent by this summer," Linford warned.
> That should of course say "next summer".
No, it should say "last summer". I mean, right now, something like 99% of my email is spam. I have to use insanely aggressive server-side filtering (spamassassin, among other things) to get rid of 90% of it, and 90% of what gets through has to be bayesed out of existance. And some of what's left is spam, too.
> I mean there is nothing I can think of that Eudora > does that Thundirbird doesn't (other than suck)
That's not fair. Eudora is pretty much the only email client with MDI (what you would call "tabbed browsing", though I guess it'd be "tabbed mailing" here). In conjunction with this, it had *session management*, which means that you could close and reopen Eudora, and all the mail windows you had open (let's say you were composing two messages and you had another few messages open for reference, and you had a habit of keeping the folders associated with your favourite mailing lists open at all times) would reopen at the state you left them. Session management is the *reason* why I left Windows (well, that and package management -- I just love typing "urpmi mozilla evolution flightgear ksensors procmail spamassassin frozen-bubble gl-117 foobillard xawtv tvtime mplayer-gui mplayer-skins mplayer-fonts win32-codecs koffice OpenOffice.org celestia k3b kolourpaint pan gaim giftd giFTcurs apollon armagetron" and having a plethora of apps downloading and installing themselves without excess hunting and clicking around on my part).
Eudora also has (imho) a much faster filtering engine than Mozilla. It has an excellent plugin system for which many third-party addons have been made. The toolbar system is superior. You can put the toolbars on the top or bottom of the screen, or across the right or left edge, and you can custom-build which buttons go into which toolbars. This is functionality that I only really see in applications written by Microsoft or written using Qt, and it was available many, many years ago in Eudora 3.x.
There were *so* many features that Eudora sported. I don't use Eudora these days, primarily for two reasons: 1) I set up a server-side spam filtering system which made most of my extensive Eudora filters unnecessary, but the one spam solution that I needed after the server filtering Eudora lacked. I'm talking about the "Bayesian" filtering found in Mozilla. 2) The server I set up is IMAP, which means that I could transition from any email client to any other email client in minutes, without having to figure out how to convert mail folder formats. This means that I can jump back to Eudora any day that I feel particularly homesick (it runs in wine, you see).
I have a happy place in my brain reserved for Eudora. It gave me many good years.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
PS: Oh yeah, it also autoseparated file attachments. This may not work for you, but it was absolutely ideal for me, and it would have been better for the users at my work, who open attachments directly in Netscape 7.1, work on them for a few hours without saving (despite our pleas), then complain about losing their data when Word or Excel or whatever happens to shut down on them (because autosave doesn't work when your file attachment is opened in tempspace).
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> "The real internet?" The WHOLE THING? Holy shit! That's an amazing phone. :(
> Mine only lets me surf the web and check my email.
My Handspring Treo 300 has a copy of PalmVNC installed, so I can remotely access the FreeBSD machine that my work uses as a web/mail server. If I do this, then I have a cute 155x155 [graphical] desktop session that I can use to do anything that a FreeBSD box can do on the internet (that is, everything).
That's really power sapping, though, constantly transferring graphical updates to and from the phone. Usually, I just use one of two web browsers (Blazer and Eudora Web) for most stuff. I have a pop3 mail client on the Treo, but I usually use a webmail interface to IMAP for my mail. The Treo has an ssh1 client as well as clients for telnet and ftp. The ftp client can remotely install Palm apps, and there's also a program called "PalmTorrent" (NOT a bittorrent client!) that can download and install apps over http. Oh, and there's a usenet client called Yanoff that I use here and there. It's a bit slow, but it works. I have an SMB (Windows file share) client on it, but I think it acts like a shell interface, and I never really tried to work with it.
The neat thing is that I got this device for $150, and my $60/mo (including taxes) cellular plan includes over forty-thousand minutes of internet access each month for no additional charge.
PalmOS kicks ass for phones, imho. I'd be happy if the Sharp Zaurus had a variant that could run with this cellular plan (and with decent battery usage), though, since the TCP/IP apps on the Zaurus really, really rock a whole lot harder.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Simple
Yeah, real simple, if you want to be hideously out of date.
You should upgrade your Win2k to *at least* service pack 4. Recommending users stick to sp2 is ludicrous.
> The same thing with ATi/nVidia. Two players means they each get half the market.
I had actually heard that Intel was the market leader (or close to it) with their amazingly poor, bug-ridden, "Extreme Graphics" integrated chip, largely due to their use in Dell (and other vendor) home machines.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> For example, what happens if you don't like firefox, how do you move your new bookmarks back to IE?
;)
:/
Well, all applications *should* be responsible for importing from other formats. It *shouldn't* be the responsibility of anyone other than Microsoft to make an importer for MSIE from Netscape/Mozilla settings. But that's just my hippie cooperation freako side talking.
There are converters that can change between different formats. I've used bookmarkbridge, which synchronizes between Opera, Mozilla and MSIE. For the most part, it works, but I had to stop because MSIE had problems with certain entries. For example, some web pages had really long TITLE tags, and the bookmark entries in Opera had the full titles, and bb tried to convert them into file names, which sucked, because some of them had special characters (like slashes) that didn't work in file names.
Also, bookmarklets (and if you don't know what these are, look them up, because they absolutely ROCK!) can get messed up in such conversions.
Still, yeah, in the absence of an MSIE importer, a Mozilla exporter is probably really useful. Heck, I think that a built-in synchronizer would be a really brilliant idea (think of it -- uncertain users can just go back and forth between browsers, and any bookmark added to one browser will apply to the other!).
It's too bad that I know no XUL. My experience is pretty firmly rooted in Qt.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/co
ding/freedom/
> FCI made a browser called Chameleon which offered enhancments to IE (and ads)... It had tabbed
> browsing. The last update to that program was in 1999; but it was developed much earlier. The earliest I
> can find Opera and tabs mentioned in the same sentence is 2002. But since I've never used Opera and
> can't find a changelog for it... who knows.
The reason why you couldn't find anything is that you're using the wrong terminology. "Tabbed browsing" is a sexy marketing word that the Mozilla folks invented. It means "MDI with taskbar".
The first Opera had MDI, and it was running in 1994. I don't know if it had a taskbar that early, I think that there's little inventive difference between having the list of open documents in the "Window" menu versus having it in a toolbar.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> I am so happy that AMD is really giving Intel a run for their money. I remember when they had so
> many problems with their first few processors. Now that their processors are strong and stable they
> have a lot of 'followers'. Their processors are a great value and definately worth every penny.
Um. The first AMD processors were made in the early 1970s. The first AMD x86 (PC) processors were made around the time that IBM adopted the 8086 processor (the late 1970s, I think).
And, bah, AMD's processor designs (that is, after they stopped being a foundry for Intel's designs) have been stable since the K6. Their processors have been "strong" (that is, if by strong you mean having fast floating-point performance) for several years, starting with the introduction of the K7 (Athlon). They tend to have fewer catastrophic bugs than Intel processors. Any real stability problems have been caused by poor support by chipset manufacturers, and there were always stable options, if you were willing to avoid crappy motherboard manufacturers.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Frozen Bubble? The screenshots look almost exactly like Bust-A-Move. I have to wonder just how bad the
> Linux gaming scene is if the best it has to offer is an unlicensed copy of an old console series.
Bah, in '02 or '03, one of the most popular games for Windows was Snood, which was also a rip-off of Bust-A-Move. It just happens to be a fantastic puzzle game, and almost any adaptation of it is fantastic. Frozen Bubble is very artfully done, though.
Me? I like Gweled and Crack-Attack on the puzzle side. On the 3D side, you'll often find me playing gl-117, a fighter-pilot game. Flightgear is pretty cool, as well, though it's a simulator and not a game. I don't play too many games, though. I'm more of the type to take my pleasure from writing programs (I'd write games, but I suffer from ADD and depression, so I usually make a great start then drop it, cold turkey). Of course, I haven't owned a computer joystick since the 1980s, so this probably influences my lack of enjoyment of some types of games.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> I'd almost go along with this. We definitely need much stricter standards for driving. I think you
> should need additional testing to be allowed to use a phone while driving, too. It's clear that most
> drivers aren't capable of doing them both at the same time-- at least not safely.
The problem with this is that our working culture is put together in a way that millions of people *have to* drive a car in order to reach their place of employment, and millions of people *cannot* change jobs easily, even if they are strongly qualified.
If I had to use public transportation, it would mean about two hours of walking and perhaps forty minutes sitting on the train, round trip, per day, and that's assuming that the train arrives at a perfectly ideal time that matches up with my rigid work schedule. It wouldn't be cheaper, either, than driving.
I'm experienced with setting up and maintaining BSD, Linux and MSWindows servers as well as desktop software for these platforms. I've put together ISO900x documents, I can program in Perl and C++, I'm in decent enough shape to move around the occasional heavy object, I do a ton of tech support, I remotely administer machines a thousand miles away, I'm a master of combating spyware on Windows machines, I have a ton of other responsibilities, and I make just enough money after eight years to not quite move out of my parents' house. And job seeking for four years has yielded nothing.
So making licenses more difficult for people like me to acquire would essentially destroy our lives entirely. People like me would end up penniless at best. But we'd have lots of fun writing Special Relativity equations in the harsh winter snow with our freeze-dried fingers.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Is there a linux P2P alternative?
:)
I recommend giFT. You can find it at gift.sf.net, and modern distros should have it in their repositories (try something like "urpmi gift" or "apt-get install gift" to see if it automatically installs from the internet). You can use different front-end clients with it, which is a nice feature. Apollon is the popular gui front-end, and giFTcurs is an excellent ncurses-based (works in text terminals, but has tabs and layouts like a gui app) front-end. It can be attached to FastTrack (that's the Kazaa network) as well as Gnutella and gift's own OpenFT network. It's possible that somebody will eventually add support for other P2P networks, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
There are no fully featured, complete applications which mimic KDE/GNOME programs like Konsole or gnome-terminal -- that is, no console/terminal programs that support MDI so that you don't need to waste real estate on the task bar for each of the many command line boxes you might open in MS Windows. I eventually was able to get KDE working in Cygwin, but it's pretty slow on this 550MHz PIII.
I set up ion (it took a *long* time to find a version that would compile on cygwin, though) in a fixed-sized X11 session and gave it konsole-like keybindings (so that I could Shift+Left and Shift+Right to move between terminal sessions. So it's like I have an MDI terminal app. It's normally bash, but I can also get it to run cmd.exe (though Tab completion and history is broken when I try to go into this mode).
It's very cool. I also used ion in Linux when my Duron-800 system started having capacitor problems on its motherboard (it would crash out of Win32 and X11 sessions using full-fledged window managers). I learned a lot about getting full functionality of my system in regular tty modes (fbtv, fbxine, aumix and giFTcurs rule!).
I haven't tried it in FreeBSD. I took too much perverse glee in having an employer give me carte blanche with respect to setting up our web/mail/wap/ldap/im server, so I was perfectly happy to load it up with a full KDE 3.2.3 and OpenOffice setup, even though it's a thousand miles away and not connected to a monitor(!).
Disclaimer: I actually did set up the server well, and I'm very good with keeping it running, to the point where it's reliably saved the employees from the *other* servers we use.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> How many hours a day (out of an 8 hour day) do you think you could hold something
> (even of tiny mass like a mouse) in the air, away from your body.
For what it's worth, I have a Gyration mouse, with which you can control the screen by waving it about in air. The feeling is almost like using a laser pointer at a presentation, but I tend to get comfortable by tossing my arm at odd angles (like stretched back over the shoulder of my chair) while controlling the screen as normal. I have this mouse (which is heavier than a typical wireless mouse) up in the air the majority of the time, though I do have the option of putting it on my desk and using it as an optical mouse when I need to. Having optional modes like this do help against the difficulty you describe.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> I've even stopped using IE in favor of Moz on XP, and still got new spyware installed. So there's an .I'm pretty picky
> exploit in this browser as well. Has to be, as I don't Kazaa, or any shareware utilities
> about what I install, 99% commercial s/w.
Well, there actually is one exploit related to Mozilla, which was reported on recently on slashdot. It was a Windows vulnerability relating to the "shell" protocol, and Mozilla's tendency is to hand over unknown protocols to the OS (so that, for example, a call to some "irc://" url would open up mirc or something). The fix is really straightforward (it's a really tiny xpi extension that changes a simple javascriptish setting (or something along those lines) that disallows shell calls. Also, the most recent versions are immune to the problem.
Still, it's entirely possible that you were exploited without doing anything. There's a hole still out there, I believe, that lets external systems run arbitrary programs on your machine, which basically would allow any spyware to become installed, even if your machine is just sitting there.
Additionally, there are a couple classes of spyware that Spybot cannot really handle. Those'd be some of the BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) and the CoolWebSearch derivatives. Spybot would scan it and clean it and report that everything's totally clean, but then the surviving fragment of spyware would just redownload and reinstall crap all over again. "HijackThis" and "CWShredder" are excellent utilities for getting past this.
Hmm. Exceed? That's something like VNC for individual applications, is it? So your Windows box is effectively firewalled away from the internet, then? Interesting strategy.
Please reconnect your Windows machine back to the internet. People have been paying me actual money to clean off the spyware from their machines, and I'm starting to enjoy this. ^_^
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> 1. The ability to open a new browser window and have the old page displayed in it, complete with its
> history and URL in the address bar. Very useful if you want to fork your browsing path and go down
> two different branches.
I just did that in Firefox. There are several extensions that add page cloning. I happen to use Tab Browser Extensions, which both clone pages and the instance's history. Yeah, the capability isn't in the base install, but the whole point of extensions are that you add these capabilities *only if you want them*.
> 2. The ability to open a new URL from the keyboard alone. All I have to do is hit Ctrl+O, type in the URL,
> and hit Enter. On Firefox and Moz I have to navigate all over the UI, using F6 (which doesn't
> always work) to try to get to the right part of the UI.
Now this is just trollish. Keyboard shortcuts are a *lot* easier in Firefox than they are in IE. there's a comparative rundown at "http://texturizer.net/firefox/keyboard.html". In this case, you'd hit CTRL+L to get to the URL bar. CTRL+L has been the standard way of opening a typed URL since the early 90s for most descendents of Mosaic, with the notable exception of Netscape 4.x. IE, NS2.x, NS3.x and all Mozillas use CTRL+L.
Additionally, CTRL+K brings you to the google field.
> 3. Google Toolbar. Much nicer than the moz/firefox alternative.
I honestly can't tell the difference between the IE Google Toolbar and the Mozilla Googlebar, except that Googlebar for Mozilla has more options and can integrate into the Multizilla pref bar.
For what it's worth, these days I use Opera and Konqueror more than I use Mozilla. But Mozilla is damned powerful and ridiculously flexible.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Only those without any sense of decency, which is perhaps most sysadmins, but not all. Any admin who
> aspires to being a good man would not invade other's privacy because they're 'just fscking currious'.
There are extreme bizarre cases. We have an old Netware IMS system for handling mail, and it just can't handle the huge amounts of traffic that the forty people here generate (well, in honesty, a huge amount of spam comes through here). So there are times that a few hundred messages get stuck in the spool. I have to move them out and examine each one's contents to see which messages need to be move back into the spool and which should just get deleted. Most are spam, but some are legit, so I have to look at the headers and take a quick glance at the body (to look for spamlike sentences, like words with spaces in odd places). So I tend to see snippets of personal communication here and there. I take no particular pleasure from it, but I have to do it.
Incidentally, this problem dramatically increased my push towards learning shell scripting and C++ programming. I created a pretty cool gui app that lets me browse these spool files and manage them, and I can work awk and sed to get rid of the bulk of messages by common elements (such as recovering any messages that are "From:" the company president).
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> The vastly different look and feel, from one app to the other,
:)
> is one of the main problems, but it is never gonna go away...
I would never pretend that X is without its problems, but I think that this one is really exaggerated in importance. Granted, I compare against MSWindows and not Mac OS X, but I still maintain my point if only by way of stubbornness.
At work, I'm running Windows 2000, Office 2000, OpenOffice.org (to recover occasionally corrupted MS Word files), Opera, Mozilla Messenger, and xterm-on-ionwm-on-X11-on-Cygwin for Konsole-like functionality. There's also an accounting program custom built by some nigh incompetent outside developers. Every single one of these programs use a different widget set (even Office 2000, which is made by the same company as Windows 2000!), and the different widgets do not impede my productivity. They also don't make me shriek in terror when I look at them.
At home, I'm running KDE. Almost every program I run is KDE-based, so they have the same "Crystal" theme. On occasion, I run Opera, but the Qute theme that Opera is using pretty much meshes nicely with KDE's look, and both are Qt-based. The only other major widget sets I use are XUL (Mozilla apps) and gtk. I have gtk set to automatically use my KDE theme for its icons (a neat little tool called "GtkQt"), so gtk apps typically differ in only a few aspects, like button placement and 3D-ness of buttons. I choose to use a different look for Mozilla (Walnut), but if I wanted to, I could make it Qute, which would pretty much make my entire desktop experience homogenous.
But, you know what? There's actually a positive to having different programs running with different themes. If I see a wooden texture, I know I'm in my mail app without having to move my eyes around. If I see a bunch of buttons across the bottom of the app, I know I'm probably in KNode, my newsreader (I custom-placed the toolbar that way). If I see a vertical "tab bar" across the right side of the window, I instantly know that I'm at an Opera window. It's pretty neat. A different look can make it easier to instantly know where you are and what you're doing in your computer. I mean, would you paint your bedroom the same colour as your family room? (hint: brighter colours in the latter, subdued colours in the former)
But that's just me, of course.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> 3. Window peeling - this is kinda nifty. Instead of minimizing, resizing or moving your current window
... maybe not ratpoison, though), and I remember being able to do it in school a decade ago.
> to see what is underneath you 'peel back' part of the parent.
> That's what I always liked window managers that supported the "shade" feature.
Which ones haven't? I'm pretty sure that you can do it in all the major ones (KDE, GNOME, IceWM, Xfce
It's a neat feature. Double-click the titlebar and the whole window (except for the titlebar) disappears. Double-click again to bring the window back. In some distros, KDE is set up so that a shaded window will temporarily appear when you mouse over it, and resume shading when the mouse leaves. This is sort of the opposite effect of how peeling seems to do it.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> What kind of weird-ass window manager doesn't have a CLOSE widget on the windows?
Ratpoison doesn't have one. Well, it technically doesn't have windows, either. It's sort of like screen, but for X11. But it is pretty cool. I used it for a couple months when my old machine started deteriorating and periodically freezing. Full window managers would cause frequent freezes, but ratpoison would not.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> I like Firefox but I have to disagree. I spend alot of time implementing technologies I've never worked
:)
.
;)
> with before so I spend alot of time scouring the web for information. I find the Opera broswer superior in
> this case. Here are the reason I prefer Opera.
I use Opera primarily, as well, but I will counter some of your points here anyway.
> Having Find In Page on the tool bar. (Yes, you can hotkey is from other broswers I know)
Aside from the Find As You Type feature (which I think is what you're describing, and which Opera sort of does with links a la CTRL+J), the google search bar is also a Find In Page bar. You just click on the "G" icon to the left of the search field, and it gives a pull-down choice of search engines. One of these engines is "Find In This Page".
> Google on the tool bar (Yes I know Firebird has it)
Yeah, you can also add such a thing to regular Mozilla. Or you could just do it the classic Opera way and set up hotkeys so you'd type "g search for this phrase" in the URL field, and it'd come up with the search in google. Oh, and Mozilla also has a google side bar.
> The ability to layout all the tool bars just as I like them. (tabs at the bottom!)
Multizilla, *the* choice for the discriminating tabbed browser fan (hint: It has session management and unclosing and everything else). It supports tabs on the bottom. There is also an extension for Firefox before v0.9 that offers similar functionality but also lets you put tabs on the *sides*, as Opera also does. This is actually my preferred way of working in Opera (because I usually
Also, Firefox gives you some control over placement of buttons. It's nothing compared to Opera, though. Only Konqueror comes close with respect to layout of toolbars and widgets. I'm not surprised that both are Qt based, since my own Qt coding experience tells me that Qt is insanely cool with respect to layout of widgets.
> z-axis of tabs are maintained based on the last time the user used each tab. If I have 5 tabs open while
> working and I'm working with the 3rd and 5th tab and I close the 3rd tab I like the 5th tab to be showing,
> not the one adjacent to the tab just closed.
Multizilla. "Edit --> Preferences --> Multizilla --> Tab bar --> Close tab will switch focus to the --> Previously selected tab". Oddly, it's greyed out right now, but I remember playing with the setting in the past.
> The print preview button. It helps print webpages that print like... You know what I'm getting at
Yeah? Click the little down arrow next to the printer button. Then click "Print Preview".
> The New button on the toolbar to open new tabs
"Edit --> Preferences --> Multizilla --> Tab bar --> Enable New Tab Button"
> Many more options dealing with popups.
Such as what? Mozilla and Firefox both allow you to block or unblock popups on a *per-site* basis. Opera does not. Mozilla (et al) pretty much has the same fine-grained javascript controls (block raising/shaking windows, etc..) as Opera. Mozilla was the *first* browser to have "intelligent" blocking, which is a clever way of saying "block popups unless it came from a mouse click". Mozilla will show an icon on the status bar and/or play a sound when it blocks a popup. Multizilla (and possibly Firefox by default) can force popups to open in a new tab instead of a new window. If anything, Opera is slightly *behind* with respect to popup blocking!
> Mouse gestures
OptiMoz. Easy to train new gestures. Default gesture for switching between tabs is better than in Opera. Firefox also has an extension for this ("All In One Gestures", I think it's called). As an aside, KDE's gesture system is pretty cool. You can apparently map gestures to keypresses in any particular application now. It's still a little buggy in the setup, though.
> Fine, but what's the point? 0.9 loads just as fast as IE
That's not always true. On many older systems, IE will load in two or three seconds, tops, while you might wait fifteen to twenty to get the first Firefox window up. This really, really sucks. In Mozilla, the "turbo" feature makes the first window load in four or five seconds, and that's *barely* acceptable.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Pinstripe is not very ugly! I agree that is needs
> polish; however, there is little wrong with it.
> The backlash is mainly due to inertia; most users -
> like myself - just got used to Qute. When the Phoenix
> switched from Orbit to Qute, I first thought it was a
> horrible, horrible decision!
Daamn, it used to use Orbit? Wow. I don't think I ever liked that theme (I tried it on Opera, I think).
I have to agree with what you wrote. I took a liking to Qute *immediately* upon first trying it out. In fact, I even made my own little modification to it in Opera to suit my needs (I shrunk the "tab" height to enable more than 45 pages open in a window at one time). Qute is *great*. Every button is extremely distinctive, and the buttons make visual sense (like, for example, using arrows instead of triangles for back/forth). And it's slightly prettier than most themes. Qute looks good in KDE, and it looks good in Windows, so I can have a common look to my browser (well, ignoring that I use walnut whenever I go into Mozilla).
The problem with Pinstripe, other than it looks really out of place in both KDE and Windows, is that it's very bland. There's no distinctive use of colours for functional purposes (in Opera, for example, all the directional indicators have a black-outlined-green-on-white look, so my eyes can find them with the least possible effort).
I know that I can change the theme to whatever I want, but I really think that the default would be better with something that default users can easily become accustomed to (like Qute!).
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> there are so many different widget libraries still in use. Suppose the user is running kmail in gnome, and
> browsing with mozilla, with OO.o in the background. Hardly an uncommon situation. But
> that's 4 different widget sets, and a lot of memory could be saved if all apps used the same widgets as
> they do on Windows. Sadly, choice is often not good.
I don't know if this is truly representative. I'm running Windows 2000 right now, and almost every program is running with a different widget set. I have Mozilla (using XUL) for mail, Opera (using Qt) for web browsing MS Office (using Office widgets, which aren't native), an LDAP Browser (Java-based) and EditPad Lite (probably win32-native widgets, but how can I tell for sure?). This of course doesn't count the cmd.exe windows and the Cygwin/X11 session I have running on this box.
On Linux, I'm usually running one of two widget sets: XUL and Qt. It's rare that I go into anything else, because almost all the programs that I need to use are either based on KDE (or Qt, which KDE is based on) or happens to be one of the Mozilla components.
Still, I am always looking into ways of speeding stuff up. I'm playing with the idea of putting frequently loaded files into ramdrives, and the Gentoo prelink function seems interesting.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> What integration benefits do you mean? This is an honest question. Every year or so I try out the latest
.c file out a thousand-file directory, and you didn't know the name, you'd have to "ls -1 ~/somedir/ | grep "\.c$" | less", then hunt around for the right name, remember it, *then* go back to retype it with tab completion. If the file dialog box, you just type the filter ("*.c") in the bottom editable text field, type the directory in the top editable field, then hit ENTER and double-click the right file that comes up.
;)
> Gnome and/or KDE, and discover they don't do anything for me other than eye candy (which I like,
> but doesn't seem that important, and could probably be obtained in other simple
> windowmanagers if I cared enough).
DISCLAIMER: When my old Duron-800 started breaking down, I had to eschew X11 pretty much altogether and run in the CTRL+ALT+F# virtual terminals for a couple months. I learned a valuable lesson and found that almost all my work (cone, pico, links, ssh) and play (image viewing with fbi, movie watching with fbxine, P2P on Kazaa's network with giftd and giFTcurs, playing some fullscreen graphical games like Falcon's Eye, television with fbtv) could be done without X11. So I *do* understand both sides of the argument.
The biggie for me is session management. When I shut down my machine (or just log out of KDE), the system remembers which applications I had open at the time. The next time I log into KDE, all those applications open up, and they all open in the specific places I had them when I last left them. So kate will open up with the source code I've been hacking lately, and konsole will open up with a few tabs, one of them already in the directory of that code so I can do some test compiles.
Another benefit is direct access to different networking protocols in the KDE file manager. I have a bookmark set to "sftp://my.server.name:~/public_html/" (well, something like that) so that I can directly open and edit my home page in kate. Yeah, that's not a great idea for professional websites, where you should be mirroring all the html/css/cgi/js files locally and synchronizing back and forth, but for a simple home page, it's great to just load it directly.
Also, in file dialogs, there are some places where tab completion isn't ideal. If you had to open some
I use tab completion all the time, though. It *is* really cool.
But eye candy is a humongous factor. I really, really like clicking the "3d" button on my bottom panel and seeing the desktop shrink away and turn into a spinning cube of virtual desktops. And I have knewsticker hogging resources all the time, and I have a cute little cat named Neko that plays around on the top of my active titlebar, hopping around and generally looking silly, courtesy of AMOR.
Incidentally, you *can* set KDE up with features similar to that of a tabbed window manager. ALT+F3, V, F will fullscreen any maximizable app, ALT+F3, V, N will get rid of any annoying titlebars and related decorations, and there is one window decoration that acts like tabs. It starts with a B, I think. Basically, if you have two or more windows in the same location, the titlebars of each will shrink and get placed next to each other, with one of them (the one in front) lit up. It's rather interesting, though I haven't played with it much.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
PS: I use ionwm on top of Xorg on top of Cygwin in Win32, because it's the only way I can get a decent MDI terminal window.
> > > Unless things change drastically, we predict that 80 percent of
> > email will be spam by December this year, and it's very likely to go
> > to 90 percent by this summer," Linford warned.
> That should of course say "next summer".
No, it should say "last summer". I mean, right now, something like 99% of my email is spam. I have to use insanely aggressive server-side filtering (spamassassin, among other things) to get rid of 90% of it, and 90% of what gets through has to be bayesed out of existance. And some of what's left is spam, too.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> Norton Anti-virus works perfectly well with Thunderbird - never had any problems with it.
NAV Corporate 7.x (and probably 8.x) eats Mozilla inboxes. Very annoying.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
> I mean there is nothing I can think of that Eudora
> does that Thundirbird doesn't (other than suck)
That's not fair. Eudora is pretty much the only email client with MDI (what you would call "tabbed browsing", though I guess it'd be "tabbed mailing" here). In conjunction with this, it had *session management*, which means that you could close and reopen Eudora, and all the mail windows you had open (let's say you were composing two messages and you had another few messages open for reference, and you had a habit of keeping the folders associated with your favourite mailing lists open at all times) would reopen at the state you left them. Session management is the *reason* why I left Windows (well, that and package management -- I just love typing "urpmi mozilla evolution flightgear ksensors procmail spamassassin frozen-bubble gl-117 foobillard xawtv tvtime mplayer-gui mplayer-skins mplayer-fonts win32-codecs koffice OpenOffice.org celestia k3b kolourpaint pan gaim giftd giFTcurs apollon armagetron" and having a plethora of apps downloading and installing themselves without excess hunting and clicking around on my part).
Eudora also has (imho) a much faster filtering engine than Mozilla. It has an excellent plugin system for which many third-party addons have been made. The toolbar system is superior. You can put the toolbars on the top or bottom of the screen, or across the right or left edge, and you can custom-build which buttons go into which toolbars. This is functionality that I only really see in applications written by Microsoft or written using Qt, and it was available many, many years ago in Eudora 3.x.
There were *so* many features that Eudora sported. I don't use Eudora these days, primarily for two reasons:
1) I set up a server-side spam filtering system which made most of my extensive Eudora filters unnecessary, but the one spam solution that I needed after the server filtering Eudora lacked. I'm talking about the "Bayesian" filtering found in Mozilla.
2) The server I set up is IMAP, which means that I could transition from any email client to any other email client in minutes, without having to figure out how to convert mail folder formats. This means that I can jump back to Eudora any day that I feel particularly homesick (it runs in wine, you see).
I have a happy place in my brain reserved for Eudora. It gave me many good years.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
PS: Oh yeah, it also autoseparated file attachments. This may not work for you, but it was absolutely ideal for me, and it would have been better for the users at my work, who open attachments directly in Netscape 7.1, work on them for a few hours without saving (despite our pleas), then complain about losing their data when Word or Excel or whatever happens to shut down on them (because autosave doesn't work when your file attachment is opened in tempspace).