You should really be sitting down and attempting to understand the code, ASAP. Asking Slashdot for fancy tools isn't really going to help you. The real barrier here is your own brain.
On the other hand, judges know that they have expansive powers of law. Their decisions form a body of precedent, and precedent is very important in future legal decision-making. Certainly, if a judge goes against statute on a regular basis, he'll probably be thrown out during the next judicial retention election, but a judge is also expected to point out inconsistencies or logical fallacies in a statute. This role is a crucial part of the system of checks and balances. The judge's opinion is sometimes further examined in appellate court, and even less frequently, based on the findings of the appellate court, the law is overturned or modified explicitly by the supreme court.
So this is a long way of saying, yes, blame the judge. His sole duty is to render justice, under the guidelines of the Constitution. That is all.
AC poster is absolutely right-- TI-99/4A was a great machine, and Parsec was a phenomenal game. As others pointed out, if you had the speech synthesizer module, the game would announce things to you. This machine was arguably what set me on the course of CS and IT, roughly 24 years ago.
And Parsec was only the tip of the iceberg. My love of music was founded with a TI program called "Music Maker" where you could enter notes on a staff and it would play it-- it had 4-note polyphony-- and this was in, what, 1985? I entered in a clavier piece by C.P.E. Bach. Awesome! I also learned my first programming language-- TI Extended BASIC-- where I wrote a dungeon-crawler, and even worked my way up to an asteroids-type game using sprites (that crashed almost immediately upon launching). I also remember playing Zork, Alpiner, Star Trek (another speech synthesizer game: "Entering sector 2 point 2")... and some others I can no longer remember the names of.
Of course, I learned about troubleshooting, too. The TI periperal bus sucked, and the machine would regularly eat my floppy disks. The only storage mechanism that worked reliably was the cassette tape drive, but it was god-awful slow. The main lesson being, don't ask your dad for troubleshooting help unless you want to spend hours learning new swear words.
Which is why I just bought TOS on DVD. It's the last chance I'll have to make sure I can watch the original footage. I don't care how good the HD looks (I've seen it), it's not the original, some of the charm is gone. For some people, that's not important, but for me, it's a dealbreaker.
Wow. As a teenager, I drooled over those machines, and my all-consuming goal was to save enough paper route money to buy one. I ended up opting for the much more affordable LCIII. I had had a taste of the 68040 at my father's work-- one of the programmers had a Quadra 950-- and I always wanted one. I ended up getting a Quadra 605 some time later on a trade-in deal that a local computer shop was doing, and that was a great machine, but I never forgot how badass those AV machines seemed. After your story, I guess I'm glad I didn't go that route. When I toured colleges my senior year in high school, I recall that one school (CMU or Colby, I can't remember) had piles of the AV machines and SGI machines, and I literally associated those machines in my mind with COMPUTER SCIENCE. I still do in some ways... computer hardware is so boring now!
That's interesting. The results of the poll in the link you gave me and the one on the votebyissues.org website matched up very closely. Except Romney-- he was in the middle of the pack on the votebyissues.org website, but on your site, he was dead last! Thanks for the link.
Very interesting post. Thanks for sharing. I've been thinking along these lines for awhile now-- in fact, I was attempting to devise a database system that stored some limited "business logic" that would allow certain program modules to be reused in different contexts, depending on how the end-user wanted to compose a workflow, and it ended up becoming dauntingly complex. I mentioned this to a CS professor of mine, and I proceeded to get a mini-lecture on Godel's incompleteness theorem. Yikes! I've abandoned that part for now-- work has to get done. But it makes me appreciate how flexible the UNIX philosophy is, which is similar in many ways to my line of thinking. It's very elegant and powerful, although not particularly easy. I think I'll keep the subject on a back burner. Thanks!
I highly suggest that everyone have a look at votebyissue.org. I consider voting to be my civic duty, and so I spent about an hour on Saturday reading through the blurbs and checking off boxes. The results were surprising. Before taking the quiz, I considered Edwards to be my top choice, followed by Obama. Surprise, surprise-- Clinton and Kucinich were actually better aligned with my views (although Edwards was still on top). Ron Paul was the only Republican to make it into the "positive points" column, and I apparently despise Tancredo. Obama ended up being dead last for Democrats; just about tied with Ron Paul.
BTW, if you don't agree or disagree with a blurb, leave the checkbox blank. The software takes this into account at the end. The instructions were not clear on this. After I had my tallies, I formulated a simple tally system-- +1 point if I agreed, -1 point if I disagreed, and -.5 if I did not answer. I did not answer if I thought the candidate was being purposefully vague.
This is worth your time, and much more time-efficient than trawling through the fluff on the candidates' websites.
Sorry, that's just not the case. OO is just a formalization of what was already happening with good procedural programmers. OO is not fundamentally different that procedural programming-- it is a superset. OO languages force the programmer to do certain things: code modularity, polymorphism, typedefs/classes, etc, and does so in a way that encourage a programmer NOT to come up with their own system to do the same thing.
If you look at developers who spend a lot of time doing things in C (e.g., the OpenBSD developers-- have a look at their repository), you'll see that they are keenly aware of "object-oriented" design principles. They also tend to know exactly when things like byte alignment is an issue, and when you really should just use a void pointer, because they are forced to think about their machines. Most OO programmers I know have no idea why they would need OO language features-- they just use them because that's what they've been taught-- and they know next to nothing about the machines themselves. I would argue that a good programmer is a good programmer; and if they have standard procedural programming experience, that will nicely complement their future OO work.
GP is right-- OO is simply a design philosophy. The actual mechanics of building an application are no different.
This is the reason I can't watch the TVs at the gym while on the treadmill. Instant motion-sickness. I'm resigned to the fact that I won't be an astronaut, but apparently I won't be a gamer for much longer either...
Even better is using authpf to modify the firewall's running ruleset. This way, you get the advantage of portknocking, since the protected port is not open until the user does their little dance with the firewall, and also the advantage of a real authentication system, since authpf uses SSH to authenticate the user. Because the authentication part uses SSH, you can plug in any authentication source you want, via GSSAPI, or/etc/passwd or whatever. We use SSH public keys, and the protected ports in question are port-forwarded to something nonstandard and tunnelled via SSL. Works great for us.
Yes, that is exactly what I meant, but you said it better than I did.
What got me thinking about this in the first place is our parent company's tendency to purchase off-the-shelf software to fill an organizational need. Invariably, the problem is this: either the software is too simple to represent the real-world complexity of the information process, or the software is so complex (so as to be general enough to fit all imaginable processes) that it is impossible to master. This has led to frustration on the part of many of our employees, because they must either change what they're doing to fit the limited scope of the software (which defeats the purpose of the software in some sense), or listen to endless IT pipe dreams about "how great it will be when X is rolled out."
As a result, our local IT shop has taken a "guerilla" approach-- we write little tools where they help. Sometimes these small collections of little tools end up being fairly large software environments, but since they're tailored to the task at hand, people like to use them. And since they can come to us and say, "such-and-such isn't really working, can you change it to do this-and-that?", they feel much more empowered over the process and are much more involved in their work in the long run. It's a nice positive feedback loop.
Anyhow, this is the role that I see IT really filling. As you point out, something that requires that kind of intimacy with the company's culture and workflow is not easy to outsource.
In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form. This is somewhat true, but only in the most trivial sense. What job doesn't change with technological advancement? The IT department is at the very edge of that change, and it has always had to adapt to those changes. It will continue to do so. For instance, I don't see many tape monkeys around here anymore. That's a job I used to do-- fortunately, we have robotic tape changers for that now.
Wrt strategic advantage vs. temporary gain, this is also true. But again, it is still not indicative of the whole picture. To say that "IT" is merely the implementation of a technology in a company is not to give the IT department a fair shake. Many IT management (myself included) spend a lot of time with the rest of the company working to change the culture of the company. Does the "IT Department go away" if IT becomes so important that every worker is essentially an IT worker? Because in some segments, that's the direction we're headed. There's a reason why CIOs are commonplace now as compared to ten years ago.
Any formatting done by the author will just interfere with page makeup later. This is exactly right, and I've tried [unsuccessfully] to bring this up many times where I work. The duplication of effort is absurd. Often an author will compose something in Word, or WordPerfect, or Pages. These drafts are often loaded with formatting, tables, figures, and [inexplicably] video files. Our editorial staff then breaks this whole document down, reformatting it to their own whims-- sometimes they bang the document into shape; sometimes they start from scratch. Microsoft Word is used exclusively in this second step. Now, this document is sent to the production staff, where they completely remove all formatting, and send it to a compositor (aka "page layout person") who often lays out the book in QuarkXPress or InDesign format. The production staff also sends the fulltext to the "new media" and marketing staffs for use in their own projects. Layout proofs come back to the production folks as hard copy-- that hard copy is circulated and marked up, and then FedEx'ed back to the compositor/web/marketing people.
The worse part is that new revisions of books start with either a text dump of that Quark file or from the last-good editorial copy which must then be hand-checked against the final book edition and modified.
LaTEX would be the perfect tool to do away with all of this nonsense. Our current proliferation of closed file formats makes revision control very difficult, and maintaining that software is expensive. LaTEX would allow us to use very simple revision-control tools for text, like CVS. This would, of course, require some training, but it would streamline the entire process. And the tools are free.
Actually, you've got that backward. Apple's operating system is far more locked down than their hardware. Their current batch of computers are essentially generic x86 machines with EFI. Nothing really special there. And even in their PowerPC days, those machines were wonderfully hackable. Open Firmware, which was a Sun innovation and which was borrowed by Apple, allowed for all kinds of cool tricks. Most of the PowerPC hardware was still generic PC stuff; some of it required special firmware if it needed to be accessible before the OS was available, but still, nothing special. I am typing this on a G4 that I bought in 1999-- and it looks and performs nothing like it once did (Lian-Li case, RAID 0, processor upgrade, Radeon 9800 Pro, DVD+-RW, etc). The front panel switches and "sleep" LED took a little bit of soldering to get going, but it was pretty simple stuff.
By contrast, Apple's OS is a freaking nightmare sometimes. Take their version of Samba. You think it works like vanilla Samba, don't you? You'd be wrong. I've taken a working smb.conf from a Linux box and dropped it into 10.4, and it simply wouldn't work as expected. Why? Apple replaced winbind with their proprietary AD plugin. Want documentation on how this thing really works? Good luck. Leopard is even worse here-- try dropping an smb.conf in and it will be immediately overwritten, regardless of whether you've locked the file or not. There are many, many other examples. Don't get me wrong-- I like the OS. But getting my favorite UNIX things to run on it is often an exercise in patience.
If you want to see a closed piece of hardware, take a look at a VAXstation. There's an odd machine.
The funny thing is, if you ever have had that "Apple Authorized Reseller" experience, is that the Apple Store is a HUGE improvement over these mom & pop shops. I was skeptical when Apple started pushing these people out-- I support small business, and you always met interesting and fact-filled people in those stores-- but after purchasing several items (an iPod and a camera) in an Apple Store, I was sold. Sure, I could have spent less buying those things on the web. But the Apple Store people let me play with them, and if the question I asked involved opening latches and looking inside (like in the case of the tethered camera I was looking at), they were cool with me doing that. In retrospect, I remember dealing with a lot of snarky people at those "Apple Authorized Resellers", and they were always dingy and cramped. The Apple Store was a good move for Apple, and fortunately, it appears to have been a good move for its customers as well.
Right. It's a conspiracy of environmentalists. Don't you think it's much more likely that this is just a company trying to cash in on the hot "green" market?
I suspect that your experience is not typical. I've been using compact fluorescents in all fixtures since 2001. Furthermore, every single bulb I purchased in 2001 is still in operation, except for one, which I dropped when we moved to a new apartment.
Here's an interesting article about the safety features of the CFL bulb. My brother, who is a graduate student in fire protection engineering assures me that Underwriters Laboratories, though fully private-sector, is the real deal, so their comments in this article have a lot of credibility, particularly with regard to fire safety.
But waving around an OS like it was some magic bullet that's going to somehow fix your security problems is, well, insanity. Google "sane defaults". Windows fails miserably in this regard, as does much commercial and free software. Apple usually gets sane defaults right, at least from a UI perspective, but the only group of people (as far as I am aware) who have put a lot of thought into sane defaults from a security perspective is the OpenBSD group. Making sure that things work securely, out-of-the-box is important, because IT shops are often in need of something quick-and-dirty. Often those quick-and-dirty implementations become permanent infrastructure. Not only that, but-- even good IT workers can't be experts at everything. My personal opinion is that the implementor must ensure that things work smoothly in a typical setup, because typically only the implementor has the best knowledge of the workings of the software. If an IT worker is putting something together stupidly, the application should let the user know about this as loudly as possible. So yeah, good software won't solve the "idiot user" problem, but it can help a lot.
I use PINE on my Blackberry via SSH. I have my own MTA, and on it I run Postfix, courier-imap, RoundCube, and PINE. This gives me great flexibility for checking my email. I can check it on my phone using PINE (I hate the BIS crap, and I don't really trust someone else with my email password). I can check it on a public terminal using RoundCube. And I check it at home using Thunderbird or PINE. procmail deals with all of my rules in one place. All of my mail is in Maildir format, and I use the system "dump" command for backups. I make full use of/etc/mail/aliases for one-off email addresses. As you can tell, I am totally spoiled when it comes to email.
PINE gets a bad rap for, as far as I can tell, not being as hard to set up as mutt. If you like mutt, good for you. I can get a PINE install up and running in under 5 minutes. I don't have to mess around with fetchmail, or some guy's perl script. It all just works. I've been a PINE user for 11 years, so those commands are second-nature. mutt just doesn't cut the mustard for me.
Slashdot Mirror
You are apparently the only one who understood my post.
You should really be sitting down and attempting to understand the code, ASAP. Asking Slashdot for fancy tools isn't really going to help you. The real barrier here is your own brain.
On the other hand, judges know that they have expansive powers of law. Their decisions form a body of precedent, and precedent is very important in future legal decision-making. Certainly, if a judge goes against statute on a regular basis, he'll probably be thrown out during the next judicial retention election, but a judge is also expected to point out inconsistencies or logical fallacies in a statute. This role is a crucial part of the system of checks and balances. The judge's opinion is sometimes further examined in appellate court, and even less frequently, based on the findings of the appellate court, the law is overturned or modified explicitly by the supreme court.
So this is a long way of saying, yes, blame the judge. His sole duty is to render justice, under the guidelines of the Constitution. That is all.
AC poster is absolutely right-- TI-99/4A was a great machine, and Parsec was a phenomenal game. As others pointed out, if you had the speech synthesizer module, the game would announce things to you. This machine was arguably what set me on the course of CS and IT, roughly 24 years ago.
And Parsec was only the tip of the iceberg. My love of music was founded with a TI program called "Music Maker" where you could enter notes on a staff and it would play it-- it had 4-note polyphony-- and this was in, what, 1985? I entered in a clavier piece by C.P.E. Bach. Awesome! I also learned my first programming language-- TI Extended BASIC-- where I wrote a dungeon-crawler, and even worked my way up to an asteroids-type game using sprites (that crashed almost immediately upon launching). I also remember playing Zork, Alpiner, Star Trek (another speech synthesizer game: "Entering sector 2 point 2")... and some others I can no longer remember the names of.
Of course, I learned about troubleshooting, too. The TI periperal bus sucked, and the machine would regularly eat my floppy disks. The only storage mechanism that worked reliably was the cassette tape drive, but it was god-awful slow. The main lesson being, don't ask your dad for troubleshooting help unless you want to spend hours learning new swear words.
Which is why I just bought TOS on DVD. It's the last chance I'll have to make sure I can watch the original footage. I don't care how good the HD looks (I've seen it), it's not the original, some of the charm is gone. For some people, that's not important, but for me, it's a dealbreaker.
Fucking the tape drive doesn't count.
Wow. As a teenager, I drooled over those machines, and my all-consuming goal was to save enough paper route money to buy one. I ended up opting for the much more affordable LCIII. I had had a taste of the 68040 at my father's work-- one of the programmers had a Quadra 950-- and I always wanted one. I ended up getting a Quadra 605 some time later on a trade-in deal that a local computer shop was doing, and that was a great machine, but I never forgot how badass those AV machines seemed. After your story, I guess I'm glad I didn't go that route. When I toured colleges my senior year in high school, I recall that one school (CMU or Colby, I can't remember) had piles of the AV machines and SGI machines, and I literally associated those machines in my mind with COMPUTER SCIENCE. I still do in some ways... computer hardware is so boring now!
That's interesting. The results of the poll in the link you gave me and the one on the votebyissues.org website matched up very closely. Except Romney-- he was in the middle of the pack on the votebyissues.org website, but on your site, he was dead last! Thanks for the link.
Very interesting post. Thanks for sharing. I've been thinking along these lines for awhile now-- in fact, I was attempting to devise a database system that stored some limited "business logic" that would allow certain program modules to be reused in different contexts, depending on how the end-user wanted to compose a workflow, and it ended up becoming dauntingly complex. I mentioned this to a CS professor of mine, and I proceeded to get a mini-lecture on Godel's incompleteness theorem. Yikes! I've abandoned that part for now-- work has to get done. But it makes me appreciate how flexible the UNIX philosophy is, which is similar in many ways to my line of thinking. It's very elegant and powerful, although not particularly easy. I think I'll keep the subject on a back burner. Thanks!
I highly suggest that everyone have a look at votebyissue.org. I consider voting to be my civic duty, and so I spent about an hour on Saturday reading through the blurbs and checking off boxes. The results were surprising. Before taking the quiz, I considered Edwards to be my top choice, followed by Obama. Surprise, surprise-- Clinton and Kucinich were actually better aligned with my views (although Edwards was still on top). Ron Paul was the only Republican to make it into the "positive points" column, and I apparently despise Tancredo. Obama ended up being dead last for Democrats; just about tied with Ron Paul.
BTW, if you don't agree or disagree with a blurb, leave the checkbox blank. The software takes this into account at the end. The instructions were not clear on this. After I had my tallies, I formulated a simple tally system-- +1 point if I agreed, -1 point if I disagreed, and -.5 if I did not answer. I did not answer if I thought the candidate was being purposefully vague.
This is worth your time, and much more time-efficient than trawling through the fluff on the candidates' websites.
But you also have to worry about replay attacks with portknocking. This is not a problem when you use SSH.
Sorry, that's just not the case. OO is just a formalization of what was already happening with good procedural programmers. OO is not fundamentally different that procedural programming-- it is a superset. OO languages force the programmer to do certain things: code modularity, polymorphism, typedefs/classes, etc, and does so in a way that encourage a programmer NOT to come up with their own system to do the same thing.
If you look at developers who spend a lot of time doing things in C (e.g., the OpenBSD developers-- have a look at their repository), you'll see that they are keenly aware of "object-oriented" design principles. They also tend to know exactly when things like byte alignment is an issue, and when you really should just use a void pointer, because they are forced to think about their machines. Most OO programmers I know have no idea why they would need OO language features-- they just use them because that's what they've been taught-- and they know next to nothing about the machines themselves. I would argue that a good programmer is a good programmer; and if they have standard procedural programming experience, that will nicely complement their future OO work.
GP is right-- OO is simply a design philosophy. The actual mechanics of building an application are no different.
This is the reason I can't watch the TVs at the gym while on the treadmill. Instant motion-sickness. I'm resigned to the fact that I won't be an astronaut, but apparently I won't be a gamer for much longer either...
Even better is using authpf to modify the firewall's running ruleset. This way, you get the advantage of portknocking, since the protected port is not open until the user does their little dance with the firewall, and also the advantage of a real authentication system, since authpf uses SSH to authenticate the user. Because the authentication part uses SSH, you can plug in any authentication source you want, via GSSAPI, or /etc/passwd or whatever. We use SSH public keys, and the protected ports in question are port-forwarded to something nonstandard and tunnelled via SSL. Works great for us.
Yes, that is exactly what I meant, but you said it better than I did.
What got me thinking about this in the first place is our parent company's tendency to purchase off-the-shelf software to fill an organizational need. Invariably, the problem is this: either the software is too simple to represent the real-world complexity of the information process, or the software is so complex (so as to be general enough to fit all imaginable processes) that it is impossible to master. This has led to frustration on the part of many of our employees, because they must either change what they're doing to fit the limited scope of the software (which defeats the purpose of the software in some sense), or listen to endless IT pipe dreams about "how great it will be when X is rolled out."
As a result, our local IT shop has taken a "guerilla" approach-- we write little tools where they help. Sometimes these small collections of little tools end up being fairly large software environments, but since they're tailored to the task at hand, people like to use them. And since they can come to us and say, "such-and-such isn't really working, can you change it to do this-and-that?", they feel much more empowered over the process and are much more involved in their work in the long run. It's a nice positive feedback loop.
Anyhow, this is the role that I see IT really filling. As you point out, something that requires that kind of intimacy with the company's culture and workflow is not easy to outsource.
Wrt strategic advantage vs. temporary gain, this is also true. But again, it is still not indicative of the whole picture. To say that "IT" is merely the implementation of a technology in a company is not to give the IT department a fair shake. Many IT management (myself included) spend a lot of time with the rest of the company working to change the culture of the company. Does the "IT Department go away" if IT becomes so important that every worker is essentially an IT worker? Because in some segments, that's the direction we're headed. There's a reason why CIOs are commonplace now as compared to ten years ago.
The worse part is that new revisions of books start with either a text dump of that Quark file or from the last-good editorial copy which must then be hand-checked against the final book edition and modified.
LaTEX would be the perfect tool to do away with all of this nonsense. Our current proliferation of closed file formats makes revision control very difficult, and maintaining that software is expensive. LaTEX would allow us to use very simple revision-control tools for text, like CVS. This would, of course, require some training, but it would streamline the entire process. And the tools are free.
Actually, you've got that backward. Apple's operating system is far more locked down than their hardware. Their current batch of computers are essentially generic x86 machines with EFI. Nothing really special there. And even in their PowerPC days, those machines were wonderfully hackable. Open Firmware, which was a Sun innovation and which was borrowed by Apple, allowed for all kinds of cool tricks. Most of the PowerPC hardware was still generic PC stuff; some of it required special firmware if it needed to be accessible before the OS was available, but still, nothing special. I am typing this on a G4 that I bought in 1999-- and it looks and performs nothing like it once did (Lian-Li case, RAID 0, processor upgrade, Radeon 9800 Pro, DVD+-RW, etc). The front panel switches and "sleep" LED took a little bit of soldering to get going, but it was pretty simple stuff.
By contrast, Apple's OS is a freaking nightmare sometimes. Take their version of Samba. You think it works like vanilla Samba, don't you? You'd be wrong. I've taken a working smb.conf from a Linux box and dropped it into 10.4, and it simply wouldn't work as expected. Why? Apple replaced winbind with their proprietary AD plugin. Want documentation on how this thing really works? Good luck. Leopard is even worse here-- try dropping an smb.conf in and it will be immediately overwritten, regardless of whether you've locked the file or not. There are many, many other examples. Don't get me wrong-- I like the OS. But getting my favorite UNIX things to run on it is often an exercise in patience.
If you want to see a closed piece of hardware, take a look at a VAXstation. There's an odd machine.
The funny thing is, if you ever have had that "Apple Authorized Reseller" experience, is that the Apple Store is a HUGE improvement over these mom & pop shops. I was skeptical when Apple started pushing these people out-- I support small business, and you always met interesting and fact-filled people in those stores-- but after purchasing several items (an iPod and a camera) in an Apple Store, I was sold. Sure, I could have spent less buying those things on the web. But the Apple Store people let me play with them, and if the question I asked involved opening latches and looking inside (like in the case of the tethered camera I was looking at), they were cool with me doing that. In retrospect, I remember dealing with a lot of snarky people at those "Apple Authorized Resellers", and they were always dingy and cramped. The Apple Store was a good move for Apple, and fortunately, it appears to have been a good move for its customers as well.
Right. It's a conspiracy of environmentalists. Don't you think it's much more likely that this is just a company trying to cash in on the hot "green" market?
I suspect that your experience is not typical. I've been using compact fluorescents in all fixtures since 2001. Furthermore, every single bulb I purchased in 2001 is still in operation, except for one, which I dropped when we moved to a new apartment.
Here's an interesting article about the safety features of the CFL bulb. My brother, who is a graduate student in fire protection engineering assures me that Underwriters Laboratories, though fully private-sector, is the real deal, so their comments in this article have a lot of credibility, particularly with regard to fire safety.
Actually, I think it was supposed to be "Can has disproving!"
Fortunately, most of us use PINE's commands and not its C functions.
I use PINE on my Blackberry via SSH. I have my own MTA, and on it I run Postfix, courier-imap, RoundCube, and PINE. This gives me great flexibility for checking my email. I can check it on my phone using PINE (I hate the BIS crap, and I don't really trust someone else with my email password). I can check it on a public terminal using RoundCube. And I check it at home using Thunderbird or PINE. procmail deals with all of my rules in one place. All of my mail is in Maildir format, and I use the system "dump" command for backups. I make full use of /etc/mail/aliases for one-off email addresses. As you can tell, I am totally spoiled when it comes to email.
PINE gets a bad rap for, as far as I can tell, not being as hard to set up as mutt. If you like mutt, good for you. I can get a PINE install up and running in under 5 minutes. I don't have to mess around with fetchmail, or some guy's perl script. It all just works. I've been a PINE user for 11 years, so those commands are second-nature. mutt just doesn't cut the mustard for me.