On the one hand, you want OEMs to be free to bundle valid software, including valid replacements for Microsoft's own half-baked accessories. Some OEMs bundle Eudora, for instance, and that's much better than leaving the users with Outlook Express. Office suites (in some cases MS Office and in other cases alternatives) are another popular bundle item, and again that adds value. Even if you're not a big fan of Corel WPOS, as indeed I am not, it's still definitely better than the WordPad, Cardfile, and no spreadsheet whatsoever, which is what comes with Windows if the OEM doesn't add anything. Even Microsoft recognises that not every user is going to be willing to buy MS Office, and yet they might like to be able to type up documents. So you want OEMs to be able to make that kind of addition. And obviously you *have* to allow drivers for the hardware, and the OEM is the immediate source for such things. They should be bundled.
On the other hand, some OEMs can't think of anything they'd rather bundle than WeatherBug and its ilk, and that's just sick and wrong. These sorts of offerings have already significantly harmed many users' opinions of Windows XP, and I can certainly sympathise if Microsoft doesn't want that happening with Vista. (In the past some (e.g., Packard Bell) have been known to bundle even *worse* dross, such as shell replacement environments that make MS Bob look positively heartwarming by comparison, but I haven't seen so much of that recently. I think WeatherBug and so on are just about the worst OEM-ware I've seen bundled with Windows XP. Oh, and Outlook Express, but Microsoft has nobody but themselves to blame for that particular atrocity.)
Allowing OEMs to bundle whatever they want is a double-edged sword. You have to take the good with the bad. Of course, Microsoft could punish OEMs whose bundles are extremely terrible by refusing to deal with them any more, but this would be a dangerous time for Microsoft to do that. They *might* go out of business and take their nonsense with them, but on the other hand they might *not*, and that would mean significant (and possibly even large) OEMs (other than Apple) distributing entry-level PCs with a non-Microsoft OS, and Microsoft does not want that.
> That most people won't spend over $400 on a phone because there aren't any > phones worth spending that much on?
If what you need is a phone, it's not worth spending a $100 on one, let alone $500+, no matter *how* nice the phone is, because you can get a quite nice phone for $100, if all you need is a phone.
The iPhone isn't a phone. I mean, yes, it's *also* a phone, but it's not *primarily* a phone. It's primarily a handheld computer. The "it's a phone" feature is a nice feature, but it's not a sufficient raison d'etra for a $500 device, unless you're the sort of person who will happily pay $350 a plate for dinner on a regular basis if it keeps out the upper-middle-class wannabes who want to *pretend* they're in your economic bracket but obviously aren't really. That's not Apple's market. Yes, they want to be perceived as high-end, but they're not that kind of extreme high end.
Actually, although it's nice that the iPhone can function as a phone, what's going to be even more temptingly attractive to many folks is that its form factor is pared down to just about match that of a cellphone. I personally don't give a rip about that (I'm one of those people who would rather have a 20" laptop than a 17" one, because the extra screen space and larger keyboard would be worth more to me than the lost portability), but lots of people are going to drool all over themselves. They're going to say to themselves, "It's the size of a phone!" in much the same way that subnotebook buyers say to themselves, "It's the size of a three-ring binder!" The fact that it can actually make phonecalls is just a bonus.
When Jobs said Apple is shooting for 1% of the cellphone market, he was just being dramatic, knowing that the real extreme fanboys are going to say, "1%? Heck, they ought to be able to get 10% in a year..." and so forth. Which is just so much horse doots, because most the overwhelming bulk of the cellphone market is owned by the low end, because most people buying a cellphone just want a cellphone and maybe a service plan. Apple knows this, and Jobs knows this, but he wanted to be drammatic in the keynote.
Realistically, what they're shooting for is an iPod-esque market share of the handheld computer market -- a market share so overwhelming that it drives and expands the whole market. I won't try to predict whether they'll attain that, but that's what they're shooting for.
HTML is problematic, needlessly complex, and some browsers don't support it properly.
If you just stick with printable ASCII and serve with Content-type: text/plain, the only compatibility issue you have to worry about then is line endings...
Several factors go into determining what the "major" browsers are, and overall usage share is just one of them. Different people have slightly different lists, but almost nobody determines it solely based on that one factor.
Safari is platform-specific, making it a non-option for a lot of people. That raises the bar a bit for how much market share it needs to have in order for webmasters to be willing to support it. IE usually makes the cut, but its market share is overwhelming. Konqueror usually *doesn't* make the cut, because it only (AFAIK) runs on X11, requires KDE to be installed, and is difficult to upgrade independently of KDE and/or keep multiple versions installed for testing. If its market share were really high, like that of IE, people would probably still be willing to support it, but as it stands... no. Safari is even more platform-specific than Konqueror.
Safari also is a relative newcomer. Opera has been around a while, and its usage share has been fairly constant since the late nineties. (In the graph on WP this is not really visible, since old versions of Opera are categorized into "Others".) It was one of the "big three" browsers back when Netscape was solidly number one (#2 being IE), and its usage share hasn't really declined since then, although the others have shuffled around in various ways, sometimes splitting the market in ways that left Opera at #4 or lower. For a time, around the end of the first browser war, these three browsers between them had something like 99.5% usage share. Then Gecko came along, then Konqueror and others, and things have opened up again now, but Opera's position hasn't really changed. The old Netscape has (for practical purposes) gone away, and IE peaked circa 2002-2003 and is now on a gradual decline, with Gecko and others on the increase.
It's not clear, right now, what this is all going to look like in another couple of years. Gecko seems to have secured the #2 slot for the forseeable future, but apart from that things are changing too fast right now for clear pronouncements to be made with any confidence. Most analyists have handed the #2 slot off from Netscape to Gecko, and this is a pretty non-controversial position given the relationship between them, but nobody's quite sure yet who's going to come out with the #3 slot when the dust clears. A lot of people still list Opera there, simply because they haven't updated their lists yet. It looked for a while like it was going to be KHTML, since both Konqueror and Safari used that, but since Apple forked their webkit off, that's no longer so clear.
My guess is that Opera will end up in the #4 slot, maybe even #5, without losing any market share, because others appear to be gaining more than it is at the expense of IE.
Remember that people's idea of which browsers are the major ones lags a few months behind their uptake. IE was not really considered a major browser yet in 1996, although in retrospect it is clear that its ascent to #1 had already begun.
> tell me what I miss with IE7 when I already run Windows + Firefox 2.0
With IE7 you get the ability to see whether your website, which validates, and which looks fine in Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror, is going to look similarly fine to users who browse in IE7.
Of course, you only care about that if you publish content on the web. I'm sure nobody who reads slashdot ever does that...
> That's just it of course: Pegasus was a great product for its time, but has failed to > keep up with competitors. Nearly everyone has already switched over to Thunderbird > or something else
Failed to keep up? You're out of your chair.
If you compare Pegasus and Thunderbird side-by-side, Thunderbird looks positively feature-impoverished. If people have switched from Pegasus to Thunderbird, it is because they were no longer willing to be tied down to MS Windows. Running on other operating systems is the *one* meaningful feature Thunderbird possesses that Pegasus does not.
Going the other way, there are many downsides to Thunderbird, the most significant being that its filtering is nowhere near the same ballpark with Pegasus Mail's filtering. It doesn't have flow control. It can't filter based on status flags like has-been-read, has-been-answered, or cetera. It can't filter based on time elapsed since receipt (e.g., leave unread messages in the inbox for up to ten days, then move them to another folder based on these rules...). It can't highlight a message so that it shows up a different color in the list. It can't form-reply. It can't launch an external process to handle certain messages. Et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam.
Besides the filtering, there are a number of other useful features missing from Thunderbird too, but that one is really the biggie. If your mailreader can't presort your mail for you, whatever else it's going to do to save you time is going to pale by comparison.
Heck, even *Gnus* (the mailreader that has every feature *including* the kitchen sink, and a learning curve to match) is missing some of Pegasus Mail's more useful features, features that Pegasus Mail has had since 1996.
Pegasus Mail didn't fail to keep up, in terms of development or features. What happened is two things:
First, and most important, it failed to be ported to the operating systems that are used by power users who crave powerful software with powerful features. A great many former Pegasus Mail users no longer use Windows. Wine didn't mature fast enough, and users were forced to find other mailreaders that would run on the OS they wanted to use. Choice of mailreader, even a really great mailreader, was not a strong enough factor to drive the choice of operating systems.
Second, it lost the end-user market when operating system makers started bundling cheesy half-baked mailreaders with the OS. But it shares that trait with most other mailreaders, except for the bundled ones and the ones that were never aiming for the end-user market in the first place (e.g., Gnus).
I understand why *development* of Pegasus Mail has stopped, in the absense of funds. But it would be nice if it could continue to be distributed for another couple of years. It's still quite a good ways ahead of the dev curve. Thunderbird will catch up with it in time, but based on its progress to date it could be another five or ten years.
Meanwhile, I'm now stuck with no decent option to recommend to people who don't want to fight a learning curve (to adopt e.g. Gnus) and aren't satisified with Yet Another Lame Outlook Clone (e.g., Thunderbird).
If bandwidth costs are the problem, he could have just given permission for others to distribute the unchanged binaries.
I suspect what's really going on is that he hopes somebody offers to buy the source. Frankly, I hope so too. I've been hoping so for a while. If someone were to manage to port it to *nix/X11, I'd be a very happy man.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 3, Informative
> I was going to say the best way to sum them up is that they are both > ancient [...] relics with arcane "interfaces".
Nobody, so far as I am aware, uses Emacs because of its default interface (which is, indeed, ancient and arcane). We use it because of its capabilities, and we customize the interface to suit our needs. Yes, there are people who *use* the default interface, because they are accustomed to it, because they needed Emacs for its features and never bothered to customize the interface. But they don't use Emacs *because* of the interface.
> Sure, *nix geeks will love it, and they may even devout a surprisingly pathetic > amount of time mastering it because, "technically speaking, it provides a much > more robust set of features than any GUI-based program."
You clearly don't understand Emacs.
In the first place, it *is* a GUI-based program. (Yes, you can run it without a GUI, but you would only ever do so if for some reason no GUI is available, and certain features become unavailable under such circumstances; it is certainly not the normal mode of operation.) Second, the amount of time it can save you on a day-to-day basis over a normal text editor editor will pay back your initial learning-time investment in a few weeks, or at most a few months -- at least, it will if you are doing the kind of editing Emacs was designed for.
Emacs is very good for partially automating semi-repetitive tasks. Some tasks can be fully automated, and that's fine, but many editing tasks cannot be automated in that fashion, because the user to constantly make decisions that the software can't handle. Yes, you *could* write an application in Perl or some other language that would repeatedly ask you questions about what to do, but writing it would be tedious and using it would be worse. Emacs, because it embeds and fully integrates the programming language into the text editor, solves these problems much more quickly and easily.
Of course, if you don't perform the kind of editing tasks that Emacs is really good for, then you probably don't care. And if you aren't already a programmer, then learning lisp would be much harder (because you'd have to learn all the programming concepts, in addition to the language) and maybe not worth it. But that doesn't make it any less a valuable tool for those who need it.
A more modern default interface wouldn't hurt it any, I'll grant you. But there is no alternative, currently. There is no tool that can do the things Emacs does, with the ease with which Emacs does them, and has a modern user-friendly default interface. Emacs is the only game in town.
Sure, there are many text-editors. But there are not many *fully* programmable integrated text editing environments -- at least, none that I'm aware of.
Learning to use a bandsaw is a silly waste of time if all you're going to do with it is sharpen pencils. An ordinary pencil sharpener is much easier to learn to use properly, takes up less space, is less dangerous, and will sharpen the pencil just about as quickly. Fine, use the pencil sharpener. But people who make dollhouse furniture are probably going to opt for the bandsaw.
> Should he simply turn his computer off for a few weeks to wait for the full > Vista (which may still have the issue) or try to find a fix right now?
My real advice would be to stay on XP for now, or else switch to a competing OS. Judging by past experience, Vista is going to be More Trouble Than It's Worth until a couple of service packs come out. However, the question expressly said "short of downgrading to XP".
There isn't a good answer to his question, because the way he's asked it denies the good answers. He's essentially asking, "How can I use it *now*, even though it's not ready yet, without having to put up with the flakiness of a product that isn't ready yet?"
The only other obvious answer is "Well, if you don't want to 'downgrade' to XP, then you should upgrade/migrate to another OS altogether. Don't use Vista; it isn't really ready yet. Give it a couple of years." But that isn't what he wants to hear. He's been waiting for Longhorn since two weeks after XP came out, and he's tired of waiting, because the MS release cycle is even slower than Debian stable. Well, tough. Use a wired network, then.
It may be that there's some workaround, but how much time do you really want to spend tracking down workarounds for stuff that ought to Just Work if you used a mature and stable operating system that's been out long enough to have some of its bugs fixed?
> The recent outages in Asia were exasperated by the lack of redundant routes.
I assume you mean exacerbated. I'm not sure what it would mean to exasperate an outage; normally only sentient beings can be exasperated.
Nonetheless, your point is valid. If an entire nation is connected to the internet via one (1) ISP with one (1) link to the outside world and one (1) external IP address, they have larger problems than whether one user's foolish actions can cause them all to be blocked from a particular website (even if it's a fairly major website like WP; and yes, I understand they were only blocked from editing, not viewing, but that's really extraneous to the point).
> Your criteria, which sounds reasonable, removes KDE and other best of class > choices from consideration. Why do that if the substitute application can use > the data without problem and then do many more things with it?
Because it ties you unnecessarily to a specific platform.
Bear in mind that the cost of switching applications can be much greater than the cost of switching operating systems, due to staff training issues. You don't want to switch applications again several years from now when you decide that you want to move from Linux to something else. (If that seems unlikely, consider how likely it seemed ten years ago that you would move from Windows to Linux.) And you *certainly* don't want to have to switch out *all* of your core business applications at one time. It takes *years* to get staff comfortable with a change of *one* core business application; doing them all at once is unconscionable.
Yes, you will occasionally choose to switch applications, but this decision should be made individually, one application at a time, for reasons having to do with that application (e.g., your needs have progressed beyond what it can continue to meet). If your applications are married to a specific platform, you get stuck in a situation where due to a platform migration you may have to change them all out at once, which is excruciating for everyone involved, exasperatingly unpopular with your staff, and amazingly expensive.
Either that or you are eternally tied to a dying platform. (All platforms die eventually; it is a matter of time.) Some places _still_ keep DOS systems around for this reason, because ten years ago they were unwilling or unable to replace all of their applications at one go, because of the impossible training issues it would create, and so they have one or two DOS apps left that they still need to migrate away from. (Yes, there are many DOS applications out there that will not run, or will not run properly, under Windows -- certainly not under XP.) Virtualization can help a little (reducing e.g. the requirements for hardware and physical space), but it's still a very substantial problem (and creates training issues of its own, as most end users are not comfortable with the extra layers of interface created by virtualization). And it takes *decades* to move away from one legacy single-platform application at a time until you finally get weaned off the last one.
If you select cross-platform applications in the first place, you don't get stuck.
I understand what KDE is trying to do, but standardizing on it wholesale now will make large headaches if you ever want to move to any other platform, for any reason, in exactly the same way that standardizing on Windows fifteen or twenty years ago makes large headaches now if you want to move to Linux. (By standardizing on KDE wholesale I do not mean using it as a desktop environment. I mean using applications that won't run on anything else to meet core business requirements. If you're running cross-platform applications in a KDE environment, you're still free, because you can run them in a different environment later if you so choose.)
Also bear in mind that I am *not* saying you shouldn't let your IT geeks use KOffice. IT geeks can train themselves on a new application in hours, so you can let them use whatever they want (within reason). If it gets their job done, fine. And I understand what you're saying about file format compatibility, but I'm not talking about selecting file formats. Yes, you standardize on certain file formats, but that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about selecting the core applications you deploy for your end users, train them on, and so on and so forth.
> however a couple of our core applications run exclusively on Windows
Then that is where you have to start.
Yes, you could insert a couple of Linux systems in side roles that don't require them to run the core apps, e.g., a DNS server here and a CGI server there and so on and so forth -- and that's likely worth doing for its own sake -- but if you want to migrate entirely off of Windows, you've first got to migrate to all cross-platform applications.
And here's the timeline for 'Vienna': 2007 Q1 Vista released; work on Vienna begins. 2007 Q4 Microsoft announces Vienna will contain innovative new filesystem 2008 Q2 Microsoft projects release date for 'Vienna' as late 2010 or early 2011 2008 Q3 Microsoft announces Vienna will revolutionize the internet desktop 2009 Q2 Microsoft announces Vienna's filesystem will make search irrelevant 2009 Q4 Microsoft projects release date for Vienna as second half of 2011 2010 Q1 Microsoft announces Vienna will be inherently more secure than Vista 2010 Q2 Microsoft announces Vienna's new API will make developers' jobs easy 2010 Q4 Microsoft announces Vienna will have built-in internet telephony (VOIP) 2011 Q2 Microsoft projects release date for Vienna in early 2012 2011 Q3 Microsoft announces Vienna will work with next-generation security hardware 2012 Q1 Microsoft announces partnership with wireless internet provider to enhance Vienna's
internet telephony, allowing users to go "unplugged" 2012 Q2 Microsoft projects Vienna release date pushed back to 2013 2012 Q3 Microsoft announces Vienna's wireless internet telephony will make cellphones obsolete 2013 Q1 Microsoft announces Vienna's wireless internet telephony will be more secure than cellphones 2013 Q3 Microsoft announces Vienna kernel will be most secure OS kernel ever 2013 Q4 Microsoft projects Vienna release date in early 2014 2014 Q1 Microsoft announces the new filesystem may not be ready for RTM but will ship
just after Vienna in a service pack 2014 Q2 Microsoft announces Vienna public beta will be forthcoming later in the year 2014 Q3 Microsoft announces the new developer API will be spun off as a separate project from Vienna 2014 Q4 Microsoft promises Vienna release no later than 2015 Q2 2015 Q1 Deal with wireless internet company falls through 2015 Q2 Microsoft announces innovative filesystem will be in release after Vienna 2015 Q2 Microsoft announces Vienna will still feature "unplugged" internet telephony,
but user will have choice of third-party wireless providers 2015 Q3 Microsoft releases limited beta of Vienna to select individuals and companies 2015 Q3 Reviews of Vienna start coming out; reviewers note internet telephony not present 2015 Q4 Microsoft announces final product name for Vienna will be Windows Fiesta 2015 Q4 Microsoft confirms internet telephony will not be ready to ship with first release 2016 Q1 Microsoft releases public beta of Fiesta to a wider audience 2016 Q2 Microsoft announces final release date for Fiesta in November; nobody believes it 2016 October Microsoft announces Windows Fiesta will be available to select customers in
November, retail version will ship in January 2016 November Microsoft announces Fiesta now available to select customers 2017 January Microsoft actually releases Windows Fiesta
Giving out free stuff to people who write reviews on high-profile sites has been a common practice for hardware makers for some while, I think. This may be the first I've heard of a _software_ maker giving out _hardware_ as a freebie, but maybe they just wanted to be sure Vista runs flawlessly and didn't want to chance that with the recipients' extant hardware. And this is *not* the first I've heard of a manufacturer of one product sending a complementary product along with, e.g., motherboard manufacturers have been known to send RAM with their mainboard so that the reviewer will have the right kind of RAM so they can use the motherboard without spending money. The only difference here is that it's hardware and software, instead of hardware and hardware. And of course that MS is a monopoly, but if that has any bearing on this particular practice, I am not aware of it. (If they were giving out free laptops with purchase of Vista in order to break into the laptop market, _that_ would be a serious ethical and legal problem. But that's not what's going on here.)
If there were any strings attached, then there would be an ethical issue, of course, but otherwise I don't see a problem, or at least not a qualitatively larger problem than you have when AMD sends a free motherboard and CPU to a hardware review site, or SanDisk sends them a free USB key, or whatever.
Of course if the blogger then posts a review of Vista they should disclose that they got it as a freebie. Review sites typically do that, e.g. with a statement at the end of the review like "Review hardware provided by [Manufacturer's Name]". In this case it would be review hardware and software, but otherwise the same sort of statement would do fine, I should think.
> Even guns have mostly been developed purely in the private sector in the > hopes of selling them to the military at some later date.
Sure, for values of "at some later date" that generally amount to something between "as soon as I can get a working prototype put together" and "before I run out of working capital, for a preference" (for new companies entering the market) or "before the contracts on our existing models run out" (for established weapons manufacturers).
These dreams of selling to the military don't always *materialize* right away, but the major gun developers' aspirations for their work invariably involve military contracts as soon as and as often as can be arranged. That's where the big money is.
Sure, if they don't _get_ the military contract, they sell to the public to make ends meet. Hence for instance Thompson's (in)famous submachine gun being marketed heavily to the public to keep the company afloat until the military finally pulled the trigger on buying them in '38. But selling to the military was always the goal.
The line between current/active email and archived email is extremely blurry, and going back and archiving the older stuff as a separate step would cost me several extra hours a week for no good purpose.
Yes, I have more than 2GB of email. Keeping it doesn't hurt anything. 5 or 6 GB of space (or whatever it's up to now) costs, to a first approximation, nothing, particularly compared to my time. And yes, I *do* refer back to something old from time to time, and I often don't know exactly how old it is when I go looking for it, but grep finds it anyway. Quickly. Of course, my mail is automatically sorted upon receipt via split methods and stored using the nnml backend; if you use woefully feature-impoverished software like Outlook your mileage may vary. You probably don't have an easy way to open a folder (that corresponds, say, to a low-traffic mailing list) and show the last 300 messages, for example, or an easy way to separately choose whether to show only marked and unread messages versus the read ones too. You probably don't have regular expression filters for sorting them into folders in the first place, either.
If large amounts of email are a problem, the real problem is that your software isn't cut out for the workout it's getting. I've played with Outlook briefly, and I consider it a toy mailreader suitable only for people who don't actually get that much mail. It doesn't correctly rewrap quoted text, doesn't correctly break-and-rewrap when replying in the middle of a paragraph, doesn't fold quoted matter, doesn't handle attachments in a safe and sane fashion, doesn't handle HTML mail in a safe and sane fashion, doesn't have proper macros, isn't properly scriptable,...
I don't want to give the impression here that I'm rabidly anti-Microsoft. I consider Outlook to be hands-down the worst product Microsoft has ever kept on the market for more than two years running. (They've produced a few other odd bits of utter rubbish (what large company hasn't?), but stuff like Bob disappeared from the store shelves after a few months, and a company is allowed to make a mistake, after all, as long as they eventually figure out it's a mistake and repent of it.) I'm much more kindly disposed to Word, for instance.
So I'm not rabidly anti-Microsoft, so much as rabidly anti-Outlook.
> 7836 (RTFM) is the actual "straight-thru" (always a live answer - never a voicemail) extension > to our IT group. I've been told I'm the only one outside of the group that 'gets' the joke
Bear in mind that 7836 can be translated to any of a hundred and eight different four-letter sequences. If you count sequences with digits in them, which are commonly used to make rememberable phone numbers, there are three hundred and twenty possibilities. Is it really surprising that nobody in the company happened to notice that RTFM is one of the many possibilities for what 7836 might mean? After all, it could also have been chosen because it spells out the Unix command sudo (which is used by system administrators to execute a command with escalated privileges), among other things.
> Where do I get a live CD that supports winmodems like the one which comes on my laptop?
It depends on what model of winmodem you have, but Knoppix tries to support as many of them as it can. While it's possible to find out what model and chipset you have and look them up to see if they are supported, it's much easier to just put a Knoppix CD in the drive and try it out to see if it works. Because it's a LiveCD, you don't have to install anything or alter the contents of your hard drive, so when you take the CD out and reboot everything will be back the way you left it. So all you lose by trying it is, at most, the cost of a blank CD-R disc, the bandwidth you consumed downloading the image, and the five minutes you spent trying it.
We *know* what the big power hogs are: anything that does heating or cooling. Air conditioning, stove (oven and range), clothes dryer, and any other electric heating or cooling devices you may have (e.g., space heaters).
Note that fans don't count as "cooling", because all they really do is move air around, which is rather easier. So even a really *big* CPU fan, although we call it a cooling device in IT, does not suck down power like an air conditioner or space heater would do.
After heating and cooling, the lights are often the next-biggest power hog, but they're still small potatoes compared to heating and cooling.
You want to save power? Put in better insulation, and set your thermostats to a wider temperature range (e.g., only heat to 60 instead of 70 in the winter, and cool to 80 instead of 70 in the summer). And if the area room with the heater is warmer than the rest of the house, put in a better fan to improve distribution. Fans are cheap to run, compared to the heater itself, and *much* cheaper than space heaters.
> The good news is I've patented emoting with ascii characters.:););/;\:/:\ > I'll be back for my royalties in 2007!
You can't do that. I've got a business method patent on coming back for royalties.
I think maybe next I'll file a patent on actually spelling out in plain language the emotions you're feeling, in an email message. So, for instance, if you're happy, you could say in the message, "I'm happy". I'll file the patent on that as soon as I think up a suitable user interface for it;-)
Umm, emoticons are rather older than AOL, dude. I'm pretty sure they were used on usenet since before the introduction of nntp, and I suspect they were probably used on multiuser systems before the internet.
> "I'm guessing you're one of those 'glass is half empty' kinda guys"
I'm one of those guys who doesn't believe the glass could really be half-full *or* half-empty, because how on earth would you really get it exactly halfway? It's almost certainly either a little more or a little less than halfway.
We could assume for purposes of simplicity that the glass is half empty, but if you're going to do that you're in Physics Textbook World and might as well assume the glass is a point mass while you're at it.
There are two fundamentally different kinds of suckage. There's the kind where it just isn't designed to provide for everything you want, which I'm going to call Class One suckage, and there's the kind where it's *supposed* to do what you want, but in one way or another doesn't do it very well, which I'm going to call Class Two suckage for the purposes of this post. This latter category can be further subdivided into interface issues (Class 2A if you will) and functionality issues (Class 2B).
All systems have Class 1 suckage to the extent that you ever want them to do anything more (or different) than they were designed to do.
However, within the limits of their design, some systems don't have Class 2 suckage, at least not very much. PC-DOS 3.3 is an excellent example. It didn't do a lot of the things we expect an operating system to do these days, but what it *did* do, it did quite well. You can argue that there was some Class 2 suckage in the filesystem, but even that wasn't too bad. (Indeed, with a couple of Class 1 improvements (LFNs and a larger max filesystem size) FAT32 is still an excellent choice for storing many kinds of data, and better in many ways than the filesystems normally used with Linux. The LFN implementation has Class 2 suckage, but it was not present in DOS, so there it was only a Class 1 issue.) You can talk about all the stuff DOS didn't do (e.g., multitasking), but then you're back in Class 1, i.e., you're asking it to do stuff it was never intended to do.
That said, I haven't used DOS in a long time, for obvious reasons, because Class 1 suckage *does* matter. But it is my opinion that Class 2 suckage is much *worse*, and Windows is loaded with it. (I speak here of versions of Windows prior to Vista. I have not experienced Vista. One supposes, given the number of years since XP came out and the amount of rewriting they probably did, that Vista might not have precisely the same suckage properties as previous versions. I also am not really talking about NT3 or NT4, nor CE, nor the versions prior to 3.0, because I never experienced much of those either, so I'm not qualified to comment on them. But the other versions are all loaded with Class 2 suckage.)
Linux distributions have some Class 2 suckage, but I haven't seen much in the kernel itself. Indeed, the kernel thing that is most noticeable to me as a difference between kernels is the virtual memory handling, which (apart from the minor issue of not auto-allocating swap space when needed) is, in my experience, substantially superior to that of any other OS I have used and, in particular, better than both Windows (same version caveats as above) and FreeBSD.
On a lighter note, the Gnome folks seem to have really gotten ahold of this principle, because they remove more Class 2 suckage every release, introducing Class 1 suckage in its place.
The weather doesn't really go to extreme extremes in New England either. The people who live there like to think of their winters as "extreme" because they've all visited the Carolinas for a vacation at one point or another, so they know what a truly mild winter can be like, and since New England has something that resembles _actual_ winter, they want to think of it as extreme.
But it's not extreme in any really extreme sense. Extreme would be fifty or sixty below[1] for half the winter and ninety below on an especially cold day, like they get in the colder parts of Sibera. A few days a year of twenty below is a normal winter in any temperate region, and New England is no more "extreme" in that sense than Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, or cetera.
--- [1] All temperatures in this post are indicated on the Fahrenheit scale.
Below about 30 below you have to cover every square inch of skin when
you go out. Snow gets too warm to squeak at about 5 degrees, turns
slushy at about 25, and melts by 35. Room temperature is around 50 for
hotbodies, 60 for normal folks, 70 for those who feel cold all the time,
80 for old farts whose bodies can no longer metabolize enough food to
produce body heat. A hot summer day can get up to 100. Water boils
a bit over 200 (depending on altitude). You bake cookies at around 350.
Paper burns at 451, according to Bradbury.
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On the one hand, you want OEMs to be free to bundle valid software, including valid replacements for Microsoft's own half-baked accessories. Some OEMs bundle Eudora, for instance, and that's much better than leaving the users with Outlook Express. Office suites (in some cases MS Office and in other cases alternatives) are another popular bundle item, and again that adds value. Even if you're not a big fan of Corel WPOS, as indeed I am not, it's still definitely better than the WordPad, Cardfile, and no spreadsheet whatsoever, which is what comes with Windows if the OEM doesn't add anything. Even Microsoft recognises that not every user is going to be willing to buy MS Office, and yet they might like to be able to type up documents. So you want OEMs to be able to make that kind of addition. And obviously you *have* to allow drivers for the hardware, and the OEM is the immediate source for such things. They should be bundled.
On the other hand, some OEMs can't think of anything they'd rather bundle than WeatherBug and its ilk, and that's just sick and wrong. These sorts of offerings have already significantly harmed many users' opinions of Windows XP, and I can certainly sympathise if Microsoft doesn't want that happening with Vista. (In the past some (e.g., Packard Bell) have been known to bundle even *worse* dross, such as shell replacement environments that make MS Bob look positively heartwarming by comparison, but I haven't seen so much of that recently. I think WeatherBug and so on are just about the worst OEM-ware I've seen bundled with Windows XP. Oh, and Outlook Express, but Microsoft has nobody but themselves to blame for that particular atrocity.)
Allowing OEMs to bundle whatever they want is a double-edged sword. You have to take the good with the bad. Of course, Microsoft could punish OEMs whose bundles are extremely terrible by refusing to deal with them any more, but this would be a dangerous time for Microsoft to do that. They *might* go out of business and take their nonsense with them, but on the other hand they might *not*, and that would mean significant (and possibly even large) OEMs (other than Apple) distributing entry-level PCs with a non-Microsoft OS, and Microsoft does not want that.
> That most people won't spend over $400 on a phone because there aren't any
> phones worth spending that much on?
If what you need is a phone, it's not worth spending a $100 on one, let alone $500+, no matter *how* nice the phone is, because you can get a quite nice phone for $100, if all you need is a phone.
The iPhone isn't a phone. I mean, yes, it's *also* a phone, but it's not *primarily* a phone. It's primarily a handheld computer. The "it's a phone" feature is a nice feature, but it's not a sufficient raison d'etra for a $500 device, unless you're the sort of person who will happily pay $350 a plate for dinner on a regular basis if it keeps out the upper-middle-class wannabes who want to *pretend* they're in your economic bracket but obviously aren't really. That's not Apple's market. Yes, they want to be perceived as high-end, but they're not that kind of extreme high end.
Actually, although it's nice that the iPhone can function as a phone, what's going to be even more temptingly attractive to many folks is that its form factor is pared down to just about match that of a cellphone. I personally don't give a rip about that (I'm one of those people who would rather have a 20" laptop than a 17" one, because the extra screen space and larger keyboard would be worth more to me than the lost portability), but lots of people are going to drool all over themselves. They're going to say to themselves, "It's the size of a phone!" in much the same way that subnotebook buyers say to themselves, "It's the size of a three-ring binder!" The fact that it can actually make phonecalls is just a bonus.
When Jobs said Apple is shooting for 1% of the cellphone market, he was just being dramatic, knowing that the real extreme fanboys are going to say, "1%? Heck, they ought to be able to get 10% in a year..." and so forth. Which is just so much horse doots, because most the overwhelming bulk of the cellphone market is owned by the low end, because most people buying a cellphone just want a cellphone and maybe a service plan. Apple knows this, and Jobs knows this, but he wanted to be drammatic in the keynote.
Realistically, what they're shooting for is an iPod-esque market share of the handheld computer market -- a market share so overwhelming that it drives and expands the whole market. I won't try to predict whether they'll attain that, but that's what they're shooting for.
HTML is problematic, needlessly complex, and some browsers don't support it properly.
If you just stick with printable ASCII and serve with Content-type: text/plain, the only compatibility issue you have to worry about then is line endings...
Several factors go into determining what the "major" browsers are, and overall usage share is just one of them. Different people have slightly different lists, but almost nobody determines it solely based on that one factor.
Safari is platform-specific, making it a non-option for a lot of people. That raises the bar a bit for how much market share it needs to have in order for webmasters to be willing to support it. IE usually makes the cut, but its market share is overwhelming. Konqueror usually *doesn't* make the cut, because it only (AFAIK) runs on X11, requires KDE to be installed, and is difficult to upgrade independently of KDE and/or keep multiple versions installed for testing. If its market share were really high, like that of IE, people would probably still be willing to support it, but as it stands... no. Safari is even more platform-specific than Konqueror.
Safari also is a relative newcomer. Opera has been around a while, and its usage share has been fairly constant since the late nineties. (In the graph on WP this is not really visible, since old versions of Opera are categorized into "Others".) It was one of the "big three" browsers back when Netscape was solidly number one (#2 being IE), and its usage share hasn't really declined since then, although the others have shuffled around in various ways, sometimes splitting the market in ways that left Opera at #4 or lower. For a time, around the end of the first browser war, these three browsers between them had something like 99.5% usage share. Then Gecko came along, then Konqueror and others, and things have opened up again now, but Opera's position hasn't really changed. The old Netscape has (for practical purposes) gone away, and IE peaked circa 2002-2003 and is now on a gradual decline, with Gecko and others on the increase.
It's not clear, right now, what this is all going to look like in another couple of years. Gecko seems to have secured the #2 slot for the forseeable future, but apart from that things are changing too fast right now for clear pronouncements to be made with any confidence. Most analyists have handed the #2 slot off from Netscape to Gecko, and this is a pretty non-controversial position given the relationship between them, but nobody's quite sure yet who's going to come out with the #3 slot when the dust clears. A lot of people still list Opera there, simply because they haven't updated their lists yet. It looked for a while like it was going to be KHTML, since both Konqueror and Safari used that, but since Apple forked their webkit off, that's no longer so clear.
My guess is that Opera will end up in the #4 slot, maybe even #5, without losing any market share, because others appear to be gaining more than it is at the expense of IE.
Remember that people's idea of which browsers are the major ones lags a few months behind their uptake. IE was not really considered a major browser yet in 1996, although in retrospect it is clear that its ascent to #1 had already begun.
> tell me what I miss with IE7 when I already run Windows + Firefox 2.0
With IE7 you get the ability to see whether your website, which validates, and which looks fine in Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror, is going to look similarly fine to users who browse in IE7.
Of course, you only care about that if you publish content on the web. I'm sure nobody who reads slashdot ever does that...
> That's just it of course: Pegasus was a great product for its time, but has failed to
> keep up with competitors. Nearly everyone has already switched over to Thunderbird
> or something else
Failed to keep up? You're out of your chair.
If you compare Pegasus and Thunderbird side-by-side, Thunderbird looks positively feature-impoverished. If people have switched from Pegasus to Thunderbird, it is because they were no longer willing to be tied down to MS Windows. Running on other operating systems is the *one* meaningful feature Thunderbird possesses that Pegasus does not.
Going the other way, there are many downsides to Thunderbird, the most significant being that its filtering is nowhere near the same ballpark with Pegasus Mail's filtering. It doesn't have flow control. It can't filter based on status flags like has-been-read, has-been-answered, or cetera. It can't filter based on time elapsed since receipt (e.g., leave unread messages in the inbox for up to ten days, then move them to another folder based on these rules...). It can't highlight a message so that it shows up a different color in the list. It can't form-reply. It can't launch an external process to handle certain messages. Et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam.
Besides the filtering, there are a number of other useful features missing from Thunderbird too, but that one is really the biggie. If your mailreader can't presort your mail for you, whatever else it's going to do to save you time is going to pale by comparison.
Heck, even *Gnus* (the mailreader that has every feature *including* the kitchen sink, and a learning curve to match) is missing some of Pegasus Mail's more useful features, features that Pegasus Mail has had since 1996.
Pegasus Mail didn't fail to keep up, in terms of development or features. What happened is two things:
First, and most important, it failed to be ported to the operating systems that are used by power users who crave powerful software with powerful features. A great many former Pegasus Mail users no longer use Windows. Wine didn't mature fast enough, and users were forced to find other mailreaders that would run on the OS they wanted to use. Choice of mailreader, even a really great mailreader, was not a strong enough factor to drive the choice of operating systems.
Second, it lost the end-user market when operating system makers started bundling cheesy half-baked mailreaders with the OS. But it shares that trait with most other mailreaders, except for the bundled ones and the ones that were never aiming for the end-user market in the first place (e.g., Gnus).
I understand why *development* of Pegasus Mail has stopped, in the absense of funds. But it would be nice if it could continue to be distributed for another couple of years. It's still quite a good ways ahead of the dev curve. Thunderbird will catch up with it in time, but based on its progress to date it could be another five or ten years.
Meanwhile, I'm now stuck with no decent option to recommend to people who don't want to fight a learning curve (to adopt e.g. Gnus) and aren't satisified with Yet Another Lame Outlook Clone (e.g., Thunderbird).
If bandwidth costs are the problem, he could have just given permission for others to distribute the unchanged binaries.
I suspect what's really going on is that he hopes somebody offers to buy the source. Frankly, I hope so too. I've been hoping so for a while. If someone were to manage to port it to *nix/X11, I'd be a very happy man.
> I was going to say the best way to sum them up is that they are both
> ancient [...] relics with arcane "interfaces".
Nobody, so far as I am aware, uses Emacs because of its default interface (which is, indeed, ancient and arcane). We use it because of its capabilities, and we customize the interface to suit our needs. Yes, there are people who *use* the default interface, because they are accustomed to it, because they needed Emacs for its features and never bothered to customize the interface. But they don't use Emacs *because* of the interface.
> Sure, *nix geeks will love it, and they may even devout a surprisingly pathetic
> amount of time mastering it because, "technically speaking, it provides a much
> more robust set of features than any GUI-based program."
You clearly don't understand Emacs.
In the first place, it *is* a GUI-based program. (Yes, you can run it without a GUI, but you would only ever do so if for some reason no GUI is available, and certain features become unavailable under such circumstances; it is certainly not the normal mode of operation.) Second, the amount of time it can save you on a day-to-day basis over a normal text editor editor will pay back your initial learning-time investment in a few weeks, or at most a few months -- at least, it will if you are doing the kind of editing Emacs was designed for.
Emacs is very good for partially automating semi-repetitive tasks. Some tasks can be fully automated, and that's fine, but many editing tasks cannot be automated in that fashion, because the user to constantly make decisions that the software can't handle. Yes, you *could* write an application in Perl or some other language that would repeatedly ask you questions about what to do, but writing it would be tedious and using it would be worse. Emacs, because it embeds and fully integrates the programming language into the text editor, solves these problems much more quickly and easily.
Of course, if you don't perform the kind of editing tasks that Emacs is really good for, then you probably don't care. And if you aren't already a programmer, then learning lisp would be much harder (because you'd have to learn all the programming concepts, in addition to the language) and maybe not worth it. But that doesn't make it any less a valuable tool for those who need it.
A more modern default interface wouldn't hurt it any, I'll grant you. But there is no alternative, currently. There is no tool that can do the things Emacs does, with the ease with which Emacs does them, and has a modern user-friendly default interface. Emacs is the only game in town.
Sure, there are many text-editors. But there are not many *fully* programmable integrated text editing environments -- at least, none that I'm aware of.
Learning to use a bandsaw is a silly waste of time if all you're going to do with it is sharpen pencils. An ordinary pencil sharpener is much easier to learn to use properly, takes up less space, is less dangerous, and will sharpen the pencil just about as quickly. Fine, use the pencil sharpener. But people who make dollhouse furniture are probably going to opt for the bandsaw.
> Should he simply turn his computer off for a few weeks to wait for the full
> Vista (which may still have the issue) or try to find a fix right now?
My real advice would be to stay on XP for now, or else switch to a competing OS. Judging by past experience, Vista is going to be More Trouble Than It's Worth until a couple of service packs come out. However, the question expressly said "short of downgrading to XP".
There isn't a good answer to his question, because the way he's asked it denies the good answers. He's essentially asking, "How can I use it *now*, even though it's not ready yet, without having to put up with the flakiness of a product that isn't ready yet?"
The only other obvious answer is "Well, if you don't want to 'downgrade' to XP, then you should upgrade/migrate to another OS altogether. Don't use Vista; it isn't really ready yet. Give it a couple of years." But that isn't what he wants to hear. He's been waiting for Longhorn since two weeks after XP came out, and he's tired of waiting, because the MS release cycle is even slower than Debian stable. Well, tough. Use a wired network, then.
It may be that there's some workaround, but how much time do you really want to spend tracking down workarounds for stuff that ought to Just Work if you used a mature and stable operating system that's been out long enough to have some of its bugs fixed?
> The recent outages in Asia were exasperated by the lack of redundant routes.
I assume you mean exacerbated. I'm not sure what it would mean to exasperate an outage; normally only sentient beings can be exasperated.
Nonetheless, your point is valid. If an entire nation is connected to the internet via one (1) ISP with one (1) link to the outside world and one (1) external IP address, they have larger problems than whether one user's foolish actions can cause them all to be blocked from a particular website (even if it's a fairly major website like WP; and yes, I understand they were only blocked from editing, not viewing, but that's really extraneous to the point).
> Your criteria, which sounds reasonable, removes KDE and other best of class
> choices from consideration. Why do that if the substitute application can use
> the data without problem and then do many more things with it?
Because it ties you unnecessarily to a specific platform.
Bear in mind that the cost of switching applications can be much greater than the cost of switching operating systems, due to staff training issues. You don't want to switch applications again several years from now when you decide that you want to move from Linux to something else. (If that seems unlikely, consider how likely it seemed ten years ago that you would move from Windows to Linux.) And you *certainly* don't want to have to switch out *all* of your core business applications at one time. It takes *years* to get staff comfortable with a change of *one* core business application; doing them all at once is unconscionable.
Yes, you will occasionally choose to switch applications, but this decision should be made individually, one application at a time, for reasons having to do with that application (e.g., your needs have progressed beyond what it can continue to meet). If your applications are married to a specific platform, you get stuck in a situation where due to a platform migration you may have to change them all out at once, which is excruciating for everyone involved, exasperatingly unpopular with your staff, and amazingly expensive.
Either that or you are eternally tied to a dying platform. (All platforms die eventually; it is a matter of time.) Some places _still_ keep DOS systems around for this reason, because ten years ago they were unwilling or unable to replace all of their applications at one go, because of the impossible training issues it would create, and so they have one or two DOS apps left that they still need to migrate away from. (Yes, there are many DOS applications out there that will not run, or will not run properly, under Windows -- certainly not under XP.) Virtualization can help a little (reducing e.g. the requirements for hardware and physical space), but it's still a very substantial problem (and creates training issues of its own, as most end users are not comfortable with the extra layers of interface created by virtualization). And it takes *decades* to move away from one legacy single-platform application at a time until you finally get weaned off the last one.
If you select cross-platform applications in the first place, you don't get stuck.
I understand what KDE is trying to do, but standardizing on it wholesale now will make large headaches if you ever want to move to any other platform, for any reason, in exactly the same way that standardizing on Windows fifteen or twenty years ago makes large headaches now if you want to move to Linux. (By standardizing on KDE wholesale I do not mean using it as a desktop environment. I mean using applications that won't run on anything else to meet core business requirements. If you're running cross-platform applications in a KDE environment, you're still free, because you can run them in a different environment later if you so choose.)
Also bear in mind that I am *not* saying you shouldn't let your IT geeks use KOffice. IT geeks can train themselves on a new application in hours, so you can let them use whatever they want (within reason). If it gets their job done, fine. And I understand what you're saying about file format compatibility, but I'm not talking about selecting file formats. Yes, you standardize on certain file formats, but that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about selecting the core applications you deploy for your end users, train them on, and so on and so forth.
> however a couple of our core applications run exclusively on Windows
Then that is where you have to start.
Yes, you could insert a couple of Linux systems in side roles that don't require them to run the core apps, e.g., a DNS server here and a CGI server there and so on and so forth -- and that's likely worth doing for its own sake -- but if you want to migrate entirely off of Windows, you've first got to migrate to all cross-platform applications.
And here's the timeline for 'Vienna':
2007 Q1 Vista released; work on Vienna begins.
2007 Q4 Microsoft announces Vienna will contain innovative new filesystem
2008 Q2 Microsoft projects release date for 'Vienna' as late 2010 or early 2011
2008 Q3 Microsoft announces Vienna will revolutionize the internet desktop
2009 Q2 Microsoft announces Vienna's filesystem will make search irrelevant
2009 Q4 Microsoft projects release date for Vienna as second half of 2011
2010 Q1 Microsoft announces Vienna will be inherently more secure than Vista
2010 Q2 Microsoft announces Vienna's new API will make developers' jobs easy
2010 Q4 Microsoft announces Vienna will have built-in internet telephony (VOIP)
2011 Q2 Microsoft projects release date for Vienna in early 2012
2011 Q3 Microsoft announces Vienna will work with next-generation security hardware
2012 Q1 Microsoft announces partnership with wireless internet provider to enhance Vienna's
internet telephony, allowing users to go "unplugged"
2012 Q2 Microsoft projects Vienna release date pushed back to 2013
2012 Q3 Microsoft announces Vienna's wireless internet telephony will make cellphones obsolete
2013 Q1 Microsoft announces Vienna's wireless internet telephony will be more secure than cellphones
2013 Q3 Microsoft announces Vienna kernel will be most secure OS kernel ever
2013 Q4 Microsoft projects Vienna release date in early 2014
2014 Q1 Microsoft announces the new filesystem may not be ready for RTM but will ship
just after Vienna in a service pack
2014 Q2 Microsoft announces Vienna public beta will be forthcoming later in the year
2014 Q3 Microsoft announces the new developer API will be spun off as a separate project from Vienna
2014 Q4 Microsoft promises Vienna release no later than 2015 Q2
2015 Q1 Deal with wireless internet company falls through
2015 Q2 Microsoft announces innovative filesystem will be in release after Vienna
2015 Q2 Microsoft announces Vienna will still feature "unplugged" internet telephony,
but user will have choice of third-party wireless providers
2015 Q3 Microsoft releases limited beta of Vienna to select individuals and companies
2015 Q3 Reviews of Vienna start coming out; reviewers note internet telephony not present
2015 Q4 Microsoft announces final product name for Vienna will be Windows Fiesta
2015 Q4 Microsoft confirms internet telephony will not be ready to ship with first release
2016 Q1 Microsoft releases public beta of Fiesta to a wider audience
2016 Q2 Microsoft announces final release date for Fiesta in November; nobody believes it
2016 October Microsoft announces Windows Fiesta will be available to select customers in
November, retail version will ship in January
2016 November Microsoft announces Fiesta now available to select customers
2017 January Microsoft actually releases Windows Fiesta
Giving out free stuff to people who write reviews on high-profile sites has been a common practice for hardware makers for some while, I think. This may be the first I've heard of a _software_ maker giving out _hardware_ as a freebie, but maybe they just wanted to be sure Vista runs flawlessly and didn't want to chance that with the recipients' extant hardware. And this is *not* the first I've heard of a manufacturer of one product sending a complementary product along with, e.g., motherboard manufacturers have been known to send RAM with their mainboard so that the reviewer will have the right kind of RAM so they can use the motherboard without spending money. The only difference here is that it's hardware and software, instead of hardware and hardware. And of course that MS is a monopoly, but if that has any bearing on this particular practice, I am not aware of it. (If they were giving out free laptops with purchase of Vista in order to break into the laptop market, _that_ would be a serious ethical and legal problem. But that's not what's going on here.)
If there were any strings attached, then there would be an ethical issue, of course, but otherwise I don't see a problem, or at least not a qualitatively larger problem than you have when AMD sends a free motherboard and CPU to a hardware review site, or SanDisk sends them a free USB key, or whatever.
Of course if the blogger then posts a review of Vista they should disclose that they got it as a freebie. Review sites typically do that, e.g. with a statement at the end of the review like "Review hardware provided by [Manufacturer's Name]". In this case it would be review hardware and software, but otherwise the same sort of statement would do fine, I should think.
> Even guns have mostly been developed purely in the private sector in the
> hopes of selling them to the military at some later date.
Sure, for values of "at some later date" that generally amount to something between "as soon as I can get a working prototype put together" and "before I run out of working capital, for a preference" (for new companies entering the market) or "before the contracts on our existing models run out" (for established weapons manufacturers).
These dreams of selling to the military don't always *materialize* right away, but the major gun developers' aspirations for their work invariably involve military contracts as soon as and as often as can be arranged. That's where the big money is.
Sure, if they don't _get_ the military contract, they sell to the public to make ends meet. Hence for instance Thompson's (in)famous submachine gun being marketed heavily to the public to keep the company afloat until the military finally pulled the trigger on buying them in '38. But selling to the military was always the goal.
The line between current/active email and archived email is extremely blurry, and going back and archiving the older stuff as a separate step would cost me several extra hours a week for no good purpose.
...
Yes, I have more than 2GB of email. Keeping it doesn't hurt anything. 5 or 6 GB of space (or whatever it's up to now) costs, to a first approximation, nothing, particularly compared to my time. And yes, I *do* refer back to something old from time to time, and I often don't know exactly how old it is when I go looking for it, but grep finds it anyway. Quickly. Of course, my mail is automatically sorted upon receipt via split methods and stored using the nnml backend; if you use woefully feature-impoverished software like Outlook your mileage may vary. You probably don't have an easy way to open a folder (that corresponds, say, to a low-traffic mailing list) and show the last 300 messages, for example, or an easy way to separately choose whether to show only marked and unread messages versus the read ones too. You probably don't have regular expression filters for sorting them into folders in the first place, either.
If large amounts of email are a problem, the real problem is that your software isn't cut out for the workout it's getting. I've played with Outlook briefly, and I consider it a toy mailreader suitable only for people who don't actually get that much mail. It doesn't correctly rewrap quoted text, doesn't correctly break-and-rewrap when replying in the middle of a paragraph, doesn't fold quoted matter, doesn't handle attachments in a safe and sane fashion, doesn't handle HTML mail in a safe and sane fashion, doesn't have proper macros, isn't properly scriptable,
I don't want to give the impression here that I'm rabidly anti-Microsoft. I consider Outlook to be hands-down the worst product Microsoft has ever kept on the market for more than two years running. (They've produced a few other odd bits of utter rubbish (what large company hasn't?), but stuff like Bob disappeared from the store shelves after a few months, and a company is allowed to make a mistake, after all, as long as they eventually figure out it's a mistake and repent of it.) I'm much more kindly disposed to Word, for instance.
So I'm not rabidly anti-Microsoft, so much as rabidly anti-Outlook.
> 7836 (RTFM) is the actual "straight-thru" (always a live answer - never a voicemail) extension
> to our IT group. I've been told I'm the only one outside of the group that 'gets' the joke
Bear in mind that 7836 can be translated to any of a hundred and eight different four-letter sequences. If you count sequences with digits in them, which are commonly used to make rememberable phone numbers, there are three hundred and twenty possibilities. Is it really surprising that nobody in the company happened to notice that RTFM is one of the many possibilities for what 7836 might mean? After all, it could also have been chosen because it spells out the Unix command sudo (which is used by system administrators to execute a command with escalated privileges), among other things.
> Where do I get a live CD that supports winmodems like the one which comes on my laptop?
It depends on what model of winmodem you have, but Knoppix tries to support as many of them as it can. While it's possible to find out what model and chipset you have and look them up to see if they are supported, it's much easier to just put a Knoppix CD in the drive and try it out to see if it works. Because it's a LiveCD, you don't have to install anything or alter the contents of your hard drive, so when you take the CD out and reboot everything will be back the way you left it. So all you lose by trying it is, at most, the cost of a blank CD-R disc, the bandwidth you consumed downloading the image, and the five minutes you spent trying it.
We *know* what the big power hogs are: anything that does heating or cooling. Air conditioning, stove (oven and range), clothes dryer, and any other electric heating or cooling devices you may have (e.g., space heaters).
Note that fans don't count as "cooling", because all they really do is move air around, which is rather easier. So even a really *big* CPU fan, although we call it a cooling device in IT, does not suck down power like an air conditioner or space heater would do.
After heating and cooling, the lights are often the next-biggest power hog, but they're still small potatoes compared to heating and cooling.
You want to save power? Put in better insulation, and set your thermostats to a wider temperature range (e.g., only heat to 60 instead of 70 in the winter, and cool to 80 instead of 70 in the summer). And if the area room with the heater is warmer than the rest of the house, put in a better fan to improve distribution. Fans are cheap to run, compared to the heater itself, and *much* cheaper than space heaters.
> The good news is I've patented emoting with ascii characters. :) ;) ;/ ;\ :/ :\
;-)
> I'll be back for my royalties in 2007!
You can't do that. I've got a business method patent on coming back for royalties.
I think maybe next I'll file a patent on actually spelling out in plain language the emotions you're feeling, in an email message. So, for instance, if you're happy, you could say in the message, "I'm happy". I'll file the patent on that as soon as I think up a suitable user interface for it
Umm, emoticons are rather older than AOL, dude. I'm pretty sure they were used on usenet since before the introduction of nntp, and I suspect they were probably used on multiuser systems before the internet.
Acrylic, polycarbonate, or whatever it's made from, I still say it's almost certainly either more or less than half full.
> "I'm guessing you're one of those 'glass is half empty' kinda guys"
I'm one of those guys who doesn't believe the glass could really be half-full *or* half-empty, because how on earth would you really get it exactly halfway? It's almost certainly either a little more or a little less than halfway.
We could assume for purposes of simplicity that the glass is half empty, but if you're going to do that you're in Physics Textbook World and might as well assume the glass is a point mass while you're at it.
> I think that we're still a good 10 years out from this even beginning to happen.
Yeah, but do you really think Microsoft is going to be able to get Vista's successor done and otu the door in only ten years?
There are two fundamentally different kinds of suckage. There's the kind where it just isn't designed to provide for everything you want, which I'm going to call Class One suckage, and there's the kind where it's *supposed* to do what you want, but in one way or another doesn't do it very well, which I'm going to call Class Two suckage for the purposes of this post. This latter category can be further subdivided into interface issues (Class 2A if you will) and functionality issues (Class 2B).
All systems have Class 1 suckage to the extent that you ever want them to do anything more (or different) than they were designed to do.
However, within the limits of their design, some systems don't have Class 2 suckage, at least not very much. PC-DOS 3.3 is an excellent example. It didn't do a lot of the things we expect an operating system to do these days, but what it *did* do, it did quite well. You can argue that there was some Class 2 suckage in the filesystem, but even that wasn't too bad. (Indeed, with a couple of Class 1 improvements (LFNs and a larger max filesystem size) FAT32 is still an excellent choice for storing many kinds of data, and better in many ways than the filesystems normally used with Linux. The LFN implementation has Class 2 suckage, but it was not present in DOS, so there it was only a Class 1 issue.) You can talk about all the stuff DOS didn't do (e.g., multitasking), but then you're back in Class 1, i.e., you're asking it to do stuff it was never intended to do.
That said, I haven't used DOS in a long time, for obvious reasons, because Class 1 suckage *does* matter. But it is my opinion that Class 2 suckage is much *worse*, and Windows is loaded with it. (I speak here of versions of Windows prior to Vista. I have not experienced Vista. One supposes, given the number of years since XP came out and the amount of rewriting they probably did, that Vista might not have precisely the same suckage properties as previous versions. I also am not really talking about NT3 or NT4, nor CE, nor the versions prior to 3.0, because I never experienced much of those either, so I'm not qualified to comment on them. But the other versions are all loaded with Class 2 suckage.)
Linux distributions have some Class 2 suckage, but I haven't seen much in the kernel itself. Indeed, the kernel thing that is most noticeable to me as a difference between kernels is the virtual memory handling, which (apart from the minor issue of not auto-allocating swap space when needed) is, in my experience, substantially superior to that of any other OS I have used and, in particular, better than both Windows (same version caveats as above) and FreeBSD.
On a lighter note, the Gnome folks seem to have really gotten ahold of this principle, because they remove more Class 2 suckage every release, introducing Class 1 suckage in its place.
The weather doesn't really go to extreme extremes in New England either. The people who live there like to think of their winters as "extreme" because they've all visited the Carolinas for a vacation at one point or another, so they know what a truly mild winter can be like, and since New England has something that resembles _actual_ winter, they want to think of it as extreme.
But it's not extreme in any really extreme sense. Extreme would be fifty or sixty below[1] for half the winter and ninety below on an especially cold day, like they get in the colder parts of Sibera. A few days a year of twenty below is a normal winter in any temperate region, and New England is no more "extreme" in that sense than Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, or cetera.
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[1] All temperatures in this post are indicated on the Fahrenheit scale.
Below about 30 below you have to cover every square inch of skin when
you go out. Snow gets too warm to squeak at about 5 degrees, turns
slushy at about 25, and melts by 35. Room temperature is around 50 for
hotbodies, 60 for normal folks, 70 for those who feel cold all the time,
80 for old farts whose bodies can no longer metabolize enough food to
produce body heat. A hot summer day can get up to 100. Water boils
a bit over 200 (depending on altitude). You bake cookies at around 350.
Paper burns at 451, according to Bradbury.