I still like the existing mbox format, primarily because it is in plain text. This makes it easy to manage with common text tools and editors, as well as making it portable across many different MUA's. I just cringe whenever somebody mentions storing mail in some kind of database; if users want to use an MUA that does that, that's fine, but if sendmail ever changes the mailbox format to something that I can't read with 'less', I'll stop upgrading.
The only thing I don't really like in the mbox format is the separation between messages. It's very similar to the mail header lines, and I'm not sure what would happen if a message happened to contain a line with the same format. OTOH, I can't think of another separator that would work better while keeping the file in 7-bit ASCII.
I also use Eudora as my MUA, one of the reasons being that all mailboxes it creates are also in mbox format. One thing I like about Eudora is that it stores almost all metadata about each message in a separate file, including indexes to each message for faster access. But the down side to that is there have been several times when Eudora crashed (it is a M$-Windows program, after all) and the metadata got out of sync with the mailbox, so the tags were often lost. I think a better solution would be to store metadata as extra header lines in the message (I think pine does this) -- although I wouldn't want *too* many extra headers cluttering the mail -- and have the MUA use a separate file just for indexing and re-sorting.
I also like the fact that Eudora extracts attachments from messages so that the mbox file doesn't get too big. However, placing all attachments in a single directory creates its own cluttered mess, plus there are potential problems when two or more messages happen to have attachments with the same file name, and it's difficult to keep track of which mailbox each attachment came from. Perhaps a partial solution to this would be to have a separate attachment directory for each mailbox, and each attachment's filename would be modified to indicate which message it came from (such as a date prefix or message ID suffix). The downside is that it may not work on old systems with a minimum filename length (POSIX programs must not depend on more that 14 chars). Attachment separation should also be limited to MUA's; MTA's ought to keep attachments inline so that user agents can do whatever they want with them.
A mailbox with over 1400 messages, using Courier-IMAP, viewing through my webmail interface
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that IMAP is simply a protocol for remote access to a mailbox. The mailbox on the imap server side could still be the standard unix mbox format (single file for all messages). This is not what the original post was asking:
Maildir: Do you really want to clutter your system with millions of small files? That's waste of inodes, space (unless perhaps you use Linux/ReiserFS or SGi) and just try to open a Maildir with 1000+ mails and see how long it takes your favorite Mailprogram to only display the subjects.
It seems that most of the other posters have missed this important point. If M$N claims all rights to user content, they must also accept all responsibility.
Has anyone else noticed that the length of commercial breaks seems to be getting longer? On a recently taped show, I checked my VCR's tape timer at the start and end of three consecutive commercial breaks. They were 4:30, 4:00, and 4:30 minutes long, amounting to approximately 29% of the total time slot. In years past, it seemed like commercial breaks accounted for 25% or less of the total time.
It's as if advertisers felt like commercials aren't as effective as they used to be, so their answer is to give you even more!
Yes; sorry if I wasn't clear in my intent. The original post asked "What finance software are you using now, what features do you like and what features do you think these software packages need?" I tried to answer that question by listing the features I use in MS Money that I'd like to see implemented in GnuCash.
I got hooked on MS Money 3 about twelve years ago, upgraded to MS Money 4 when Microsoft offered it for free download, and have used it ever since. I've never used Quicken, the main reason being that I didn't want to go through the hassle of converting all my existing finance records, and potentially lose some data.
I tried using GnuCash last month so that I'd have one less reason to use a Windows emulator. (VMware; MS Money won't run under wine.) Transferring my existing accounts, though a two-step process (export from Money, import to GnuCash), wasn't hard. And I did like several of GnuCash's features, like the arbitrary hierarchy of categories and being able to view a payee as an expense account.
After using both MS Money and GnuCash concurrently for about a week, I decided to stick with MS Money. The primary reason was that I discovered that GnuCash did *not* import my transaction memos! (Well, actually it looks like it did keep memos for split transactions, but not for normal transactions.)
Another feature I rely on heavily in MS Money is the payment calendar -- reminders of what bills or statements I should be expecting in the mail. This became a critical feature for me a few years back when the post office mysteriously 'lost' some of my bills repeatedly over several months. GnuCash doesn't have anything similar.
The charts that GnuCash offers are cute, but not useful. MS Money offers several _dozen_ report and chart types, each of which can be customized (I have 6 custom charts which I use more frequently than the built-in charts). And moreover, each report can be displayed either as text or a graph. To be specific, here are the reports/graphs that I frequently use:
* Cash History: a sum of my liquid assets (cash, checking, and savings accounts) shown in a line graph over time. GnuCash has an Assets over Time bar chart, but it includes all other assets.
* Liquid Net Worth: a simple summary report of my liquid assets vs. liabilities (credit cards). Again, GnuCash has a Balance Sheet, but it includes all other assets.
* Monthly Cash Flow: a report showing my transactions by category (rows) and month (columns). I think GnuCash's Transaction Report is supposed to do something like this, but I couldn't get it to work ("No matching transactions found").
* Spending (after taxes): a bar chart showing my expenses, excluding taxes taken out of my paycheck. Similar to GnuCash's Expenses over Time bar chart (except that GnuCash includes tax expenses).
I also have a minor complaint about GnuCash's charts: they don't size well. MS Money fits the chart nicely to the size of the window, and you can customize sich things as whether to show a legend, what type of graph to use, B/W vs. color, etc. GnuCash appears to use a fixed chart size that I can't change.
Also, when you right-click on certain chart elements in MS Money (such as a slice of a pie chart), you have the option to view the transactions related to that element. In GnuCash, clicking on most charts does nothing, but in some charts it will distort the image. Cute, but not useful.
I'm sure that switching platforms now just for the application mentioned is not a particularly viable option, but if you aren't opposed to using commercial apps and want UNIX, you may consider looking into OS X at some point in the future.
OK, so when will OS X get ported to the x86? (That includes Cocoa and Aqua, not just Darwin.) That's something I'd like to try myself, but I can't afford (nor do I have extra space for) new hardware at this time.
In reading Hatch's statement, I don't see any mention of the DCMA. All it looks like to me is a request for more thought about legislation that would be fair for everyone.
First of all, I just have to say it: I've seen a few shows on PBS that were interrupted by telethon-like requests for financial contributions. Okay, maybe that's the exception rather than the rule, but still...
The main point I want to make is that there really isn't that much difference between DVR's and VCR's as far as what you can do with them. The implementation may be different, but I can still record shows for later viewing, skip through commercials (though not as fast), take a tape over to a friend's, or make copies. And there's nothing wrong with that (as long as it's for personal use). In fact, allowing viewers to record TV shows can actually increase a station's audience, because otherwise we'd have to choose between two or more shows that share the same time slot, or choose whether to watch TV at all if we have something more important to do at that time. So why raise such a fuss over a new technology to do the same thing viewers have already been doing for years?
I mean, can't you see it? Kelsey Grammar doing a 30-second spot, explaining how skipping commercials is really a crime, and explaining how ads pay for TV programming, et cetera? After all, it would be pretty cheap and easy to launch for them to launch such a campaign.
Maybe he already did, but we just missed it because we skipped the commercials!
I normally use Communicator 4.78, but I tried RC1 a few days ago after reading a recent review of web browsers for Linux.
It has a number of new features (relative to Communicator) that I like, and I like the layout better than Netscape 6. I didn't get to do much testing for reliability on many web sites, though, because it has one major shortcoming:
It's dismally slow!
Granted, I didn't use a stopwatch on it, but it felt like mozilla was taking 1.5-2 times as long to respond to user actions as Communicator does. I don't think I lasted an hour before my patience wore out. I've gone back to Communicator.
What are the odds of speeding up mozilla's responsiveness in the future?
I haven't even found a compelling reason to switch from Windows 95 to XP, but one big reason not to (paranoia). The only reason I've considered it is because I want to upgrade my computer sometime, but the 3D video cards I'm looking at don't offer drivers for Win95 at all. (The only thing I use Windows for is games, so I gotta have a spiffy video card for it.)
Isn't there something in the legal system that says a defendant may not be forced to testify against himself? It sounds like that is what's going on here.
He compared the situation to "proprietary operating systems that run only on specific hardware designed and manufactured by the same vendor," such as Apple Computer's Mac OS or Sun Microsystems' Solaris.
And what about non-proprietary operating systems? NetBSD, for example, runs on several dozens of platforms with different CPU's, in addition to those thousands of systems that all use the same x86 architecture.
I still use Eudora Pro 3; I don't care for any of the new changes in the later versions, especially HTML parsing and banner ads (which you can't block, or else the program won't work). And I've never seen any other brand of mail client for Windoze or unix that gives me the features I really love in Eudora:
Color coded labels for each message
Very easy to use and powerful mail filters
Mail boxes are stored in the standard unix mailbox format--i.e., plain text, making it very simple to transfer mailboxes from Eudora to unix and vice-versa. (The last time I tried to help a friend back up his mail in Outlook, we couldn't even find his mailboxes!)
Eudora 3 is one of the only 2 productivity programs I have left for which I still need M$-Windows.
I've managed Apache at work, and Roxen at home. I still can't say whether one is better than the other, but I do like those RXML tags, so I'm sticking with Roxen for now.
I agree that the pen could be a good replacement for the mouse in some cases. It would be much faster to point and tap directly on what you want on the screen than to locate the mouse cursor, move the mouse to the right place, and click.
But there are also problems to consider such as protecting the screen from repetitive poking and scratching, and tiring out your arm from holding up a pen in front of you as opposed to resting it on the mouse's back.
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I still like the existing mbox format, primarily because it is in plain text. This makes it easy to manage with common text tools and editors, as well as making it portable across many different MUA's. I just cringe whenever somebody mentions storing mail in some kind of database; if users want to use an MUA that does that, that's fine, but if sendmail ever changes the mailbox format to something that I can't read with 'less', I'll stop upgrading.
The only thing I don't really like in the mbox format is the separation between messages. It's very similar to the mail header lines, and I'm not sure what would happen if a message happened to contain a line with the same format. OTOH, I can't think of another separator that would work better while keeping the file in 7-bit ASCII.
I also use Eudora as my MUA, one of the reasons being that all mailboxes it creates are also in mbox format. One thing I like about Eudora is that it stores almost all metadata about each message in a separate file, including indexes to each message for faster access. But the down side to that is there have been several times when Eudora crashed (it is a M$-Windows program, after all) and the metadata got out of sync with the mailbox, so the tags were often lost. I think a better solution would be to store metadata as extra header lines in the message (I think pine does this) -- although I wouldn't want *too* many extra headers cluttering the mail -- and have the MUA use a separate file just for indexing and re-sorting.
I also like the fact that Eudora extracts attachments from messages so that the mbox file doesn't get too big. However, placing all attachments in a single directory creates its own cluttered mess, plus there are potential problems when two or more messages happen to have attachments with the same file name, and it's difficult to keep track of which mailbox each attachment came from. Perhaps a partial solution to this would be to have a separate attachment directory for each mailbox, and each attachment's filename would be modified to indicate which message it came from (such as a date prefix or message ID suffix). The downside is that it may not work on old systems with a minimum filename length (POSIX programs must not depend on more that 14 chars). Attachment separation should also be limited to MUA's; MTA's ought to keep attachments inline so that user agents can do whatever they want with them.
It seems that most of the other posters have missed this important point. If M$N claims all rights to user content, they must also accept all responsibility.
Has anyone else noticed that the length of commercial breaks seems to be getting longer? On a recently taped show, I checked my VCR's tape timer at the start and end of three consecutive commercial breaks. They were 4:30, 4:00, and 4:30 minutes long, amounting to approximately 29% of the total time slot. In years past, it seemed like commercial breaks accounted for 25% or less of the total time.
..."
It's as if advertisers felt like commercials aren't as effective as they used to be, so their answer is to give you even more!
"The more you tighten your grip,
Yes; sorry if I wasn't clear in my intent. The original post asked "What finance software are you using now, what features do you like and what features do you think these software packages need?" I tried to answer that question by listing the features I use in MS Money that I'd like to see implemented in GnuCash.
I got hooked on MS Money 3 about twelve years ago, upgraded to MS Money 4 when Microsoft offered it for free download, and have used it ever since. I've never used Quicken, the main reason being that I didn't want to go through the hassle of converting all my existing finance records, and potentially lose some data.
I tried using GnuCash last month so that I'd have one less reason to use a Windows emulator. (VMware; MS Money won't run under wine.) Transferring my existing accounts, though a two-step process (export from Money, import to GnuCash), wasn't hard. And I did like several of GnuCash's features, like the arbitrary hierarchy of categories and being able to view a payee as an expense account.
After using both MS Money and GnuCash concurrently for about a week, I decided to stick with MS Money. The primary reason was that I discovered that GnuCash did *not* import my transaction memos! (Well, actually it looks like it did keep memos for split transactions, but not for normal transactions.)
Another feature I rely on heavily in MS Money is the payment calendar -- reminders of what bills or statements I should be expecting in the mail. This became a critical feature for me a few years back when the post office mysteriously 'lost' some of my bills repeatedly over several months. GnuCash doesn't have anything similar.
The charts that GnuCash offers are cute, but not useful. MS Money offers several _dozen_ report and chart types, each of which can be customized (I have 6 custom charts which I use more frequently than the built-in charts). And moreover, each report can be displayed either as text or a graph. To be specific, here are the reports/graphs that I frequently use:
* Cash History: a sum of my liquid assets (cash, checking, and savings accounts) shown in a line graph over time. GnuCash has an Assets over Time bar chart, but it includes all other assets.
* Liquid Net Worth: a simple summary report of my liquid assets vs. liabilities (credit cards). Again, GnuCash has a Balance Sheet, but it includes all other assets.
* Monthly Cash Flow: a report showing my transactions by category (rows) and month (columns). I think GnuCash's Transaction Report is supposed to do something like this, but I couldn't get it to work ("No matching transactions found").
* Spending (after taxes): a bar chart showing my expenses, excluding taxes taken out of my paycheck. Similar to GnuCash's Expenses over Time bar chart (except that GnuCash includes tax expenses).
I also have a minor complaint about GnuCash's charts: they don't size well. MS Money fits the chart nicely to the size of the window, and you can customize sich things as whether to show a legend, what type of graph to use, B/W vs. color, etc. GnuCash appears to use a fixed chart size that I can't change.
Also, when you right-click on certain chart elements in MS Money (such as a slice of a pie chart), you have the option to view the transactions related to that element. In GnuCash, clicking on most charts does nothing, but in some charts it will distort the image. Cute, but not useful.
OK, so when will OS X get ported to the x86? (That includes Cocoa and Aqua, not just Darwin.) That's something I'd like to try myself, but I can't afford (nor do I have extra space for) new hardware at this time.
In reading Hatch's statement, I don't see any mention of the DCMA. All it looks like to me is a request for more thought about legislation that would be fair for everyone.
First of all, I just have to say it: I've seen a few shows on PBS that were interrupted by telethon-like requests for financial contributions. Okay, maybe that's the exception rather than the rule, but still...
The main point I want to make is that there really isn't that much difference between DVR's and VCR's as far as what you can do with them. The implementation may be different, but I can still record shows for later viewing, skip through commercials (though not as fast), take a tape over to a friend's, or make copies. And there's nothing wrong with that (as long as it's for personal use). In fact, allowing viewers to record TV shows can actually increase a station's audience, because otherwise we'd have to choose between two or more shows that share the same time slot, or choose whether to watch TV at all if we have something more important to do at that time. So why raise such a fuss over a new technology to do the same thing viewers have already been doing for years?
Maybe he already did, but we just missed it because we skipped the commercials!
I normally use Communicator 4.78, but I tried RC1 a few days ago after reading a recent review of web browsers for Linux.
It has a number of new features (relative to Communicator) that I like, and I like the layout better than Netscape 6. I didn't get to do much testing for reliability on many web sites, though, because it has one major shortcoming:
It's dismally slow!
Granted, I didn't use a stopwatch on it, but it felt like mozilla was taking 1.5-2 times as long to respond to user actions as Communicator does. I don't think I lasted an hour before my patience wore out. I've gone back to Communicator.
What are the odds of speeding up mozilla's responsiveness in the future?
Brought to you by the redundant department of redundancy!
I haven't even found a compelling reason to switch from Windows 95 to XP, but one big reason not to (paranoia). The only reason I've considered it is because I want to upgrade my computer sometime, but the 3D video cards I'm looking at don't offer drivers for Win95 at all. (The only thing I use Windows for is games, so I gotta have a spiffy video card for it.)
Isn't there something in the legal system that says a defendant may not be forced to testify against himself? It sounds like that is what's going on here.
And what about non-proprietary operating systems? NetBSD, for example, runs on several dozens of platforms with different CPU's, in addition to those thousands of systems that all use the same x86 architecture.
I still use Eudora Pro 3; I don't care for any of the new changes in the later versions, especially HTML parsing and banner ads (which you can't block, or else the program won't work). And I've never seen any other brand of mail client for Windoze or unix that gives me the features I really love in Eudora:
Eudora 3 is one of the only 2 productivity programs I have left for which I still need M$-Windows.
I've managed Apache at work, and Roxen at home. I still can't say whether one is better than the other, but I do like those RXML tags, so I'm sticking with Roxen for now.
I agree that the pen could be a good replacement for the mouse in some cases. It would be much faster to point and tap directly on what you want on the screen than to locate the mouse cursor, move the mouse to the right place, and click.
But there are also problems to consider such as protecting the screen from repetitive poking and scratching, and tiring out your arm from holding up a pen in front of you as opposed to resting it on the mouse's back.
Well, that takes care of this week's spam...