This seems like the closest thing to a solution I've yet seen in the thread. (I was hoping for "Stab People In The Face Wireless Protocol" but apparently it still hasn't been implemented.)
I wonder if running it slows down your own connection though, since you're constantly injecting packets into the other guy's connection.
Might he have to get another computer in order to run tcpnice, and then do his normal internet activities from another machine?
Well in that case, if you have the cooperation of the hospital and hotel, why not replace the router with one that will take a more flexible firmware (like DD-WRT) and then enable its QoS controls? You can put almost all P2P stuff into the "Bulk" category, while putting WoW, HTTP, Citrix, and SSH stuff in higher categories.
Also, you could create a whitelist of known MAC addresses and give them higher priority than everyone else who just walks in off the street, and you can have the router's logs forwarded to a central location for analysis -- meaning that if it's someone on the whitelist who's hogging bandwidth, you can find them and settle it adminstratively.
The solutions available when you have control of the router are significantly greater (and veer less into vigilantism, although I don't think it's necessarily as unjustified as other people are making it out to be) than if you're just using it and don't have control.
You're correct; or at least, that's how the Wikipedia article describes it -- you'll be able to put the iTV in your living room, and then stream content to it from iTunes on your Mac or PC.
Sounds a little to me like the Airport Express was with audio (it was a box that you could attach to your stereo and then stream music to it, wirelessly) except that where the APE was purely "push" because it didn't have any interface on the recieving end, iTV will be able to "pull," browsing the libraries of the computers connected to it for content.
I'm cautiously excited about it, although I'm in no way going to go out and buy one on Day 1. I think there's serious possibility for it to suck if they implement a lot of DRM, or limit the number of computers you can have stream media to it. If that's the case, I hope its streaming protocol is quickly reverse-engineered, so that more flexible library backends can be built.
The fix to Kopete that lets it use Adium skins is definitely welcome, as there are a ton of Adium skins.
However, I wish they had spent their time making Kopete compatible with Gaim's plugin architecture rather than a basically glitzy UI improvement. At least last time I checked, Kopete was completely incompatible with OTR encryption, and it looked like it was going to stay that way. (The reason I heard was that something about the existing Kopete plugin structure doesn't allow plugins to actually orginate messages, just modify them as they pass through, and OTR uses specially crafted messages to initiate connections and resend data. Or something like that; don't quote me on it directly.)
Seems like the request is still open on Bugzilla, I encourage people to vote, as IMO this is a major limitation of Kopete versus Gaim. Kopete definitely looks nicer than Gaim, but it's not as functional because of that.
Actually, I'm not sure why they don't just rebuild Kopete to use the libgaim backend, like Adium does (and Proteus, and Fire...). Maybe there are good reasons for not using it, but it strikes me as serious wheel-reinvention.
What kind of TV tuner would you have them install?
Analog NTSC? Great, except that it'll stop working in a few years, and the quality is abysmal by modern standards.
ATSC? You get high-def, but you need an antenna, and even then you only get the big networks, which is a big step down to people used to 100+ channels of cable.
Clear QAM? It lets you use cable, so no antenna, but chances are you'll still only get the major networks, and it's arguably a greater pain in the ass than ATSC: many cable companies (Comcast, I'm looking at you) strip the metadata from their clear-QAM channels, making things like program guides really painful to use. And at the end of the day, you'll still be stuck with only the major broadcast networks, because those are the only ones that the cablecos are required to broadcast unencrypted. Everything else requires a proprietary converter box.
The solution would be CableCard, but there are still a lot of areas where you either can't get one, or are treated like shit and get a degraded level of service if you do. (And you pay several extra bucks for the privilege of renting the card.)
Given the state of the market right now, I wouldn't ship a computer with a TV tuner in it, either. If the FCC were to get its act together and really make CableCard the standard, and eliminate proprietary converter boxes, then I think you'd see an explosion in the types of set-top boxes and DVRs. I have no doubt Apple would be at the top of the list.
Actually I just didn't upgrade. I stayed with the older version of iTunes (it's possible, or was possible anyway, to have two versions of iTunes on the same system).
Eventually I stopped needing that feature and looked around for alternatives to iTunes and found them lacking, so I went with a newer version plus daapd and some other stuff, but I think there is a vacuum in the market right now for a music management system that's superior to it. I've written about this elsewhere but suffice it to say that I think iTunes jumped the shark back around that point, and it's basically been down-hill from there. If someone wanted to, I think there's a big market for a heavily integrated (monolithic) library manager, audio streamer, portable-device manager (with true bidirectional sync!), bittorrent downloader, ripping/burning tool... something basically like what iTunes could have been, if Apple hadn't had to get in bed with the music companies in order to sell iPods, and wasn't restricted by pesky things like the threat of litigation. But I digress.
So right now I have a replacement that uses daapd and some other stuff. I don't like it as much as I liked the simplicity of iTunes' sharing, but it works. And it's an amount of effort that I now consider to be "built in" to the cost of iTunes, versus some theoretical 'other option.' As in, all things being equal, it's a black mark against iTunes.
Since I didn't pay for iTunes, a letter explaining why I'm not enthused with their changes is about the only thing I can do; I can't exactly send them back their program that I didn't pay for.
Everyone always talks about wanting to get a job where they get paid to do what they enjoy, but I tend to wonder if maybe you'd get burned out of doing something that you enjoy as a pastime, if you had to start doing it for 8, 10 or 12 hours a day. (Okay, admittedly there are WoW players who seem to have no problems there.)
There are lots of things that I enjoy in moderation that I don't think I'd like anymore, if I started doing them as my day job. Maybe it's just me...but I just think that playing games for a living might take the fun out of it.
I guess maybe this is because I enjoy playing games as a way to relax, and I guess I wouldn't want to play them more than a few hours a day, regardless of the other constraints on my time.
like people in the United States do under the Patriot Act for checking out certain books from the library
Right. I'll worry about that right after my library figures out how to actually keep track of the books I have out.
Do you have any idea of the amount of resources it would take to create an interconnected system capable of tracking what books people have out? It would be ridiculous. Given previous government efforts on things of that scale (a few of which I've worked on), I suspect it would probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars, take decades, and be totally obsolete by the time it was actually taken live.
That they can perhaps subpoena your library records if they are interested in you -- which I believe is possible -- is entirely different from some system that would get you "tagged and investigated," as you imply.
Yeah. I wonder what Microsoft/Sony and the other companies who are planning on capitalizing on the whole concept of a "home theater PC" think of this. It's going to really take the wind out of their sails (and sales) if people can't play movies that they bought at BestBuy on their big expensive HTPC system.
I wonder if HTPC software manufacturers will start building a DRM workaround in, just to prevent it from appearing like their software is broke? Seems like that might be legit under the interoperability portions of the DMCA, and really if these things become widespread, they can hardly afford not to.
We always would have had the cooler toys. People who are interested in learning about computers, will always be able to do more with them; this doesn't change whether the computer is a drum-memory beast or the latest bazillion-transistor Intel powerhouse.
What DRM means is that the stuff that we geeks will be doing on our computers, is the stuff that the masses should be able to do... and the stuff that we geeks ought to be doing in the absence of DRM, we'll never do at all.
When I think of all the time that really brilliant people like DVD Jon have spent breaking DRM, it doesn't seem like some great technical achievement -- it's just a lot of effort and time that could have gone to actual development of new features, but which had to instead be spent just making something simple work the way it should have.
DRM is like the ultimate broken-window fallacy. In fixing it you feel like you're accomplishing something, but really you're just treading water.
Everyone in between is better off using a pirated copy, because it is just better.
Agreed. I hardly even watch movies straight from DVD anymore. Even if I'm just going to watch it once, I just run them through HandBrake first. That way I don't have to deal with crappily designed menus, FBI warnings, and mandatory-view advertisements. (Because yes, Virginia, a "preview" is just an advertisement for another movie.)
I've told more than one other person about HandBrake and now they do the same thing. I wouldn't call it quite "Grandma friendly" yet (although the stripped-down iPod version is) but it's pretty close. If the person you're instructing knows the difference between a Phillips screw and a Torx, they can probably deal with HandBrake.
I would send a nasty letter to Creative when you're done downgrading too, but that's just me. I know I sent one to Apple when they castrated iTunes' ability to share over the internet, a feature that I had used all the time to listen to my music while studying or working in another building.
Companies need to know that we won't just bend over and let them fuck us with little "upgrades" like that, at least not without noticing.
Actually in some other discussions I've said that I think this could be really beneficial -- with systems like BitTorrent, and to a lesser extent Skype and other P2P systems, it's conceivable that a big broadband provider could configure its network so that a lot of "bulk" traffic was kept on its own wires, and didn't have to traverse the public net.
For example, if they provided a Skype supernode that all the broadband users could connect to, whenever one of the customers wanted to call another, the routing could all be done without having to send packets through a peering/transit point. It would all be on the ISPs network, which costs them basically nothing.
You can make similar arguments for positioning cache servers for other types of stuff on the network. Were it not for the copyright concerns, they could probably save themselves a lot of customer aggravation and bandwidth expense, if they just did some intelligent caching of bittorrent traffic. (And it's my understanding this is the whole theory behind the Cache Discovery Protocol, but I'm not sure which ISPs are going to use it.)
The place where I think this could have the biggest effects, would be in places that have large networks that are basically isolated from the public net by narrow connections -- say, Australia. A system of intelligent caching and encouraging the use of P2P applications would probably lighten the load on the traffic actually passing in and out of a "network island" by favoring internal connections instead.
So a broadband ISP that let you connect to your neighbor at 100Mb/s but only pass packets out to the public 'net at 1Mb, might at some point in the future, if it was designed correctly, seem like a really sweet deal.
I'd just like to add that I wasn't ranting against paper in general -- I take lots of notes on paper during presentations. I use either spiral-bound notebooks or legal pads, generally, and I find them both essential parts of my organizational/creative process. I'm still waiting on an electronic note-taking system that's as versatile as a spiral-bound notebook and a 0.07mm pen or pencil, in terms of quickly inputting high-resolution text and graphics.
However, in general I've found that each PP slide, which done according to the seemingly near-universal business-template "style" (which only has a few words of text on it!), only boils down to about one line of written notes. Thus, a 60-slide presentation might only take up a page or two of notes, plus diagrams and editorial comments as appropriate.
There's so much wrong with PP presentations that I don't even want to get started on it; most people who use them are really using them like a backwards-facing teleprompter, rather than a visual aid, and giving out tons of handouts encourages people to not take notes, meaning less retention of information. Powerpoint is a service by the lazy (presenters) for the lazy (audience).
In the short term, I think it will mean effectively nothing, as long as you don't upgrade your computer much further. Actually it might be good if you're using the ad-supported version, because they're going to turn off the advertisements at some point in the future when they stop supporting it.
At some point -- probably with your next Mac purchase, realistically -- you're going to get a system that won't run the Classic environment, and that will be the end of Eudora for you.
At that point you'll either have to use Apple Mail, or Thunderbird's mainline branch, or the Thunderbird/Eudora ("Penelope") branch. Or one of the other email programs out there. But OS 9 Eudora will be right out.
If the thought of not being able to run OS 9 applications is as unappealing to you as it is to me, you might want to get a late-model PPC Mac while you still can, if your current one is getting long in the tooth.
The one saving grace about the whole thing is that Eudora stores its saved messages in a pretty neat way (flat files) so you shouldn't have any problems moving your messages to a new system... it's more moving you to a new system that's the issue.
Personally, I gave up on Eudora a few years ago when it became clear that the OS X rewrite was just not going to happen in a timely fashion. I switched to Apple Mail, and while I can't say that I haven't looked back, it hasn't been a horrible experience. (I didn't make heavy use of Eudora's rules, and I upgraded my computer at the same time, so even though Mail takes longer to search messages, it doesn't seem like it.) I do think that the multiple-window interface of Eudora is superior to the single-window/multiple-pane thing that Mail has going, but giant monolithic windows seem to be in vogue now.
On one hand, since it seems like Qualcomm has decided to kill Eudora as a project, I'm glad they're going to provide an OSS "exit strategy" for their customers, rather than just telling them to piss off and use Outlook.
However, and particularly in view of the fact that they're sending developers to work with the Thunderbird folks, I really wish that they had opened the source of Eudora itself. To me, that's the biggest promise of OSS -- that software won't just disappear when the corporation who used to maintain it decides to take their ball and go home. Unfortunately in this case, Eudora is going to do exactly that, it's going to disappear.
The "New Eudora" that they're going to produce, is just going to be a Thunderbird clone with a Eudora-like interface on it. I know a lot of people who used Eudora, and none of them did it for the interface. By going this route, they're throwing away everything that made Eudora useful.
I hope that those developers, if they don't bring a snapshot of Eudora's source itself to combine with Thunderbird, will at least bring enough of the core philosophies that drove Eudora's creation, to produce a product that's more than just "Thunderbird with a Eudora skin."
I have heard of an email system less convenient than Lotus Notes; it involved pneumatic tubes, and pointed sticks that you pressed into wet clay tablets.
I think its Unicode support was less buggy, though, so maybe it's a tie.
I agree that more connection options are definitely better, but I think I'd take Verizon over some free-space-optical lashup... at least, when it's raining. Or snowing. Or foggy...
Even if the fiber that's being taken out to your curb can take 100Mb/s, if they don't think there's a market for it, they probably aren't buying the backhaul capacity to provide that level of service.
In other words, they might be able to get you hooked up at 100Mb/s, but you'd only be able to talk to your neighbors and other people on the local subnet at that speed.
This is a real problem for almost all broadband ISPs, because they're just not buying the capacity from their Tier 1 ISP that they should be, in order to offer even the speeds that they're advertising to people. "Real" internet connections -- and by that I mean ones to upper-tier ISPs with bandwidth and QoS and uptime guarantees -- are not cheap, and thus they get skimped on.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems like the closest thing to a solution I've yet seen in the thread. (I was hoping for "Stab People In The Face Wireless Protocol" but apparently it still hasn't been implemented.)
I wonder if running it slows down your own connection though, since you're constantly injecting packets into the other guy's connection.
Might he have to get another computer in order to run tcpnice, and then do his normal internet activities from another machine?
Well in that case, if you have the cooperation of the hospital and hotel, why not replace the router with one that will take a more flexible firmware (like DD-WRT) and then enable its QoS controls? You can put almost all P2P stuff into the "Bulk" category, while putting WoW, HTTP, Citrix, and SSH stuff in higher categories.
Also, you could create a whitelist of known MAC addresses and give them higher priority than everyone else who just walks in off the street, and you can have the router's logs forwarded to a central location for analysis -- meaning that if it's someone on the whitelist who's hogging bandwidth, you can find them and settle it adminstratively.
The solutions available when you have control of the router are significantly greater (and veer less into vigilantism, although I don't think it's necessarily as unjustified as other people are making it out to be) than if you're just using it and don't have control.
I think there's an assumption here that he doesn't control the WL router.
E.g., it's a public router, like in a coffeeshop or hotel, but which doesn't have any QoS set up on it, so it's being abused.
He wants a way of essentially chiseling out some room on the commons, when the other guy is already over-grazing his sheep there.
Step 1: Find wireless network with SSID "linksys" or "netgear"
Step 2: Point browser at gateway
Step 3: Log in with default password
Step 4: Change channel, change SSID, enable WPA-PSK, change password.
Step 5: ???
Step 6: Profit!
You're correct; or at least, that's how the Wikipedia article describes it -- you'll be able to put the iTV in your living room, and then stream content to it from iTunes on your Mac or PC.
Sounds a little to me like the Airport Express was with audio (it was a box that you could attach to your stereo and then stream music to it, wirelessly) except that where the APE was purely "push" because it didn't have any interface on the recieving end, iTV will be able to "pull," browsing the libraries of the computers connected to it for content.
I'm cautiously excited about it, although I'm in no way going to go out and buy one on Day 1. I think there's serious possibility for it to suck if they implement a lot of DRM, or limit the number of computers you can have stream media to it. If that's the case, I hope its streaming protocol is quickly reverse-engineered, so that more flexible library backends can be built.
Well, dual displays help give you a set boundary between code and email, or code and version control, or code and specs, etc. etc.
Code and Slashdot?
The fix to Kopete that lets it use Adium skins is definitely welcome, as there are a ton of Adium skins.
However, I wish they had spent their time making Kopete compatible with Gaim's plugin architecture rather than a basically glitzy UI improvement. At least last time I checked, Kopete was completely incompatible with OTR encryption, and it looked like it was going to stay that way. (The reason I heard was that something about the existing Kopete plugin structure doesn't allow plugins to actually orginate messages, just modify them as they pass through, and OTR uses specially crafted messages to initiate connections and resend data. Or something like that; don't quote me on it directly.)
Seems like the request is still open on Bugzilla, I encourage people to vote, as IMO this is a major limitation of Kopete versus Gaim. Kopete definitely looks nicer than Gaim, but it's not as functional because of that.
Actually, I'm not sure why they don't just rebuild Kopete to use the libgaim backend, like Adium does (and Proteus, and Fire...). Maybe there are good reasons for not using it, but it strikes me as serious wheel-reinvention.
What kind of TV tuner would you have them install?
Analog NTSC? Great, except that it'll stop working in a few years, and the quality is abysmal by modern standards.
ATSC? You get high-def, but you need an antenna, and even then you only get the big networks, which is a big step down to people used to 100+ channels of cable.
Clear QAM? It lets you use cable, so no antenna, but chances are you'll still only get the major networks, and it's arguably a greater pain in the ass than ATSC: many cable companies (Comcast, I'm looking at you) strip the metadata from their clear-QAM channels, making things like program guides really painful to use. And at the end of the day, you'll still be stuck with only the major broadcast networks, because those are the only ones that the cablecos are required to broadcast unencrypted. Everything else requires a proprietary converter box.
The solution would be CableCard, but there are still a lot of areas where you either can't get one, or are treated like shit and get a degraded level of service if you do. (And you pay several extra bucks for the privilege of renting the card.)
Given the state of the market right now, I wouldn't ship a computer with a TV tuner in it, either. If the FCC were to get its act together and really make CableCard the standard, and eliminate proprietary converter boxes, then I think you'd see an explosion in the types of set-top boxes and DVRs. I have no doubt Apple would be at the top of the list.
Actually I just didn't upgrade. I stayed with the older version of iTunes (it's possible, or was possible anyway, to have two versions of iTunes on the same system).
... something basically like what iTunes could have been, if Apple hadn't had to get in bed with the music companies in order to sell iPods, and wasn't restricted by pesky things like the threat of litigation. But I digress.
Eventually I stopped needing that feature and looked around for alternatives to iTunes and found them lacking, so I went with a newer version plus daapd and some other stuff, but I think there is a vacuum in the market right now for a music management system that's superior to it. I've written about this elsewhere but suffice it to say that I think iTunes jumped the shark back around that point, and it's basically been down-hill from there. If someone wanted to, I think there's a big market for a heavily integrated (monolithic) library manager, audio streamer, portable-device manager (with true bidirectional sync!), bittorrent downloader, ripping/burning tool
So right now I have a replacement that uses daapd and some other stuff. I don't like it as much as I liked the simplicity of iTunes' sharing, but it works. And it's an amount of effort that I now consider to be "built in" to the cost of iTunes, versus some theoretical 'other option.' As in, all things being equal, it's a black mark against iTunes.
Since I didn't pay for iTunes, a letter explaining why I'm not enthused with their changes is about the only thing I can do; I can't exactly send them back their program that I didn't pay for.
Everyone always talks about wanting to get a job where they get paid to do what they enjoy, but I tend to wonder if maybe you'd get burned out of doing something that you enjoy as a pastime, if you had to start doing it for 8, 10 or 12 hours a day. (Okay, admittedly there are WoW players who seem to have no problems there.)
There are lots of things that I enjoy in moderation that I don't think I'd like anymore, if I started doing them as my day job. Maybe it's just me...but I just think that playing games for a living might take the fun out of it.
I guess maybe this is because I enjoy playing games as a way to relax, and I guess I wouldn't want to play them more than a few hours a day, regardless of the other constraints on my time.
like people in the United States do under the Patriot Act for checking out certain books from the library
Right. I'll worry about that right after my library figures out how to actually keep track of the books I have out.
Do you have any idea of the amount of resources it would take to create an interconnected system capable of tracking what books people have out? It would be ridiculous. Given previous government efforts on things of that scale (a few of which I've worked on), I suspect it would probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars, take decades, and be totally obsolete by the time it was actually taken live.
That they can perhaps subpoena your library records if they are interested in you -- which I believe is possible -- is entirely different from some system that would get you "tagged and investigated," as you imply.
Nah you just send them the $500 from somebody's credit card that you got via your phishing scheme.
They'll "follow the money" for sure, but to where?
You're telling me they could have called it "Beaver" instead?
Think of how many more +5 Funny's we would have had.
Sounds good to me. As long as it ends the Gnome/KDE flamewars and eliminates some of the rampant duplication of efforts between both "platforms"...
Like, maybe we can get one mail client that's really good, instead of two half-baked ones, etc.
Yeah. I wonder what Microsoft/Sony and the other companies who are planning on capitalizing on the whole concept of a "home theater PC" think of this. It's going to really take the wind out of their sails (and sales) if people can't play movies that they bought at BestBuy on their big expensive HTPC system.
I wonder if HTPC software manufacturers will start building a DRM workaround in, just to prevent it from appearing like their software is broke? Seems like that might be legit under the interoperability portions of the DMCA, and really if these things become widespread, they can hardly afford not to.
I (and we) will always have the cooler toys.
... and the stuff that we geeks ought to be doing in the absence of DRM, we'll never do at all.
We always would have had the cooler toys. People who are interested in learning about computers, will always be able to do more with them; this doesn't change whether the computer is a drum-memory beast or the latest bazillion-transistor Intel powerhouse.
What DRM means is that the stuff that we geeks will be doing on our computers, is the stuff that the masses should be able to do
When I think of all the time that really brilliant people like DVD Jon have spent breaking DRM, it doesn't seem like some great technical achievement -- it's just a lot of effort and time that could have gone to actual development of new features, but which had to instead be spent just making something simple work the way it should have.
DRM is like the ultimate broken-window fallacy. In fixing it you feel like you're accomplishing something, but really you're just treading water.
Everyone in between is better off using a pirated copy, because it is just better.
Agreed. I hardly even watch movies straight from DVD anymore. Even if I'm just going to watch it once, I just run them through HandBrake first. That way I don't have to deal with crappily designed menus, FBI warnings, and mandatory-view advertisements. (Because yes, Virginia, a "preview" is just an advertisement for another movie.)
I've told more than one other person about HandBrake and now they do the same thing. I wouldn't call it quite "Grandma friendly" yet (although the stripped-down iPod version is) but it's pretty close. If the person you're instructing knows the difference between a Phillips screw and a Torx, they can probably deal with HandBrake.
Instructions to downgrade the firmware are here:
_ viewtopic.php?46417
http://www.epizenter.net/e107_plugins/forum/forum
I would send a nasty letter to Creative when you're done downgrading too, but that's just me. I know I sent one to Apple when they castrated iTunes' ability to share over the internet, a feature that I had used all the time to listen to my music while studying or working in another building.
Companies need to know that we won't just bend over and let them fuck us with little "upgrades" like that, at least not without noticing.
Actually in some other discussions I've said that I think this could be really beneficial -- with systems like BitTorrent, and to a lesser extent Skype and other P2P systems, it's conceivable that a big broadband provider could configure its network so that a lot of "bulk" traffic was kept on its own wires, and didn't have to traverse the public net.
For example, if they provided a Skype supernode that all the broadband users could connect to, whenever one of the customers wanted to call another, the routing could all be done without having to send packets through a peering/transit point. It would all be on the ISPs network, which costs them basically nothing.
You can make similar arguments for positioning cache servers for other types of stuff on the network. Were it not for the copyright concerns, they could probably save themselves a lot of customer aggravation and bandwidth expense, if they just did some intelligent caching of bittorrent traffic. (And it's my understanding this is the whole theory behind the Cache Discovery Protocol, but I'm not sure which ISPs are going to use it.)
The place where I think this could have the biggest effects, would be in places that have large networks that are basically isolated from the public net by narrow connections -- say, Australia. A system of intelligent caching and encouraging the use of P2P applications would probably lighten the load on the traffic actually passing in and out of a "network island" by favoring internal connections instead.
So a broadband ISP that let you connect to your neighbor at 100Mb/s but only pass packets out to the public 'net at 1Mb, might at some point in the future, if it was designed correctly, seem like a really sweet deal.
Amen to that.
I'd just like to add that I wasn't ranting against paper in general -- I take lots of notes on paper during presentations. I use either spiral-bound notebooks or legal pads, generally, and I find them both essential parts of my organizational/creative process. I'm still waiting on an electronic note-taking system that's as versatile as a spiral-bound notebook and a 0.07mm pen or pencil, in terms of quickly inputting high-resolution text and graphics.
However, in general I've found that each PP slide, which done according to the seemingly near-universal business-template "style" (which only has a few words of text on it!), only boils down to about one line of written notes. Thus, a 60-slide presentation might only take up a page or two of notes, plus diagrams and editorial comments as appropriate.
There's so much wrong with PP presentations that I don't even want to get started on it; most people who use them are really using them like a backwards-facing teleprompter, rather than a visual aid, and giving out tons of handouts encourages people to not take notes, meaning less retention of information. Powerpoint is a service by the lazy (presenters) for the lazy (audience).
In the short term, I think it will mean effectively nothing, as long as you don't upgrade your computer much further. Actually it might be good if you're using the ad-supported version, because they're going to turn off the advertisements at some point in the future when they stop supporting it.
... it's more moving you to a new system that's the issue.
At some point -- probably with your next Mac purchase, realistically -- you're going to get a system that won't run the Classic environment, and that will be the end of Eudora for you.
At that point you'll either have to use Apple Mail, or Thunderbird's mainline branch, or the Thunderbird/Eudora ("Penelope") branch. Or one of the other email programs out there. But OS 9 Eudora will be right out.
If the thought of not being able to run OS 9 applications is as unappealing to you as it is to me, you might want to get a late-model PPC Mac while you still can, if your current one is getting long in the tooth.
The one saving grace about the whole thing is that Eudora stores its saved messages in a pretty neat way (flat files) so you shouldn't have any problems moving your messages to a new system
Personally, I gave up on Eudora a few years ago when it became clear that the OS X rewrite was just not going to happen in a timely fashion. I switched to Apple Mail, and while I can't say that I haven't looked back, it hasn't been a horrible experience. (I didn't make heavy use of Eudora's rules, and I upgraded my computer at the same time, so even though Mail takes longer to search messages, it doesn't seem like it.) I do think that the multiple-window interface of Eudora is superior to the single-window/multiple-pane thing that Mail has going, but giant monolithic windows seem to be in vogue now.
Parent should be modded up as Informative.
On one hand, since it seems like Qualcomm has decided to kill Eudora as a project, I'm glad they're going to provide an OSS "exit strategy" for their customers, rather than just telling them to piss off and use Outlook.
However, and particularly in view of the fact that they're sending developers to work with the Thunderbird folks, I really wish that they had opened the source of Eudora itself. To me, that's the biggest promise of OSS -- that software won't just disappear when the corporation who used to maintain it decides to take their ball and go home. Unfortunately in this case, Eudora is going to do exactly that, it's going to disappear.
The "New Eudora" that they're going to produce, is just going to be a Thunderbird clone with a Eudora-like interface on it. I know a lot of people who used Eudora, and none of them did it for the interface. By going this route, they're throwing away everything that made Eudora useful.
I hope that those developers, if they don't bring a snapshot of Eudora's source itself to combine with Thunderbird, will at least bring enough of the core philosophies that drove Eudora's creation, to produce a product that's more than just "Thunderbird with a Eudora skin."
I have heard of an email system less convenient than Lotus Notes; it involved pneumatic tubes, and pointed sticks that you pressed into wet clay tablets.
I think its Unicode support was less buggy, though, so maybe it's a tie.
I agree that more connection options are definitely better, but I think I'd take Verizon over some free-space-optical lashup ... at least, when it's raining. Or snowing. Or foggy...
Even if the fiber that's being taken out to your curb can take 100Mb/s, if they don't think there's a market for it, they probably aren't buying the backhaul capacity to provide that level of service.
In other words, they might be able to get you hooked up at 100Mb/s, but you'd only be able to talk to your neighbors and other people on the local subnet at that speed.
This is a real problem for almost all broadband ISPs, because they're just not buying the capacity from their Tier 1 ISP that they should be, in order to offer even the speeds that they're advertising to people. "Real" internet connections -- and by that I mean ones to upper-tier ISPs with bandwidth and QoS and uptime guarantees -- are not cheap, and thus they get skimped on.