This has been scaring the crap out of me for years! I've lost many a nights sleep fretting about the ocean rising, as it is. I don't know what to do but, its obvious that we've got to do something. And do it fast, we only have 1200 years before Miami sinks.
The type of pneumatic muscle that you refer to use a pneumatic piston. These work differently. These muscles use a pneumatic bladder that, when inflated, cause the muscle to contract. This is the same behavior, or the same effect, as real muscles.
My thought is that the cycling of these pneumatic muscles will probably be somewhat noisy. There would be a hissing and poping sound from them as the inflate/deflate and the control valves are operated. I suspect that by using hydraulic muscles instead would be far quieter and would probably offer the device greater strength. The immediately obvious drawback to this is that the hydraulic method would likely have slower response times than the pneumatic version.
As stated by several earlier posts, true aggregation is not possible without hardware and software/firmware at both ends of the link. This is not an IP or layer three solution. It must be done at a lower level. But, from a purely technical, if only theoretical stand point, it is possible.
A few years ago, while working for one of the biggest network equipment vendors, I proposed this very technology. The proposal would use a variant of Multilink PPP for xDSL connections, I called it MPPPoE since the most immediate application would have been PPP over Ethernet ISPs. The plan was reviewed and determined to be technically sound as well as simple(read inexpensive) to implement in that vendors hardware offerings. However, the marketing division saw only a very limited market for this and the idea was abandoned due to "lack of interest".
What I'd like to know is if there are any vendors or more importantly, ISPs that are offering such service today. Was marketing right? I was sure that I had come up with a winner.
I feel that the massive cups are linked to another phenomenon that I have noticed. That is, the new need for people to always have a drink in hand.
Up until recently, when people got thirsty, they went to the kitchen and got a drink. They finished their drink in the kitchen and went about their business. People also drank at the table while eating. But now, people seem to be incapable of going ANYWHERE without a drink constantly in hand.
It doesn't seem to matter what the drink is or if they are even thirsty, just so long as they always have a drink. Regardless of whether it is a ridiculous 44oz Big Gulp or a 12oz bottle of water, they must have a drink in hand.
It appears to me that people have developed some form of security blanket complex where they are out of sorts unless they have a drink in their hand. You notice this with the constant sipping. They are obviously not thirsty but every couple of minutes they are compelled to sip a half ounce or so. They seem addicted to the act of drinking, rather like smokers are to the act of smoking.
I see these annoying questions all the time. "Don't tell me that a 30 year old whatever is the best we have!" Alright, I won't tell you. But, I'll tell everyone else, Fortran is sometimes the best language for the job, even after 30 years. It is simple, fast as hell and very robust. What's wrong with that? Oh, you can't write a gui in it or you can't have derived object classes? Tough, that's not what it was designed for.
Why is it that the age of a language or tool is associated with it being inferior? Do you feel that everything that was created prior to your birth is inadequate or inferior? It is in fact, very common for the earliest versions of many things to be far superior to newer ones. This is true, not just for for languages but also for many other things. Most often, the "improvements" and "advances" that are made cheapen, dilute, complicate and destabilize the original product. This is, at least partly to blame for the disposable society that we live in today. Better, or smaller faster cheaper, usually also means less reliable and durable.
To answer your question, yes. Fortran is still a very viable language and is still, after 30+ years, the best language for heavy number crunching. If you need to create a gui and have derived oject classes as well, just link to the fortran libs. But, I'm sure that some snot nosed whippersnapper will suggest that Perl is the only solution. Puhleez!
As per Microsoft. There are no "Blue Screens Of Death" in Windows 2000.
There are however, "Stop Screens" These are completely different and should not be confused with BSOD.
Yea, right.
Why these phones are bad.
on
Motorola's i95cl
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Great. They have managed to pack even more features into a tiny package. Despite the posts compaining about the large size, with all the stuff that's crammed into this thing it is tiny. This is a technological marvel, to be sure but, let's look at it from a slightly different angle.
This thing is primarily supposed to be a phone. It can do so much more but, it is supposed to be a phone. As such, it is a very poor phone as are all of the Motorola ixxxx series. Its design is not at all ergonomic. It doesn't fit well against the face and its ear piece is angled such that it does not cover the ear. This means that it is difficult to hear in a noisy environment, such as a moving vehicle. Pressing the ear piece against the ear tightly enough to develop a seal is extremely uncomfortable and also puts a great deal of stress on the hinges. This very frequently leads to the cracking or break of the flimsy hinges.
The reception quality of these phones has changed very little. Frequently, calls are garbled or dropped completely. This is especially true when using the two way "Direct Connect" feature. These two way converstations often are interrupted by @#$@!&*%$#%@##^%@@#$@&^%%&. Very annoying.
There is also the issue of the beeps when using the two way mode. Even when you select to turn off the speaker and use the two way like a regular phone, there is a very loud beep if the other caller takes more than a couple of seconds to respond. This beep not only negates the point of turning off the speaker so as not to disturb the people around you, it is also deafening when the phone is held to the ear.
Then there is the key pad. The keys are small, naturally. But, they are also flush with the case, almost recessed, which makes dialing difficult. Not to mention the convoluted key presses necessary to use the gee whiz features that they keep adding. Countless other phones, especially Nokia, have much better buttons to allow easier dialing. Also, many phones offer voice activated dialing, eliminating the need to dial completely.
To be frank, there are only two redeeming features of this phone from a usability stand point. One of course is the "Direct Connect" feature, for obvious reasons. The other is the speaker phone feature. This allows half duplex hands free speaker phone use for cellular calls. This is an excellent and very usable feature that few other cell phones offer.
The gee whiz aspect of these phones is very high but, they seem to forget that this is a phone! I'd really like to see these companies, especially Motorola, invest some more time into increasing the reliabilty, usability, ergonomics and durability of these devices. These things are portable. That means they are going to get banged around. They are small and WILL get dropped from time to time.
If I wanted toast I'd buy a toaster. I don't need my phone to make toast, regarless of how cool it is that they can make it do that. I wanted a phone. I wanted to make phone calls and that is why I bought a phone. Make my phone calls better and I'll be very happy. Everything else is just fluff and is often an annoyance.
It seems ludicrous to me that no one has returned to the moon for 30 years! The "giant leap for mankind" now seems to have been a giant leap backwards.
Every time I start to "Think Python", it's something huge like a Burmese. Then Steve Erwin jumps in and starts wrestling with it while shouting something about what a beauty she is. It's very distracting and I just can't code with all that going on.
This is a perfect example of how truely insane poeple often appear sane and very intelligent.
Throughout his LONG WINDING answers I could not help but feel that I was reading the words of a very intelligent person. He posed, for the most part, stimulating ideas and apparently, well thought out arguments to support those ideas. I had no reason to question his sanity, therefore the thought never crossed my mind. That is, until I got to the question of the Chinese Room. This was a simple, though possibly offensively worded question. It required a relativey simple answer but, based on previous answers I was ready for a big one.
I was not ready, however, for the rambling tirade of a lunatic. The man is in fact DEEPLY disturbed and may indeed be a threat to his "friend of 20 years", Goldberg. I personaly would be very uncomfortable, if not fearful, had that answer been a face to face encounter. I find the whole thing rather sad.
In the end, my conclusion is that A.L.I.C.E. is NOTHING more than she has always appeared to be. A mimic just as ELIZA was. And Wallace.... the man is really quite insane!
It's no wonder that Open Source hackers and Linux users are so poorly perceived by the general public. Here is yet another picture of the father/grand daddy of Open Source. That's right RMS himself.
For God's sake, couldn't some one have told him to button his shirt and get a haircut before giving a keynote speech.
I use notepad. Lots of people do. But, the reason may not be what you think it is.
So many people use Notepad for the same reason that so many people use Vi. The simple reason is that you can find it on *every* system. If you work in a Windows shop you will likely be working on other machines than your own. These other machines will not have your favorite "SlickEditor" but, they will have Notepad. Regardless of whether the machine is 95/98/NT/2000/XP notepad will be there. The same holds true with Vi. If you work in a *nix environment, you can be assured that whatever machine you use will have Vi. They may or may not have GEdit or Kwrite or even Emacs but, Vi wil be there.
Of course, if you use only Notepad and then go to a *nix system, you'll have a hell of a time with Vi.
Sure it's Cert slamming. There's no doubt about that. The problem is though, that to date there is no law against it. That's right, perfectly legal. For example I have on my desk a letter from "The Admiistrative Office of RPR/OFV Records Division". It looks vaguely like something from the IRS, certainly it is from some government agency. When I open it, it looks like a check for $1600 and a ticket for a cruise. Of course, it is all a bogus marketing scam. Probably trying to sell time shares. It's totally and intentionally misleading but, at the same time it is still legal.
Furthermore I wouldn't look for a law against it any time soon. Things like certificates and how they work are a bit on the technical side, at least for our poor overworked legislators. They have a lot of catching up to do and are currently bogged down trying to stop the MP3 swappers from being the scurge of humanity that they are.
The patent is certainly valid but, don't panic just yet. This particular patent, though very general and broad scoped in nature, was actually filed to protect a very nice feature found in Bay / Nortel layer 2/3 and beyond switches. This feature has been in their switches since 1995 and possibly earlier and it allows for the routing/switching of packets based on a specified pattern match of ANY arbitrary portion of a FRAME. Note the specific reference to ATM?
Using this filtering method, you can switch/route a packet or frame from/to any port based on ANY part of the frame. If you wanted, for some bizzar reason, to make your decision based on the crc checksum you can do it. Also, because you are looking at the entire frame/packet, it is not specific to IP. You can filter/switch/route ANY protocol IP, IPX, HTTP, DECNet, APPN, anything. It is extraordinarily powerful, though infrequently used. But it is great to have when you need it. You can find it on most of their switches and routers from the BayStack 450 to the Bay BCN router to the Passport 8600 series layer 3 switches.
I do not feel that IPFilters needs to be concerned as this patent and could possibly be applied to ANY filtering tecnique in use today. Anything from MAC based port blocking to layer 7 web switching. However, even Bay/Nortel has notr choesen to challenge or attempt to enforce the patent on anyone so far.
As an interesting side note. Up until last year Nortel was filing and being awarded patents at a rate of two per day. They patented any and everything that they did. Hell, there is even a patent(not copyright) on a set of icons they designed for you on mobile phone type PDAs. That's right, a patent on a small set of crappy looking icons. Try doing a patent search with keyword Nortel. You'll be amazed.
Red Carpet can make money by offering subscriptions. Subscribe and get access to the high bandwidth, high availabilty site.
Ximian also plans to make money through the sale of things like it's Exchagne Connector which allows Evolution clients to utilize Microsoft Exchange 2000's services including the calendaring features.
From the description at the Peek-a-Booty site it seems to me that it is nothing more than open proxies running SSL. While I understand their stated goals, the whole project seems redundant.
First, the project assumes that the governments are using a NOT list. This is a big assumtion. I would think that control freaks like the Chinese government would more likely use an ALLOW list. A small list of governmet sanctioned sites. This would, of course, negate Peek-A-Booty.
If the government is in fact, using a NOT list, there are already countless open proxies continually popping up all over the place. This makes me think that the whole project is redundant.
I currently use Evolution 1.0.7 in an Exchange 2000 environment but, without the connector. I user POP & SMTP to talk with Exchange. Comparing it to Outlook 2000 I would say that it is very good overall. But there are a few "rough edges".
Speed is the first issue. Performing the various daily functions is noticably slower than with Outlook on the same machine. Opening a message or sending a message all take a moment longer than Outlook, which seems to snap right to it. The sluggishness is livable but, it is noticable too.
The second is probably a matter of taste. I use Evolution with KDE 3 and the Evolution colors are all gray washouts. This isn't too bad at first but, it does cause the interface to lack contrast which I find tiring after a while. I haven't found a way to change the colors but, it is probably possible. Perhaps, through the GDM configuration but, that's more trouble than it's worth.
The only other possible issue I have is with an over abundance of menu options that don't seem to offer any real value. I still haven't figured out what the difference is between "Empty Trash" and "Expunge". Are they both necessary?
Other than that, I think Evolution is VERY comparable to Outlook. I love some of the features that it has that Outlook lacks. For instance the ability to view HTML formatted mail but not download embedded images off the net. This means no more dot clear images tracking the message and no auto-run scripts doing dirty deeds.
VFolders, a method of storing searches in a folder view format, are very nice. I must confess though, I don't use it much. I only have 5 VFolders configured.
Calendaring and contact management is great too, though I can't speak for Exchange interoperability with the Calendar, I feel confident based on Evolution that the connector would be good too.
As a whole I strongly recommend Evolution. It is an Outlook killer. Unfortunately though, it doesn't forward Melissa, Code-Red, Anna Kourikova, I Love You.....;)
Slashdot Mirror
This has been scaring the crap out of me for years! I've lost many a nights sleep fretting about the ocean rising, as it is. I don't know what to do but, its obvious that we've got to do something. And do it fast, we only have 1200 years before Miami sinks.
Oh bother.
The type of pneumatic muscle that you refer to use a pneumatic piston. These work differently. These muscles use a pneumatic bladder that, when inflated, cause the muscle to contract. This is the same behavior, or the same effect, as real muscles.
My thought is that the cycling of these pneumatic muscles will probably be somewhat noisy. There would be a hissing and poping sound from them as the inflate/deflate and the control valves are operated. I suspect that by using hydraulic muscles instead would be far quieter and would probably offer the device greater strength. The immediately obvious drawback to this is that the hydraulic method would likely have slower response times than the pneumatic version.
As stated by several earlier posts, true aggregation is not possible without hardware and software/firmware at both ends of the link. This is not an IP or layer three solution. It must be done at a lower level. But, from a purely technical, if only theoretical stand point, it is possible.
A few years ago, while working for one of the biggest network equipment vendors, I proposed this very technology. The proposal would use a variant of Multilink PPP for xDSL connections, I called it MPPPoE since the most immediate application would have been PPP over Ethernet ISPs. The plan was reviewed and determined to be technically sound as well as simple(read inexpensive) to implement in that vendors hardware offerings. However, the marketing division saw only a very limited market for this and the idea was abandoned due to "lack of interest".
What I'd like to know is if there are any vendors or more importantly, ISPs that are offering such service today. Was marketing right? I was sure that I had come up with a winner.
I blew my Ultra Mega Big Gulp on that one.
I feel that the massive cups are linked to another phenomenon that I have noticed. That is, the new need for people to always have a drink in hand.
Up until recently, when people got thirsty, they went to the kitchen and got a drink. They finished their drink in the kitchen and went about their business. People also drank at the table while eating. But now, people seem to be incapable of going ANYWHERE without a drink constantly in hand.
It doesn't seem to matter what the drink is or if they are even thirsty, just so long as they always have a drink. Regardless of whether it is a ridiculous 44oz Big Gulp or a 12oz bottle of water, they must have a drink in hand.
It appears to me that people have developed some form of security blanket complex where they are out of sorts unless they have a drink in their hand. You notice this with the constant sipping. They are obviously not thirsty but every couple of minutes they are compelled to sip a half ounce or so. They seem addicted to the act of drinking, rather like smokers are to the act of smoking.
What's up with that?
I see these annoying questions all the time. "Don't tell me that a 30 year old whatever is the best we have!" Alright, I won't tell you. But, I'll tell everyone else, Fortran is sometimes the best language for the job, even after 30 years. It is simple, fast as hell and very robust. What's wrong with that? Oh, you can't write a gui in it or you can't have derived object classes? Tough, that's not what it was designed for.
Why is it that the age of a language or tool is associated with it being inferior? Do you feel that everything that was created prior to your birth is inadequate or inferior? It is in fact, very common for the earliest versions of many things to be far superior to newer ones. This is true, not just for for languages but also for many other things. Most often, the "improvements" and "advances" that are made cheapen, dilute, complicate and destabilize the original product. This is, at least partly to blame for the disposable society that we live in today. Better, or smaller faster cheaper, usually also means less reliable and durable.
To answer your question, yes. Fortran is still a very viable language and is still, after 30+ years, the best language for heavy number crunching. If you need to create a gui and have derived oject classes as well, just link to the fortran libs. But, I'm sure that some snot nosed whippersnapper will suggest that Perl is the only solution. Puhleez!
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
As per Microsoft. There are no "Blue Screens Of Death" in Windows 2000.
There are however, "Stop Screens" These are completely different and should not be confused with BSOD.
Yea, right.
Great. They have managed to pack even more features into a tiny package. Despite the posts compaining about the large size, with all the stuff that's crammed into this thing it is tiny. This is a technological marvel, to be sure but, let's look at it from a slightly different angle.
This thing is primarily supposed to be a phone. It can do so much more but, it is supposed to be a phone. As such, it is a very poor phone as are all of the Motorola ixxxx series. Its design is not at all ergonomic. It doesn't fit well against the face and its ear piece is angled such that it does not cover the ear. This means that it is difficult to hear in a noisy environment, such as a moving vehicle. Pressing the ear piece against the ear tightly enough to develop a seal is extremely uncomfortable and also puts a great deal of stress on the hinges. This very frequently leads to the cracking or break of the flimsy hinges.
The reception quality of these phones has changed very little. Frequently, calls are garbled or dropped completely. This is especially true when using the two way "Direct Connect" feature. These two way converstations often are interrupted by @#$@!&*%$#%@##^%@@#$@&^%%&. Very annoying.
There is also the issue of the beeps when using the two way mode. Even when you select to turn off the speaker and use the two way like a regular phone, there is a very loud beep if the other caller takes more than a couple of seconds to respond. This beep not only negates the point of turning off the speaker so as not to disturb the people around you, it is also deafening when the phone is held to the ear.
Then there is the key pad. The keys are small, naturally. But, they are also flush with the case, almost recessed, which makes dialing difficult. Not to mention the convoluted key presses necessary to use the gee whiz features that they keep adding. Countless other phones, especially Nokia, have much better buttons to allow easier dialing. Also, many phones offer voice activated dialing, eliminating the need to dial completely.
To be frank, there are only two redeeming features of this phone from a usability stand point. One of course is the "Direct Connect" feature, for obvious reasons. The other is the speaker phone feature. This allows half duplex hands free speaker phone use for cellular calls. This is an excellent and very usable feature that few other cell phones offer.
The gee whiz aspect of these phones is very high but, they seem to forget that this is a phone! I'd really like to see these companies, especially Motorola, invest some more time into increasing the reliabilty, usability, ergonomics and durability of these devices. These things are portable. That means they are going to get banged around. They are small and WILL get dropped from time to time.
If I wanted toast I'd buy a toaster. I don't need my phone to make toast, regarless of how cool it is that they can make it do that. I wanted a phone. I wanted to make phone calls and that is why I bought a phone. Make my phone calls better and I'll be very happy. Everything else is just fluff and is often an annoyance.
I think you're right on the money.
It seems ludicrous to me that no one has returned to the moon for 30 years! The "giant leap for mankind" now seems to have been a giant leap backwards.
Every time I start to "Think Python", it's something huge like a Burmese. Then Steve Erwin jumps in and starts wrestling with it while shouting something about what a beauty she is. It's very distracting and I just can't code with all that going on.
This is a perfect example of how truely insane poeple often appear sane and very intelligent.
Throughout his LONG WINDING answers I could not help but feel that I was reading the words of a very intelligent person. He posed, for the most part, stimulating ideas and apparently, well thought out arguments to support those ideas. I had no reason to question his sanity, therefore the thought never crossed my mind. That is, until I got to the question of the Chinese Room. This was a simple, though possibly offensively worded question. It required a relativey simple answer but, based on previous answers I was ready for a big one.
I was not ready, however, for the rambling tirade of a lunatic. The man is in fact DEEPLY disturbed and may indeed be a threat to his "friend of 20 years", Goldberg. I personaly would be very uncomfortable, if not fearful, had that answer been a face to face encounter. I find the whole thing rather sad.
In the end, my conclusion is that A.L.I.C.E. is NOTHING more than she has always appeared to be. A mimic just as ELIZA was. And Wallace.... the man is really quite insane!
It's no wonder that Open Source hackers and Linux users are so poorly perceived by the general public. Here is yet another picture of the father/grand daddy of Open Source. That's right RMS himself.
For God's sake, couldn't some one have told him to button his shirt and get a haircut before giving a keynote speech.
Real men only use Edlin.
I use notepad. Lots of people do. But, the reason may not be what you think it is.
So many people use Notepad for the same reason that so many people use Vi. The simple reason is that you can find it on *every* system. If you work in a Windows shop you will likely be working on other machines than your own. These other machines will not have your favorite "SlickEditor" but, they will have Notepad. Regardless of whether the machine is 95/98/NT/2000/XP notepad will be there. The same holds true with Vi. If you work in a *nix environment, you can be assured that whatever machine you use will have Vi. They may or may not have GEdit or Kwrite or even Emacs but, Vi wil be there.
Of course, if you use only Notepad and then go to a *nix system, you'll have a hell of a time with Vi.
Sure it's Cert slamming. There's no doubt about that. The problem is though, that to date there is no law against it. That's right, perfectly legal. For example I have on my desk a letter from "The Admiistrative Office of RPR/OFV Records Division". It looks vaguely like something from the IRS, certainly it is from some government agency. When I open it, it looks like a check for $1600 and a ticket for a cruise. Of course, it is all a bogus marketing scam. Probably trying to sell time shares. It's totally and intentionally misleading but, at the same time it is still legal.
Furthermore I wouldn't look for a law against it any time soon. Things like certificates and how they work are a bit on the technical side, at least for our poor overworked legislators. They have a lot of catching up to do and are currently bogged down trying to stop the MP3 swappers from being the scurge of humanity that they are.
I always thought that this particular law was garbage but, it passed anyway.
But, the radio broadcasters arguement to try to get out of it is so lame even I am not impressed.
The patent is certainly valid but, don't panic just yet. This particular patent, though very general and broad scoped in nature, was actually filed to protect a very nice feature found in Bay / Nortel layer 2/3 and beyond switches. This feature has been in their switches since 1995 and possibly earlier and it allows for the routing/switching of packets based on a specified pattern match of ANY arbitrary portion of a FRAME. Note the specific reference to ATM?
Using this filtering method, you can switch/route a packet or frame from/to any port based on ANY part of the frame. If you wanted, for some bizzar reason, to make your decision based on the crc checksum you can do it. Also, because you are looking at the entire frame/packet, it is not specific to IP. You can filter/switch/route ANY protocol IP, IPX, HTTP, DECNet, APPN, anything. It is extraordinarily powerful, though infrequently used. But it is great to have when you need it. You can find it on most of their switches and routers from the BayStack 450 to the Bay BCN router to the Passport 8600 series layer 3 switches.
I do not feel that IPFilters needs to be concerned as this patent and could possibly be applied to ANY filtering tecnique in use today. Anything from MAC based port blocking to layer 7 web switching. However, even Bay/Nortel has notr choesen to challenge or attempt to enforce the patent on anyone so far.
As an interesting side note. Up until last year Nortel was filing and being awarded patents at a rate of two per day. They patented any and everything that they did. Hell, there is even a patent(not copyright) on a set of icons they designed for you on mobile phone type PDAs. That's right, a patent on a small set of crappy looking icons. Try doing a patent search with keyword Nortel. You'll be amazed.
Red Carpet can make money by offering subscriptions. Subscribe and get access to the high bandwidth, high availabilty site.
Ximian also plans to make money through the sale of things like it's Exchagne Connector which allows Evolution clients to utilize Microsoft Exchange 2000's services including the calendaring features.
From the description at the Peek-a-Booty site it seems to me that it is nothing more than open proxies running SSL. While I understand their stated goals, the whole project seems redundant.
First, the project assumes that the governments are using a NOT list. This is a big assumtion. I would think that control freaks like the Chinese government would more likely use an ALLOW list. A small list of governmet sanctioned sites. This would, of course, negate Peek-A-Booty.
If the government is in fact, using a NOT list, there are already countless open proxies continually popping up all over the place. This makes me think that the whole project is redundant.
NTP was too complicated(??) so, you designed built and tested your own homegrown version of NTP??????
To quote Dr. Evil, "Riiiight...".
Red Hat 7.3 KDE 3.0
Hasn't crashed at all!
I currently use Evolution 1.0.7 in an Exchange 2000 environment but, without the connector. I user POP & SMTP to talk with Exchange. Comparing it to Outlook 2000 I would say that it is very good overall. But there are a few "rough edges".
;)
Speed is the first issue. Performing the various daily functions is noticably slower than with Outlook on the same machine. Opening a message or sending a message all take a moment longer than Outlook, which seems to snap right to it. The sluggishness is livable but, it is noticable too.
The second is probably a matter of taste. I use Evolution with KDE 3 and the Evolution colors are all gray washouts. This isn't too bad at first but, it does cause the interface to lack contrast which I find tiring after a while. I haven't found a way to change the colors but, it is probably possible. Perhaps, through the GDM configuration but, that's more trouble than it's worth.
The only other possible issue I have is with an over abundance of menu options that don't seem to offer any real value. I still haven't figured out what the difference is between "Empty Trash" and "Expunge". Are they both necessary?
Other than that, I think Evolution is VERY comparable to Outlook. I love some of the features that it has that Outlook lacks. For instance the ability to view HTML formatted mail but not download embedded images off the net. This means no more dot clear images tracking the message and no auto-run scripts doing dirty deeds.
VFolders, a method of storing searches in a folder view format, are very nice. I must confess though, I don't use it much. I only have 5 VFolders configured.
Calendaring and contact management is great too, though I can't speak for Exchange interoperability with the Calendar, I feel confident based on Evolution that the connector would be good too.
As a whole I strongly recommend Evolution. It is an Outlook killer. Unfortunately though, it doesn't forward Melissa, Code-Red, Anna Kourikova, I Love You.....
Would you enjoy being bludgeoned by an olive loaf?
I can't read the paper but, for his sake, I hope that he really meant that reliabillity isn't that important to him.
His server is toast!