On the one hand, Sun spread "back in the day" by getting good coverage in college CS departments, which led to new hires driving purchasing decisions once they left school. Sometimes the real world is what the schools were 5 years ago.
On the other hand, Apple's been trying that for 20 years and getting nowhere.
we shouldn't forsake the kids' futures for the sake of indoctrination.
What is it with folks who think there's only room for either DS9 or B5, but not BOTH?
Beats the hell out of me. It irritates me when things are lopsided like that. Like, for example, how earlier story submissions about B5 coming to DVD - something that fans have been hoping for for years - get rejected instantly by slashdot, but the second someone goes into the shower on Enterprise, it's on the front page.
If some of us B5 fans are annoying, it's only because we're trying to restore balance to the force.
The first season of Babylon 5 is available NOW on DVD.
For those who aren't aware, or haven't seen, Babylon 5 has a far more interesting and COHESIVE story than DS9 - and DS9 was the closest approximation ST ever had to a cohesive storyline.
What do I mean by cohesive? Simply this: there's no reset button. Everything isn't solved at the end of the episode, all mutations un-mutated, all weird twists un-twisted. There are episodes in Season 5 which are tied closely to what happened in episodes from the other four seasons.
There's a real story - beginning, middle, and end. It spreads over the full 5 seasons. And, if my opinion isn't already clear - that's huge. It's a good story, and worth exercising your attention span for.
Sure, their special effects budget wasn't as rich as $T. Some threads get mangled because an actor wasn't available two seasons after the seeds were planted. When you consider the difficulty of producing a cohesive epic 5-season TV show, though, B5 did pretty good.
The Series 2 Tivo's can connect to an ethernet for their connectivity by means of a cheap $10 USB->Ethernet adapter. It's "unofficial" but it does indeed work.
Great. Exactly what I'm looking for.
Are there any known problems having both USB ether and digital cable? I understand that some of the older network options conflicted with digital cable boxes, not quite sure how...
Bottom line, the boxes cost around 299+250 to make. Pay it over time (monthly) or pay up all at once, its up to you.
Cost-plus economics work with the government. Not so much the market at large. If the price is unpalatable, other options include cutting costs and bringing in other revenue (e.g. advertisement, partnering, etc).
Me, personally, I think $550 is a bit high, and I think that a monthly of $10 would do a lot better than a monthly of $20-$35. You may remember certain other industries that started out with low monthly costs, who later recouped once they had a stronger market (how much do you pay for cable today, and how much did you pay in 1985? How much would you have been willing to pay in 1985?)
Just my opinion. You disagree; that's what opinions are for. I certainly hope that DVRs make it, and that I end up owning one... but it isn't a no-brainer.
On the bright side, if you want to trade up it certainly increases the resale value of the unit.
Theoretically, yes, but I'm guessing that that is probably intentionally inconvenient to transfer. Just a guess, but...
Kudos to your wife for the research (I know you're the husband because no wife would ever refer to her hub as a "spousal overunit").
On Usenet and some mailing lists, the wife is always Spousal Overunit or SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed). I checked with my wife, and on female-oriented groups they use "DH." One of the meanings is "Dear Hubby." I understand there's another meaning but she won't tell me what it is...
When is your "shootout" web page going up?
I suspect it won't. While research is being diligently done, right now it's sort of a battle between "TiVO is cheaper, and my friend Scott has one" versus "Damnit, I didn't run Ethernet into the family room so that we could buy a box that uses a @$%^ing serial modem."
I'm not big on TV, but my spousal overunit is and is currently doing the Tivo-ReplayTV pre-purchase research, and apparently the "lifetime" service fee is for the "lifetime" of the unit you purchase. If you get a new box, even from the same provider, you get to pony up that fee again.
It's the fees that'll kill them. Good technology, not the right marketing strategy for this stage of the game. Make it cheap until you get a solid, self-sustaining user base.
Remember the kid in school that would always say, "My ball, my rules"?
Yup. But I never remember him making the plans and the materials for the ball freely available to anyone and everyone, so that they could make their own ball and their own rules.
Take note that Linus decided to remind us nine times that it is his tree. I am a big fan of Linux, but not so much of Linus. The way he wrote that letter made him seem a bit childish.
Yeah. I'm sure that the developers who whine and pester him do it a lot more than nine times, but you never see that - you only see his public statement after putting up with it, again and again, over and over, ad infinitum. Frankly, I suspect if you had to deal with his mailbox you'd be doing the same thing.
There is nothing new in his message - its all been said before, repeatedly, in many ways and variations. It all has to be said repeatedly, because people don't listen, don't get it, and don't want to get it. If its childish, that's because it has to be reduced to the level of the audience.
First of all, rockets don't really "accelerate, tumble, and move erratically" that much.
If I recall correctly from the Gulf war, they do if they're Scuds. 8)
Having said that, for the vast majority of missiles manufactured by any decent technological power, you're absolutely right in everything you say.
I think this is quite revolutionary. I venture guess they will put these bastards on Aircraft carriers. Not a hostile shell, missile, airplane or UAV will come within miles. And there are nuclear power plants to drive them.
*cough*satellites*cough*
Sure, there's a few international treaties to deal with, but if you can do it...
ObRef: Dale Brown's Silver Tower. Zap!
Re:I fail to see anything new here?
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 2
Does Ghost etc. support Gigabit Ethernet? USB
Ethernet? Token Ring? No? Of course not - have
fun finding the necessary DOS drivers.
Hell, Ghost barely supports most laptops with pcmcia ether. But that hasn't stopped it from being the tool of choice for IT departments, because they want to take an image made on machine hardware X and be able to blow it onto machine hardware X.0.1.
I wonder, though, if you could boot a Unix CD with the appropriate weird network driver and then run Ghost under dosemu or something like that... All it wants is net and disk, why not? That doesn't solve your problem with finding a Unix server, but it would be an interesting experiment.
In any case, congratulations for making it onto/., and for having your server survive...
I fail to see anything new here?
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I can see no discernable difference between this and any bootable Linux CD with 'dd', 'gzip', and 'nc' or 'ssh' installed. The reason people buy Ghost is that it resizes partitions, and this doesn't have any of that.
Am I missing something? Is there something on their page that I didn't see as I read through? Is there a demand for new and unfamiliar commands for doing familiar things?
This is not a troll - this is honest curiosity. I've used Partition Image, which is similar, and don't use it for pretty much the same reason - nothing added. On the other hand, I've used multiple bootable distributions (linuxcare, superrescue, @stake) to make disk images using dd/gzip/nc/ssh/md5sum. Cake.
However, that doesn't explain why AT&T, Sprint and other long-distance telcos in the US, who don't have local loops, are doing OK (despite shrinking long-distance revenues) compared to many CLECs that offered (some of) its IP-based services.
Well, I'm not sure why that needs to be explained - it is an apples and oranges comparison. The LD telcos have a larger user base, have been in business for many years before the boom, and provide mostly telco-only at the consumer level (AT&T is the only one I know of playing in broadband, and that's only through cable not over telecom infrastructure).
The CLECS played heavily to the broadband data marketplace for the last mile, and were consumers of the data backbones provided by the large telco carriers. The broadband data marketplace is much smaller; not only are less people interested in xDSL than phone service, the distance limitations put the kabosh on an enormous number of potential subscribers.
The two segments are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Established, broad consumer base and large B2B businesses versus new companies rolling out new technology to a limited consumer base. How could the new technology be to blame? I haven't seen many stories from people saying "Yeah, I got DSL, but I decided that 56k was all I need so I got rid of it." The biggest problem I hear about the technology is the distance limitations and the sheer volume of crappy wiring that is out there (working fine for POTS, decent for ISDN, poorly for xDSL - and tell me the ILECs don't like it that way...)
When downturns hit, it is usually the largest and most diverse companies that survive, in any industry.
On that, I agree totally. If xDSL had been introduced and pushed by the ILECs instead of the CLECs, I'm sure that the market for it would be rosier (and more expensive) today. Since it cut into their T1 cash cow, though, they only moved when the CLECs became a threat.
So I don't buy the conspiracy theory
Well, that's my weak spot. When it comes to ILECs, I'm happy to entertain pretty much any conspiracy theory;)
They have to be separated. Consider this: I'm Joe Telco Lineman. I've been working for my ILEC for 20 years, I've got another 20 to go, and I like that pension thingy. I've been working in a monopoly environment where I could more or less get it done without any competition or quality control, because hey, what are they gonna do? Go to a competitor? hahahaha....
Then these upstart CLECs come along, and the gawddam government says that we have to share OUR copper with them so that they can take business away from US. Well shit Billy, I don't know about you, but I've got 21 work orders today and 15 of them are OURS and 6 are from those CLEC bastards. Seems to me I'm only likely to have time to get... oh... 15 or so of them done today... Sound about right? Damn straight... We'll get those others done tomorrow. Mebbe the day after that.
If the above scenario doesn't sound likely to you, you haven't talked to enough ILEC telco workers. I've had to deal with a number of them over both voice and data, and had discussions with a few others who didn't know I had anything to do with data or telco and were happy to let their hair down. They OWN the copper the way a mean doberman owns that bone between his paws that you were hoping to get a hold of.
It is insanity to believe that you can have company A owning infrastructure and services, company B owning services, and expect company A to give "the same installation cycles and access" to their competitors. Fortunately for the ILECs, the government has so far been insane.
If you look at all the telcos of various types, it is the incumbents (RBOCs, Baby Bells, ILECs, PTTs...) who are surviving quite well and even prospering.... It's precisely the next-gen telcos (CLECs, ISPs, xSPs) who invested in the new IP technology that ran into the boom/bust and are struggling or going bust.
You missed a few details - let's rephrase that:
"If you look at all the telcos of various types, it is the companies that control the physical infrastructure that both they and their competitors need (RBOCs, Baby Bells, ILECs, PTTs...) who are surviving quite well and even prospering.... It's precisely the companies who depend on the physical infrastructure that is controlled by their competitors (CLECs, ISPs, xSPs) who invested in the new IP technology that runs over the same copper wires that the incumbents have control over that ran into the boom/bust and are struggling or going bust."
The only thing "new IP technology" has to do with it is that the Incumbents don't like the idea of someone selling faster service over the same copper for a lower price... notice how the ILECs hunkered over their miserably handled ISDN options until the threat of competition forced them to move on to faster, cheaper, better technology. And oddly enough, once they moved, they managed to grow their xSL business while all the non-Incumbent competitors got trashed by ruinous turnaround on copper orders.
"AOL!" in this context means "Me Too!" It came about because people associated replies (usenet, web discussion boards) that had "Me Too!" and no useful content with newbies, e.g. AOL users.
Always messes me up. I always think "Army Of Light"...
Show some respect. The Skunk Works turned in a revolutionary, extraordinarily capable, STUPENDOUSLY RISKY airplane on a shoestring budget. We need more engineers like that.
I second that motion. For anyone who is interested, I recommend "Skunk Works: A personal memoir of my years at Lockheed" by Ben Rich. The SR-71 and F-117 were both created at the Skunk Works, and this book tells the tale from the inside. It contains some pretty fascinating tidbits - for example, during selection trials the F-117 prototype showed an alarmingly large radar signature on the test range. The fix? They had to design a stealth pylon to put it on because the F-117 proto was the first plane so stealthy that its signature was less than the pylon!
IMAPS is in 1.0.3 (stable), don't know when it was added. Works like a charm for me.
It was in the versions I tried (starting at, I think, 1.0...) I wouldn't have tried it without it - it's a minimum requirement for me.
You may want to check it out again.
Yes, I didn't intend to knock evolution - I think it's a great client, and will keep getting better. But for multiplatform use right, now, mozilla is the answer for me.
Both kmail and evolution use gpg, mutt as well invokes gpg when it is needed,
Oh, of course. And there are Pine plugins, and you can get emacs rmail to work with it. And as everyone knows, you can use the pipe command in ed to incorporate PGP functionality.
How things are in Windows, I have no idea.
Well, Pine is supported. The rest, not so much.
I tried Evolution for a while; generally a good app with some serious flaws (at the time I tried it). For example, there's this thing called STARTTLS that makes SMTP halfway secure - evolution didn't support it, it only supported the abandoned smtps protocol. I don't know if kmail or mutt support it, or if either of them supports IMAPS (Pine does, incidentally). Let's assume anyone thinking about GPG probably cares a little about protecting access to their mail store as well.
Even with that, I hung with evolution for a while, but since I spend 75% of my time in Windows and 25% in Linux, I got sick of switching back and forth between evolution and OE. So for anyone not able to live 100% in the Linux world, mozilla+enigmail is news rather than just being a latecomer.
Slashdot Mirror
You get 1 MS Licensing point for each copy of XP, 5 for MS Office and 10 for 2000 Server. No points at all for Linux.
How many points do I need to get a Harrier?
No shit! You have an enormous gravity well between your house and the house across the street, too?
we should ALL send him a copy of the "two hour" memo along with his TSP reports!
Although it may be more effective to send the memo with the one about the TPS reports.
Well, only if you send it 12 times...
On the one hand, Sun spread "back in the day" by getting good coverage in college CS departments, which led to new hires driving purchasing decisions once they left school. Sometimes the real world is what the schools were 5 years ago.
On the other hand, Apple's been trying that for 20 years and getting nowhere.
we shouldn't forsake the kids' futures for the sake of indoctrination.
You didn't go to school in the US, did you?
What is it with folks who think there's only room for either DS9 or B5, but not BOTH?
Beats the hell out of me. It irritates me when things are lopsided like that. Like, for example, how earlier story submissions about B5 coming to DVD - something that fans have been hoping for for years - get rejected instantly by slashdot, but the second someone goes into the shower on Enterprise, it's on the front page.
If some of us B5 fans are annoying, it's only because we're trying to restore balance to the force.
the only down side is the full series won't be out for a while.
Yeah, but that's true for any series. They always milk it. You could just wait until season 5 comes out and THEN watch them ;>
The first season of Babylon 5 is available NOW on DVD.
For those who aren't aware, or haven't seen, Babylon 5 has a far more interesting and COHESIVE story than DS9 - and DS9 was the closest approximation ST ever had to a cohesive storyline.
What do I mean by cohesive? Simply this: there's no reset button. Everything isn't solved at the end of the episode, all mutations un-mutated, all weird twists un-twisted. There are episodes in Season 5 which are tied closely to what happened in episodes from the other four seasons.
There's a real story - beginning, middle, and end. It spreads over the full 5 seasons. And, if my opinion isn't already clear - that's huge. It's a good story, and worth exercising your attention span for.
Sure, their special effects budget wasn't as rich as $T. Some threads get mangled because an actor wasn't available two seasons after the seeds were planted. When you consider the difficulty of producing a cohesive epic 5-season TV show, though, B5 did pretty good.
That's likely to be it's only failure mode in the future - stick a wrapper around it that restarts it when it dies, and you'll be right as rain.
What, like supervise from daemontools?
Nah. It'll never work.
The Series 2 Tivo's can connect to an ethernet for their connectivity by means of a cheap $10 USB->Ethernet adapter. It's "unofficial" but it does indeed work.
Great. Exactly what I'm looking for.
Are there any known problems having both USB ether and digital cable? I understand that some of the older network options conflicted with digital cable boxes, not quite sure how...
Bottom line, the boxes cost around 299+250 to make. Pay it over time (monthly) or pay up all at once, its up to you.
Cost-plus economics work with the government. Not so much the market at large. If the price is unpalatable, other options include cutting costs and bringing in other revenue (e.g. advertisement, partnering, etc).
Me, personally, I think $550 is a bit high, and I think that a monthly of $10 would do a lot better than a monthly of $20-$35. You may remember certain other industries that started out with low monthly costs, who later recouped once they had a stronger market (how much do you pay for cable today, and how much did you pay in 1985? How much would you have been willing to pay in 1985?)
Just my opinion. You disagree; that's what opinions are for. I certainly hope that DVRs make it, and that I end up owning one... but it isn't a no-brainer.
On the bright side, if you want to trade up it certainly increases the resale value of the unit.
Theoretically, yes, but I'm guessing that that is probably intentionally inconvenient to transfer. Just a guess, but...
Kudos to your wife for the research (I know you're the husband because no wife would ever refer to her hub as a "spousal overunit").
On Usenet and some mailing lists, the wife is always Spousal Overunit or SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed). I checked with my wife, and on female-oriented groups they use "DH." One of the meanings is "Dear Hubby." I understand there's another meaning but she won't tell me what it is...
When is your "shootout" web page going up?
I suspect it won't. While research is being diligently done, right now it's sort of a battle between "TiVO is cheaper, and my friend Scott has one" versus "Damnit, I didn't run Ethernet into the family room so that we could buy a box that uses a @$%^ing serial modem."
I'm not big on TV, but my spousal overunit is and is currently doing the Tivo-ReplayTV pre-purchase research, and apparently the "lifetime" service fee is for the "lifetime" of the unit you purchase. If you get a new box, even from the same provider, you get to pony up that fee again.
It's the fees that'll kill them. Good technology, not the right marketing strategy for this stage of the game. Make it cheap until you get a solid, self-sustaining user base.
Remember the kid in school that would always say, "My ball, my rules"?
Yup. But I never remember him making the plans and the materials for the ball freely available to anyone and everyone, so that they could make their own ball and their own rules.
Take note that Linus decided to remind us nine times that it is his tree. I am a big fan of Linux, but not so much of Linus. The way he wrote that letter made him seem a bit childish.
Yeah. I'm sure that the developers who whine and pester him do it a lot more than nine times, but you never see that - you only see his public statement after putting up with it, again and again, over and over, ad infinitum. Frankly, I suspect if you had to deal with his mailbox you'd be doing the same thing.
There is nothing new in his message - its all been said before, repeatedly, in many ways and variations. It all has to be said repeatedly, because people don't listen, don't get it, and don't want to get it. If its childish, that's because it has to be reduced to the level of the audience.
First of all, rockets don't really "accelerate, tumble, and move erratically" that much.
If I recall correctly from the Gulf war, they do if they're Scuds. 8)
Having said that, for the vast majority of missiles manufactured by any decent technological power, you're absolutely right in everything you say.
I think this is quite revolutionary. I venture guess they will put these bastards on Aircraft carriers. Not a hostile shell, missile, airplane or UAV will come within miles. And there are nuclear power plants to drive them.
*cough*satellites*cough*
Sure, there's a few international treaties to deal with, but if you can do it...
ObRef: Dale Brown's Silver Tower. Zap!
Does Ghost etc. support Gigabit Ethernet? USB Ethernet? Token Ring? No? Of course not - have fun finding the necessary DOS drivers.
Hell, Ghost barely supports most laptops with pcmcia ether. But that hasn't stopped it from being the tool of choice for IT departments, because they want to take an image made on machine hardware X and be able to blow it onto machine hardware X.0.1.
I wonder, though, if you could boot a Unix CD with the appropriate weird network driver and then run Ghost under dosemu or something like that... All it wants is net and disk, why not? That doesn't solve your problem with finding a Unix server, but it would be an interesting experiment.
In any case, congratulations for making it onto /., and for having your server survive...
I can see no discernable difference between this and any bootable Linux CD with 'dd', 'gzip', and 'nc' or 'ssh' installed. The reason people buy Ghost is that it resizes partitions, and this doesn't have any of that.
Am I missing something? Is there something on their page that I didn't see as I read through? Is there a demand for new and unfamiliar commands for doing familiar things?
This is not a troll - this is honest curiosity. I've used Partition Image, which is similar, and don't use it for pretty much the same reason - nothing added. On the other hand, I've used multiple bootable distributions (linuxcare, superrescue, @stake) to make disk images using dd/gzip/nc/ssh/md5sum. Cake.
In other news, linux gives nothing to Nambia.
Judging from the article, "nothing" goes a long way for them.
However, that doesn't explain why AT&T, Sprint and other long-distance telcos in the US, who don't have local loops, are doing OK (despite shrinking long-distance revenues) compared to many CLECs that offered (some of) its IP-based services.
Well, I'm not sure why that needs to be explained - it is an apples and oranges comparison. The LD telcos have a larger user base, have been in business for many years before the boom, and provide mostly telco-only at the consumer level (AT&T is the only one I know of playing in broadband, and that's only through cable not over telecom infrastructure).
The CLECS played heavily to the broadband data marketplace for the last mile, and were consumers of the data backbones provided by the large telco carriers. The broadband data marketplace is much smaller; not only are less people interested in xDSL than phone service, the distance limitations put the kabosh on an enormous number of potential subscribers.
The two segments are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Established, broad consumer base and large B2B businesses versus new companies rolling out new technology to a limited consumer base. How could the new technology be to blame? I haven't seen many stories from people saying "Yeah, I got DSL, but I decided that 56k was all I need so I got rid of it." The biggest problem I hear about the technology is the distance limitations and the sheer volume of crappy wiring that is out there (working fine for POTS, decent for ISDN, poorly for xDSL - and tell me the ILECs don't like it that way...)
When downturns hit, it is usually the largest and most diverse companies that survive, in any industry.
On that, I agree totally. If xDSL had been introduced and pushed by the ILECs instead of the CLECs, I'm sure that the market for it would be rosier (and more expensive) today. Since it cut into their T1 cash cow, though, they only moved when the CLECs became a threat.
So I don't buy the conspiracy theory
Well, that's my weak spot. When it comes to ILECs, I'm happy to entertain pretty much any conspiracy theory ;)
"Earth is 83% full... Please delete anyone you can."
Maybe you wouldn't really have to go that far.
They have to be separated. Consider this: I'm Joe Telco Lineman. I've been working for my ILEC for 20 years, I've got another 20 to go, and I like that pension thingy. I've been working in a monopoly environment where I could more or less get it done without any competition or quality control, because hey, what are they gonna do? Go to a competitor? hahahaha....
Then these upstart CLECs come along, and the gawddam government says that we have to share OUR copper with them so that they can take business away from US. Well shit Billy, I don't know about you, but I've got 21 work orders today and 15 of them are OURS and 6 are from those CLEC bastards. Seems to me I'm only likely to have time to get... oh... 15 or so of them done today... Sound about right? Damn straight... We'll get those others done tomorrow. Mebbe the day after that.
If the above scenario doesn't sound likely to you, you haven't talked to enough ILEC telco workers. I've had to deal with a number of them over both voice and data, and had discussions with a few others who didn't know I had anything to do with data or telco and were happy to let their hair down. They OWN the copper the way a mean doberman owns that bone between his paws that you were hoping to get a hold of.
It is insanity to believe that you can have company A owning infrastructure and services, company B owning services, and expect company A to give "the same installation cycles and access" to their competitors. Fortunately for the ILECs, the government has so far been insane.
If you look at all the telcos of various types, it is the incumbents (RBOCs, Baby Bells, ILECs, PTTs...) who are surviving quite well and even prospering.... It's precisely the next-gen telcos (CLECs, ISPs, xSPs) who invested in the new IP technology that ran into the boom/bust and are struggling or going bust.
You missed a few details - let's rephrase that:
"If you look at all the telcos of various types, it is the companies that control the physical infrastructure that both they and their competitors need (RBOCs, Baby Bells, ILECs, PTTs...) who are surviving quite well and even prospering.... It's precisely the companies who depend on the physical infrastructure that is controlled by their competitors (CLECs, ISPs, xSPs) who invested in the new IP technology that runs over the same copper wires that the incumbents have control over that ran into the boom/bust and are struggling or going bust."
The only thing "new IP technology" has to do with it is that the Incumbents don't like the idea of someone selling faster service over the same copper for a lower price... notice how the ILECs hunkered over their miserably handled ISDN options until the threat of competition forced them to move on to faster, cheaper, better technology. And oddly enough, once they moved, they managed to grow their xSL business while all the non-Incumbent competitors got trashed by ruinous turnaround on copper orders.
Coincidence? Or Conspiracy? You be the judge...
"AOL!" in this context means "Me Too!" It came about because people associated replies (usenet, web discussion boards) that had "Me Too!" and no useful content with newbies, e.g. AOL users.
Always messes me up. I always think "Army Of Light"...
Show some respect. The Skunk Works turned in a revolutionary, extraordinarily capable, STUPENDOUSLY RISKY airplane on a shoestring budget. We need more engineers like that.
I second that motion. For anyone who is interested, I recommend "Skunk Works: A personal memoir of my years at Lockheed" by Ben Rich. The SR-71 and F-117 were both created at the Skunk Works, and this book tells the tale from the inside. It contains some pretty fascinating tidbits - for example, during selection trials the F-117 prototype showed an alarmingly large radar signature on the test range. The fix? They had to design a stealth pylon to put it on because the F-117 proto was the first plane so stealthy that its signature was less than the pylon!
IMAPS is in 1.0.3 (stable), don't know when it was added. Works like a charm for me.
It was in the versions I tried (starting at, I think, 1.0...) I wouldn't have tried it without it - it's a minimum requirement for me.
You may want to check it out again.
Yes, I didn't intend to knock evolution - I think it's a great client, and will keep getting better. But for multiplatform use right, now, mozilla is the answer for me.
Both kmail and evolution use gpg, mutt as well invokes gpg when it is needed,
Oh, of course. And there are Pine plugins, and you can get emacs rmail to work with it. And as everyone knows, you can use the pipe command in ed to incorporate PGP functionality.
How things are in Windows, I have no idea.
Well, Pine is supported. The rest, not so much.
I tried Evolution for a while; generally a good app with some serious flaws (at the time I tried it). For example, there's this thing called STARTTLS that makes SMTP halfway secure - evolution didn't support it, it only supported the abandoned smtps protocol. I don't know if kmail or mutt support it, or if either of them supports IMAPS (Pine does, incidentally). Let's assume anyone thinking about GPG probably cares a little about protecting access to their mail store as well.
Even with that, I hung with evolution for a while, but since I spend 75% of my time in Windows and 25% in Linux, I got sick of switching back and forth between evolution and OE. So for anyone not able to live 100% in the Linux world, mozilla+enigmail is news rather than just being a latecomer.