> I assume most if not all of this will be available for download (via GPL) > correct?
Yeah, if you want to mess with downloading a billion individual packages. Later, after the mad rush dies down, they'll put up ISOs too, but even then, unless you've got broadband, do you really want to spend ten days downloading it all?
> I'll elaborate on point #3. Devices, apps, games etc. You can walk in to > any Staples or Best Buy and pick up any piece of software or any printer, > digital camera, mp3 player etc. bring it home, plug it in, insert the > cd-rom and presto! it just works.
Your experience has been remarkably different from my experience. In my experience, it's like this:
Windows:
1. Buy hardware, first checking to make sure it has a Windows XP logo
on it, because if it's got the old Win98 logo you just don't know if
it'll work.
2. Plug it in, put in the CD, and install the drivers.
3. Try to use it, and find that it doesn't work.
4. Uninstall the drivers, re-read the install instructions, and then
reinstall the drivers. Reboot several times. Swear, if you're the
sort of person who swears.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 for about two and a half days.
6. Magically, the hardware works! Go into System Restore and make darn
sure you have a restore point, labelled as WORKING, because you never
want to repeat this again, EVER.
7. The next day you discover that some other random thing has stopped
working now. But that's okay; with System Restore you can switch
back and forth between your two restore points whenever you need to
have the one thing or the other thing working. Easy! Mandrake:
1. Before you buy the thing, you google for reviews that mention Linux,
just to be sure it'll work.
2. Buy it.
3. Plug it in.
4. Turn it on.
5. HardDrake will configure it for you.
There is no driver CD to fool with.
6. The hardware works.
7. The next day, everything else that worked before still works.
Sure, step 1 is easier for Windows. But Step 1 by itself isn't enough.
> You can try using the Quicklaunch buttons on the task bar That's okay for a few things, and would be a more than adequate substitute for launchers directly on the panel, but it won't do as a replacement for drawers; I'd have two or three rows' worth of the taskbar filled with quicklaunch buttons, and that's just not a good UI. I much prefer having the entire panel along the bottom edge of the screen be the tasklist, and put the drawers full of launchers in my left-edge panel.
> uncheck 'use personalized menues'. Oh, that helps, thanks. Who on earth decided to call them "personalized" menus, when rather than being personalized to my preferences (as the regular old Windows 95 start menu was) they have a mind of their own?
> you can try TweakUI I know about that. Many times I've said, "Windows isn't finished being installed until TweakUI is installed". And yes, I always turn off the data and music cd autoplaying in "Things that happen behind your back", but in WinMe the Windows Media Player still opens up when I put in a music CD.
> Try using Disk Manager This is Windows Me, not NT/2000/XP. And yeah, I know it's strange, and that most Windows systems do not exhibit this behavior. I think it's because I have entirely too many partitions. Maybe it's time to kill off that old Windows 95 partition I never use anymore and turn it into swap space...
> I always set up multiple partitions on servers Yeah, but this is a multiboot desktop. It's got ten or twelve partitions on four drives. Bootable ones include Windows 95 OSR2, DOS 6, RH6 (which is another one I never use anymore and probably ought to drez soon), Mandrake 8.1, and Windows Me. (The Mandrake 9.1 root partition is the one that's currently on the fritz, though I suspect all the partitions on that physical drive ought to be relocated; I'm planning to do that as soon as my new drive comes.)
> I'm thinking you should be using cmd.exe cmd.exe handles some things better than command.com, but it doesn't handle shell escapes much better, and so Perl one-liners are still impractical. I ended up just keeping a temp.pl open in Emacs all the time. But you probably suggested cmd.exe out of confusion thinking I'm on NT; this is WinMe. At work I have WinXP, but there's no hardware problem there, and so Mandrake is working just fine, and so I only boot WinXP to test stuff (mainly, to test web stuff in MSIE, so I can work around its deficiencies).
> BTW, for us who are too lazy to go find out ourselves, what makes > firebird better than mozilla itself?
Currently, it's not. Hence, the 1.5 release is SeaMonkey still, and this is what the store is selling on CD, and the main emphasis. Firebird's status is still "Technology Preview".
What _will_ be better about Firebird? One thing is that by splitting the components apart they allow the components to integrate better with *other* components by third parties. For example, if you find (as I do) that the Mozilla mail client does not suit your needs, you will be able to use another mail client. You can do that now, but clicking mailto: links in the browser won't work right and there are other minor issues. The Extensions mechanism for Firebird also shows great promise, though it urgently needs the ability for the user to select and install multiple extensions together as a bundle, and certain things need to be made consistent. (For example, currently the UI for selecting whether to install in the profile dir for just the current user across all versions or in the app dir for the current version across all users is not only unclear (i.e., the buttons read "Yes" and "No" versus some more clear set of alternatives like "Install in Profile", "Install Globally") but also inconsistent -- what is "Yes" for some extensions is "No" for others. This *has* to be cleared up before Firebird can take its place as the primary browser in lieu of Navigator. There are other little things too. Also, some of the components of SeaMonkey -- and some add-ons for SeaMonkey such as the Calendar -- are not yet available in the 'bird series. We'll still need to have SeaMonkey maintained until those are all converted over.
But ultimately the 'bird product line will replace SeaMonkey. What you see now is alpha stuff, and while some people are using Firebird and even in a few cases Thunderbird as their regular stuff, those are the people who live on the bleeding edge. You don't have to be ashamed if you prefer to continue using the SeaMonkey suite for the time being; it's a mature product.
Well, considering that the changes to MSIE that resulted from the matter as near as I can tell only involve Active-X controls, which Mozilla has never supported (because they're not cross-platform-capable),... I would *speculate* that an impact on other plugins has not been established. But even if it were, comparable changes to those in IE (the user needing to click to fire up a plugin) should resolve the matter. I imagine this being like the Flash Click To View feature in Firebird, but for all third-party plugins.
> I really hope that 1.5 is their last integrated release
If it is, I'll be using it for a while. I've tried Firebird 0.6, and it shows promise, but I got tired of installing extension after extension after extension just to get features I've been taking for granted for months. Every time I think I've got all the extensions I need I discover another missing feature. Also, last I checked, some things I use aren't even available yet, though it does seem to get better every time I check back. The long and short of it is, even with *all* the extensions, Firebird isn't ready to replace Navigator yet, and when it is, a way is needed to install multiple extensions all at once; this nonsense about installing each one individually is crap.
Then there's Thunderbird... fortunately I don't have to be so eager for that to shape up, since I use Gnus. But I get the feeling that if I was waiting for Thunderbird to be a viable mailreader, I'd be waiting a while yet. (Then again, I don't consider Messenger a viable mailreader either, so maybe I'm just being picky in that regard.)
Are Firebird/Thunderbird/&c the future? Yes, absolutely -- and separating the components out is something that has needed to be done for a long time. But for the moment, the reality is that SeaMonkey is still the present. We look forward to a day when it will be the past, but that day has not come yet.
The only reason I accepted Win95 in the first place is because it was able to run my DOS apps, and had multitasking, and came with the computer. If it hadn't done all of those things, I'd have stuck with DOS until I got my hands on a Linux distro (which I was already planning to try; I'd got my hands on a library book about learning to use Unix at some point and wanted to experiment with that -- Linux seemed like the way to do that (since I hadn't heard of BSD yet at the time)). This was January 1998, so NT still had a reputation for showing the BSOD quite a lot and did NOT have a reputation for running DOS apps.
My motivation for getting WinMe was largely sentimental -- I knew it would be the last version in the product line, and having used Win95 for several years I wanted to have it, even though I knew very well by then that I wouldn't ever use it for my primary OS.
WinXP came on several of the computers at work, including my workstation, which I promptly converted to dual-boot. I value having WinXP there, because it allows me to test various things. Though the thing I most often boot it for is to test my web stuff to see how it looks in MSIE, there are occasions when I need to test assorted other things, and it's handy to have that around. As an intersting point of trivia, yesterday I saw an XP BSOD for the first time ever. (So, yeah, it's definitely more stable than Win9x, as we've had WinXP on _several_ PCs for six months.)
But having been stuck with Windows for the past week, it's not the things I thought would bother me that are bothering me. I haven't had _that_ many crashes, and most of them were just regular app crashes, which occasionally happen on Mandrake also (especially since I have a tendency to try out the bleeding-edge alpha versions of some software, e.g., Mozilla). No big deal. I expected to have to reboot because of Windows going wonky all the time, but that's only happened once or twice. The networking-suddenly-doesn't-work thing (which I've seen before many times on other systems) annoyed me, but again that only happened once. The little things that annoy me constantly are UI issues. The telnet that comes with Windows refuses to run in the shell window I start it from, so I have to type C:\cygwin\bin\telnet.exe in order to get a telnet that will run inside of (e.g.) eshell. I don't have my leftside panel-full-of-drawers, so I have to make do with either the start menu or icons on the desktop. Icons on the desktop are hidden by N maximised windows -- yeah, I could "show desktop", but I don't *want* to, because I really still want those Windows where they are. As for the start menu, it's always been klunky (which is, I'm convinced, why most Windows users litter their desktop with a billion icons), but it's gotten worse in newer versions; now most of the options are hidden, and I have to click the little double-arrow thingies all the time, as if navigating the start menu didn't have enough steps already. Also, missing my left panel means I don't have the date always showing (and the clock only if I set the taskbar not to autohide, which is annoying particularly if I have a lot of windows open and need more than one row) and don't have a meter showing my RAM/swap usage; a small thing, but I've become accustomed to it, and it *is* useful. Additionally, every time I put a CD in, Windows Media junk insists on opening, even though it's *not* the CD player app I want to use. I can't figure out how to disable that. Also, my drive letters, for reasons I'm not confident I can explain perfectly, have changed around two or three times in the last week, even though none of the drives in question have been removed or changed cables or anything. (I do have way more partitions than the usual Windows quota of one, but it *ought* to handle that better.) In Linux/data is alwa
I've got a pair of needlenose pliers that my dad gave me when I went away to college. I have no idea when he got them, but I suppose they are probably older than I am...
Oh, you meant _computer_ hardware? Then that would probably be the Model M keyboard that's hooked up to the Pentium/90 that is my dialup router. The oldest thing in my _desktop_ is a Matrox Mystique.
The oldest thing in my desktop also is my video card -- but it's a Matrox Mystique. I kept it from my previous system because it's still good. Sure, it doesn't do 3D acceleration, but... I don't care about that. (Games? Sure, I play games... Oh, you mean Yet Another Doom Knock-Off? No, sorry, I got tired of those before hardware 3D acceleration even got popular; if you've played one of those you've played them all.) My Matrox Mystique is supported by every OS in the known universe (well, every one that runs on x86), and its 2D capabilities are rock-solid.
I have older hardware, but not in my desktop. For example, my dialup gateway is a Pentium/90. I also have a MicroVax 3100-40... but I haven't turned that on recently. I guess the "that you're still using", assuming it really means "that you're still using with any frequency at all", pretty much stops me at the Pentium/90, or maybe the IBM Model M keyboard that's hooked up to it.
Unless you count non-computer hardware... I've got a screwdriver that dates to 1992, and a pair of needlenose pliers that goes back at _least_ to the 80s...
> Windows as an OS isn't that bad, generally. I don't like it, > but it's not that bad.
Yeah, that used to be my opinion. I'd switched from Win95 to Linux, because there were a couple of things about Linux that I liked better (primarily, stability -- and Win95 is not the most stable Windows available), so my opinion was that Windows was okay, in itself. I even kept a Windows partition (WinMe) around on my multiboot desktop, in case I should ever want it for any reason.
Yeah. Then we had the big power outage, and I started having some filesystem problems, which eventually came to a head and forced me to leave off using my root filesystem. No problem, I'll get a new hard drive (and, while I'm at it, a UPS), install Linux on there, copy over my data from my old filesystem, and be good to go -- and meanwhile I'll just run Windows while I wait for my new HD and UPS to arrive.
So I've been running Windows for a week or so now, and it's way, way more annoying than it used to be before I was used to Mandrake. When I was using Mandrake, I was like, "Well, I prefer this, but Windows isn't so bad." Only now that I'm using it again, Windows *sucks*. There are a thousand little things, each individually no big deal, that continually annoy me. I can't *wait* for my order to arrive so I can get back to normal.
There are, however, two things that are better in Windows than in Mandrake. First, Emacs has better scrollbars. It's a very small thing, since normally I use the cursor-movement keys way more than the scrollbars, but the scrollbars in NTEmacs are without question absolutely better than the Athena 3D junk you get in Emacs under X. The second thing is, OpenOffice under Windows knows how to use my system colours on the screen and automagically translate them to black and white when printing. This won't matter for people who leave their system colours set to black on white, but for those of us who don't like going snowblind, this is a major plus. I'm going to miss this feature in OpenOffice when I go back to Linux. (However, I only use OpenOffice a few minutes at a time a few times a week, so it's not worth staying in Windows over.)
Oh, yeah: and the other day my sister wanted me to look at something that's on the other computer upstairs, and I told her I couldn't get to it because networking wasn't working, and so Windows probably needed to be rebooted. (TCP/IP was working fine, of course, just NetBIOS was hosed -- usually a good sign you need to reboot.) So, she told me, "Well, so reboot", but I was like, "But I just rebooted _yesterday_." Then I realised what I'd just said. Sarah made fun of me. It's funny; when I used Windows, I was never convinced by the rebooting argument, because I figured I turned my computer off at night anyway when I wasn't using it. But after using Linux for a year or so I have become addicted to leaving windows open for days on end and never needing to _finish_ with everything at once in order to reboot. Power outages annoy me a lot more than they used to. Yeah, I'm getting a UPS, and I can't wait until my package arrives.
Okay, so Windows isn't that bad -- if you're used to it. But I want my real system back. Soon. I hope my package comes tomorrow. Oh, and Mandrake 9.2? Oh, yes, I want that too.
> | So it doesn't surprise me that vim is more popular > | than Emacs. Heck, C is more popular than Perl, > | too; that doesn't make it better. > but in this case Emacs would be rather compared to Java.
Don't be absurd. elisp is a much higher-level language than Java. Java is, by comparison, much more like C or C++. elisp is not quite Perl, but it's the next best thing, and actually it has a couple of really nice facilities that are better than anything comparable that Perl has -- notably, buffers and markers.
> And still this would be less bloat and less complex than Emacs
The reputation of Emacs for bloat is quite overblown. Yeah, the source code tarball is rather on the large side of enormous, but due to the miracle of autoloading, roughly zero percent of that is loaded in memory at any given time. This "Emacs is huge and bloated" idea came into being during an era when a megabyte of RAM was a very large amount, more than the whole multiuser system probably had available. In today's terms, it's rather small.
As far as complexity... well, yeah, Emacs is complex, because it has lots and lots of features, but you only have to learn the features you need.
The only situation I can think of where Emacs is too large is the bootable floppy scenerio, and frankly vim is too large really for that too. For bootable floppies, I go with UED, which is small enough to go on a bootable single-sided, single-density 5.25" floppy with room to spare and will load from the hard drive on an 8086 at 4.7MHz faster than the screen can refresh. Try *that* with vim. Ha.
Yeah? Other than the ability to catch viruses, name for me one feature Outlook has that Pegasus Mail and Gnus don't both have, or that isn't more flexible and extensible in Gnus and more intuitive in Pegasus Mail.
The reverse (naming features it _lacks_, that pmail and Gnus have been all over for quite a while) is *easy*. There are the really obvious things, first of all, like an attachment UI that end users don't have to call tech support about because it makes sense, and the more advanced poweruser features like extensible filtering.
With Gnus the list goes on and on -- the ability to correctly rewrap nested quotations; full scriptability of absolutely everything; an advanced scoring system; pluggable storage backends; full bayesian mail classification (for all categories, not just spam); fully scriptable filters with access to the complete headers and body of every message, plus parent messages in the thread if needed... optional automatic folding of replies nested past a configurable depth, and the user can unfold and refold them as desired just by clicking on the attribution line; Faces support; ability (optionally) to strip markup from HTML messages and show the text; ability to apply syntax coloring and automatic indentation and custom folding and whatnot to all or part of any message at the user's whim; those are just the features *I* use; there are dozens more I've not explored yet...
> Evolution is a mere shadow of what Outlook is.
For that, I'll take your word. It's not hard to believe (in all respects except for security, of course); I've tried Evolution, and it's junk; how anyone considers it an acceptable mailreader is quite beyond me. (Then again, I have the same view of most mail clients, including Mozilla Messenger and Eudora. I guess I got spoiled early on Pegasus Mail, and now that I've used Gnus I tend to expect quite a lot, feature-wise, out of mail software, more than almost anything can deliver, I guess.)
So, I'll give Outlook the benefit of the doubt and figure that you're right, it's many times better than Evolution (in all respects except for security; Outlook's track record in that regard is pretty solidly established as abysmal).
> The auto-diallers will happily wait a long time for someone to > pick up.
Do they? My experience suggests otherwise. (I'm one of those annoying people who doesn't even _notice_ the phone ringing for several rings, then gets to a stopping place with whatever I was doing, _then_ gets up and _walks_ to the phone... it can be the tenth ring before I pick up even normally. It often quits before I get there, but I haven't answered a telemarketer call in quite a few months. Members of my family who answer more promptly (when they are around to answer at all), however, get them daily.
Maybe it's a coincidence, related to what times of day I'm the only one around to answer the phone? Or maybe the telemarketers who have our particular number are atypical? Dunno.
> Oh yes: The Gentoo Linux Installation Manual is sure to create > some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt among those who want to look > into Linux as a replacement for their pre-installed Windows.
Gentoo is not really intended for first-timers. If they've never used anything besides Windows before, give 'em Mandrake or something like that and let them get their feet wet gradually. Gentoo is for people who know enough to have specific ideas about how they want their system built, what kernel options they want, and what apps they want, people who are likely to understand the value of compiling from source, people who are going to want to update certain packages at certain times (when new versions of certain things are available). That's all great, but none of it describes someone who has never used anything but Windows before. Give them a more newbie-friendly distro and let them learn to swim in the deep end of the pool before you throw them into the middle of the Pacific.
> We all know that more people prefer emacs and it would have won > if it's vote wasn't split between GNU emacs and Xemacs.
No, I'm afraid there are many who prefer vim. Some nonsense about it taking less time to load (which is of course silly considering you only ever need to load your editor after you upgrade it (or upgrade your kernel)), or something about cursor-movement keys being for wussies, or somesuch, or meaningless complaints about the default key bindings being bad (well, of course the defaults are bad; that's why you _change_ them...) -- you know how people are -- they prefer what they're used to, and don't like to take the time to learn something (e.g., lisp) even if it will ultimately save them lots of time. So it doesn't surprise me that vim is more popular than Emacs. Heck, C is more popular than Perl, too; that doesn't make it better. Back in my day, we didn't tolerate such whining and infighting; all we had was software we wrote with our own hands in binary using vacuum tubes, and we _appreciated_ it, because we knew where we came from and understood discipline and.... Oh, am I rambling? Let me tell you about rambling, sonny, why, when I was a young whippersnapper...
Mandrake 9 comes with most of what you need, so mostly you're going to pack that CD out with Windows equivalents. For email, for Windows, NOTHING comes close to Pegasus Mail. For Linux, you're stuck either learning a geek-oriented user interface (Gnus) or using something that's highly inferior feature-wise (e.g., Evolution, Mozilla,...), but for Windows, don't skimp; get Pegasus Mail. It's freeware, it's been around the block a few times, has had most of the major features people care about since 1995, has virtually no learning curve to get going initially and a passable learning curve for the more advanced features, has the most advanced filtering system I've ever seen that doesn't require you to write scripts, and generally rocks. I recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to learn a scripting language in order to customise their mailreader. (For those who do, of course, there's Gnus (the official motto of which is "Kitchen sink? We didn't need to add that because Emacs already has it since version 19").)
> A handy web browser?
Mozilla, of course. Also go to plugins.netscape.com and get any of the plugins you happen to want.
> What would you consider the top 10 (or so) pieces of software for > a new home system, bearing in mind that I need software for both > the Windows and Linux side of things?"
1. TweakUI, from Microsoft. Windows isn't finished being installed
until you have this. Using Windows without it is inconceivable.
Some of the other Power Toys may be useful also, but this one
is the must-have.
2. A good text editor. Notepad is NOT acceptable. PFE is decent
enough if you're not picky, is freeware, and has basically no
learning curve. It's not suitable for most programmers, though,
as it doesn't have the high-end features (syntax highlighting,
automatic (re)indentation, folding, full scriptability,...).
It does have basic macros. UltraEdit is a bit better but has
a registration fee. If you're looking for the one that has had
everything including the kitchen sink since three major versions
ago and has added more features since, that's Emacs, but be
forewarned that Emacs has a significant learning curve.
Mandrake comes with all the editors you need, so you only need
to include one for Windows.
3. Mozilla. Yeah, it's big. It's worth it. Mandrake comes with
it, so you only need the Windows version.
4. OpenOffice, which you already know about. Mandrake comes with
this, so you only need the Windows version.
5. Perl. Okay, so I'm a geek, and if you're not, you might skip
this one. But if you are a geek, you'll want this. Get the
Windows build from ActiveState. (Mandrake, of course, comes
with Perl already.)
6. Ad-Aware or one of the equivalents that the other posters
mentioned. You need this for any Windows system. Linux at
least so far doesn't need it, though in principle there's no
reason spyware couldn't be written for Linux; there aren't the
same barriers as there would be for a virus. But anyway,
get Ad-Aware or something like it, and run it once a month
or any time you notice Windows performing very badly even
after reboots.
7. Pegasus Mail, if you can stand only getting your mail in
Windows. If you need to also be able to get your mail in
Linux, you'll want to look into a cross-platform solution
such as Gnus or Mozilla Messenger; in that case, store the
mail on a FAT32 partition and in Mandrake create a symlink
pointing to it from the appropriate place in your Linux
filesystem, so that your mailreaders on Windows and on
Linux will be working with the same mail folders and stuff.
You may be able to symlink the browser bookmarks in th
FOTR just should have been two movies, one for Book I and one for Book II. Likewise, TTT should have been two movies, one for Book III and one for Book IV.
ROTK could probably get by with one movie, because everything starting with chapter 6 of Book VI is sufficiently anticlimactic to be greatly shortened for the movie series without loss of much action, and Books V and VI are shorter than the others anyway (to make room for the monster appendix at the end of the third volume, probably).
This approach would have allowed for saner movie lengths, _plus_ the inclusion of more plot elements (and more action scenes, such as Old Man Willow, the Barrow Wight, et cetera), _and_ a relaxing of the pace. (The first movie felt like a _race_ more than a quest.)
Plus, of course, five movies means more tickets than three movies and more videotapes and more DVDs and more money. But do they listen to me? No.
> no toilet breaks, because it's all part of a contest... > to distinguish who is really a hardcore LOTR fan
So, you're saying I should sneak in a gallon or so of lemon iced tea, just to impress a bunch of lamers with how much I can retain? About four hours in, I'd run low on tea to drink, and be able to torment people by swishing the ice around in the bottom of the jug;-)
Yes, I was going to say that. The talk program has been available on Unix since nobody knows when and is essentially like IM only much more realtime; each character typed is seen immediately by everone on the talk session.
The only way this wouldn't qualify as prior art would be if the patent method talks specifically about transmitting information from a client machine to a server which transmits it to other clients (the usual IM modus operandi), as talk does not work that way.
> What would be nice is if there was a standard for email "read" > notices. Is there one? I sort of doubt it, considering the hacks > I've seen to try and emulate it. Outlook has a proprietary thing > that I doubt works.
This is a fairly old standard. (Pegasus Mail supported it in 2.0, which was out WAY before there was an Outlook and, for that matter, before there was a Netscape.) The problem is that privacy fanatics lobbied the mail client writers to have this feature disabled by default, even in the mail clients that did support it, and so it never became reliable and never caught on. Today, of course, turning it on by default would be insane, because of spam, but that was not the reason ten years ago. People were concerned that the sender might know when they read the message and so might expect an immediate response, and they wanted to be able to claim they hadn't seen the message yet, if they didn't have time to respond or just didn't feel like it.
No, four hours is long beyond the bounds of all reason. If a message can't go through in two hours, one of two things is wrong: either it was improperly addressed, or the recipient's business or ISP has serious network problems of the sort normally associated with gross imcompetence or a major disaster (building fire, tornado, earthquake, or what-have-you). Four HOURS? What, don't they have a spare server they can press into MTA service in a pinch? Or was it down for three hours before they even noticed? If my ISP didn't take their job more seriously than that, I'd have switched ISPs long ago.
If it's a major disaster, the recipient will have other worries than receiving your message, so the long timeouts are appropriate. If it's gross incompetence on the part of the recipient's IT department or ISP, which is not as unusual as we might wish, the recipient may not realise this and may blame the problem on you -- which means, you need to know about the problem so you can make arrangements to contact the recipient another way. If it was improperly addressed, the sender needs to know, and the sooner the quicker.
For a mail server that handles residential customers, I would leave the timeouts long. If a residential customer gets a warning that the message isn't going through, they're either going to shrug and blame themselves or their computer (in which case, it makes no difference whether it's been ten minutes or ten days since the message was sent) or else they're going to call tech support. So you want to send as few of these as possible, hence, long timeouts.
For an MTA at a business used by employees to send mostly business mail, I would definitely shorten the timeouts. If a message does not go through in a timely fashion, what will the user do? Call you? Maybe the first couple of times, but you instruct your tier-1 guy to explain that it could be a result of the recipient's network having problems, and before long your users are trained that if they get the warning and the message has to be timely, they need to make other arrangements.
Frankly, thirty minutes seems quite long to me, for the warning. Most messages go through in thirty seconds. A ten-minute warning will only fire occasionally, and when it does you'd usually still be getting the warning if the timeout was set to ninety minutes. You do want to leave the bounce timeout set in days, though, because many messages (yes, even many business messages) are not quite so urgent, and you don't want to make the user retry manually every couple of hours; that would be a much bigger hassle.
And I agree with whoever said you only want the timeout short for the first warning; you don't want a warning *every* ten minutes (oh, my word, no), only after the first ten minutes, and perhaps another one after a day or so, and that's enough, until it bounces. The user already has the idea it's not going through in a timely fashion; if they weren't concerned enough to take action the first time, they won't be the second time or the third time either.
> When I was a kid, I used to think that a 2400 modem was really fast.
2400? Let me tell you somethin' sonny, you ain't never had it rough. 2400 *is* mighty fast, or was back in the day at any rate. [mutters something about that new-fangled UUCP network and snotty children]
> I don't think this is something you can do with sendmail.
So if you need to do that, don't use sendmail. Use one of the other options -- Net::Server::Mail, for example, can surely be made to handle such things.
All you really want is to program your phone to ring silently the first N rings, and _then_ start ringing on the N+1th ring. The right value of N will effectively prevent telemarketers from ever reaching you, period, but anyone who knows you can be told, "Just let it ring about eight times", which is what anyone with a real and urgent need to reach you will do anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
> I assume most if not all of this will be available for download (via GPL)
> correct?
Yeah, if you want to mess with downloading a billion individual packages.
Later, after the mad rush dies down, they'll put up ISOs too, but even then,
unless you've got broadband, do you really want to spend ten days downloading
it all?
> I'll elaborate on point #3. Devices, apps, games etc. You can walk in to
> any Staples or Best Buy and pick up any piece of software or any printer,
> digital camera, mp3 player etc. bring it home, plug it in, insert the
> cd-rom and presto! it just works.
Your experience has been remarkably different from my experience. In my
experience, it's like this:
Windows:
1. Buy hardware, first checking to make sure it has a Windows XP logo
on it, because if it's got the old Win98 logo you just don't know if
it'll work.
2. Plug it in, put in the CD, and install the drivers.
3. Try to use it, and find that it doesn't work.
4. Uninstall the drivers, re-read the install instructions, and then
reinstall the drivers. Reboot several times. Swear, if you're the
sort of person who swears.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 for about two and a half days.
6. Magically, the hardware works! Go into System Restore and make darn
sure you have a restore point, labelled as WORKING, because you never
want to repeat this again, EVER.
7. The next day you discover that some other random thing has stopped
working now. But that's okay; with System Restore you can switch
back and forth between your two restore points whenever you need to
have the one thing or the other thing working. Easy!
Mandrake:
1. Before you buy the thing, you google for reviews that mention Linux,
just to be sure it'll work.
2. Buy it.
3. Plug it in.
4. Turn it on.
5. HardDrake will configure it for you.
There is no driver CD to fool with.
6. The hardware works.
7. The next day, everything else that worked before still works.
Sure, step 1 is easier for Windows. But Step 1 by itself isn't enough.
> You can try using the Quicklaunch buttons on the task bar
That's okay for a few things, and would be a more than adequate substitute
for launchers directly on the panel, but it won't do as a replacement for
drawers; I'd have two or three rows' worth of the taskbar filled with
quicklaunch buttons, and that's just not a good UI. I much prefer having the
entire panel along the bottom edge of the screen be the tasklist, and put the
drawers full of launchers in my left-edge panel.
> uncheck 'use personalized menues'.
Oh, that helps, thanks. Who on earth decided to call them "personalized"
menus, when rather than being personalized to my preferences (as the regular
old Windows 95 start menu was) they have a mind of their own?
> you can try TweakUI
I know about that. Many times I've said, "Windows isn't finished being
installed until TweakUI is installed". And yes, I always turn off the data
and music cd autoplaying in "Things that happen behind your back", but in
WinMe the Windows Media Player still opens up when I put in a music CD.
> Try using Disk Manager
This is Windows Me, not NT/2000/XP. And yeah, I know it's strange, and that
most Windows systems do not exhibit this behavior. I think it's because I
have entirely too many partitions. Maybe it's time to kill off that old
Windows 95 partition I never use anymore and turn it into swap space...
> I always set up multiple partitions on servers
Yeah, but this is a multiboot desktop. It's got ten or twelve partitions
on four drives. Bootable ones include Windows 95 OSR2, DOS 6, RH6 (which
is another one I never use anymore and probably ought to drez soon), Mandrake
8.1, and Windows Me. (The Mandrake 9.1 root partition is the one that's
currently on the fritz, though I suspect all the partitions on that physical
drive ought to be relocated; I'm planning to do that as soon as my new drive
comes.)
> I'm thinking you should be using cmd.exe
cmd.exe handles some things better than command.com, but it doesn't handle
shell escapes much better, and so Perl one-liners are still impractical.
I ended up just keeping a temp.pl open in Emacs all the time. But you
probably suggested cmd.exe out of confusion thinking I'm on NT; this is
WinMe. At work I have WinXP, but there's no hardware problem there, and
so Mandrake is working just fine, and so I only boot WinXP to test stuff
(mainly, to test web stuff in MSIE, so I can work around its deficiencies).
> BTW, for us who are too lazy to go find out ourselves, what makes
> firebird better than mozilla itself?
Currently, it's not. Hence, the 1.5 release is SeaMonkey still, and this is
what the store is selling on CD, and the main emphasis. Firebird's status is
still "Technology Preview".
What _will_ be better about Firebird? One thing is that by splitting the
components apart they allow the components to integrate better with *other*
components by third parties. For example, if you find (as I do) that the
Mozilla mail client does not suit your needs, you will be able to use another
mail client. You can do that now, but clicking mailto: links in the browser
won't work right and there are other minor issues. The Extensions mechanism
for Firebird also shows great promise, though it urgently needs the ability
for the user to select and install multiple extensions together as a bundle,
and certain things need to be made consistent. (For example, currently the
UI for selecting whether to install in the profile dir for just the current
user across all versions or in the app dir for the current version across all
users is not only unclear (i.e., the buttons read "Yes" and "No" versus some
more clear set of alternatives like "Install in Profile", "Install Globally")
but also inconsistent -- what is "Yes" for some extensions is "No" for others.
This *has* to be cleared up before Firebird can take its place as the primary
browser in lieu of Navigator. There are other little things too. Also, some
of the components of SeaMonkey -- and some add-ons for SeaMonkey such as the
Calendar -- are not yet available in the 'bird series. We'll still need to
have SeaMonkey maintained until those are all converted over.
But ultimately the 'bird product line will replace SeaMonkey. What you see
now is alpha stuff, and while some people are using Firebird and even in a
few cases Thunderbird as their regular stuff, those are the people who live
on the bleeding edge. You don't have to be ashamed if you prefer to continue
using the SeaMonkey suite for the time being; it's a mature product.
Well, considering that the changes to MSIE that resulted from the matter as ... I would *speculate*
near as I can tell only involve Active-X controls, which Mozilla has never
supported (because they're not cross-platform-capable),
that an impact on other plugins has not been established. But even if it were,
comparable changes to those in IE (the user needing to click to fire up a
plugin) should resolve the matter. I imagine this being like the Flash Click
To View feature in Firebird, but for all third-party plugins.
> I really hope that 1.5 is their last integrated release
If it is, I'll be using it for a while. I've tried Firebird 0.6, and it shows
promise, but I got tired of installing extension after extension after extension
just to get features I've been taking for granted for months. Every time I
think I've got all the extensions I need I discover another missing feature.
Also, last I checked, some things I use aren't even available yet, though it
does seem to get better every time I check back. The long and short of it is,
even with *all* the extensions, Firebird isn't ready to replace Navigator yet,
and when it is, a way is needed to install multiple extensions all at once;
this nonsense about installing each one individually is crap.
Then there's Thunderbird... fortunately I don't have to be so eager for that
to shape up, since I use Gnus. But I get the feeling that if I was waiting for
Thunderbird to be a viable mailreader, I'd be waiting a while yet. (Then again,
I don't consider Messenger a viable mailreader either, so maybe I'm just being
picky in that regard.)
Are Firebird/Thunderbird/&c the future? Yes, absolutely -- and separating the
components out is something that has needed to be done for a long time. But
for the moment, the reality is that SeaMonkey is still the present. We look
forward to a day when it will be the past, but that day has not come yet.
> Stick with Windows 2000.
/data is alwa
The only reason I accepted Win95 in the first place is because it was able to
run my DOS apps, and had multitasking, and came with the computer. If it
hadn't done all of those things, I'd have stuck with DOS until I got my hands
on a Linux distro (which I was already planning to try; I'd got my hands on a
library book about learning to use Unix at some point and wanted to experiment
with that -- Linux seemed like the way to do that (since I hadn't heard of BSD
yet at the time)). This was January 1998, so NT still had a reputation for
showing the BSOD quite a lot and did NOT have a reputation for running DOS apps.
My motivation for getting WinMe was largely sentimental -- I knew it would be
the last version in the product line, and having used Win95 for several years
I wanted to have it, even though I knew very well by then that I wouldn't ever
use it for my primary OS.
WinXP came on several of the computers at work, including my workstation, which
I promptly converted to dual-boot. I value having WinXP there, because it
allows me to test various things. Though the thing I most often boot it for
is to test my web stuff to see how it looks in MSIE, there are occasions when
I need to test assorted other things, and it's handy to have that around.
As an intersting point of trivia, yesterday I saw an XP BSOD for the first
time ever. (So, yeah, it's definitely more stable than Win9x, as we've had
WinXP on _several_ PCs for six months.)
But having been stuck with Windows for the past week, it's not the things I
thought would bother me that are bothering me. I haven't had _that_ many
crashes, and most of them were just regular app crashes, which occasionally
happen on Mandrake also (especially since I have a tendency to try out the
bleeding-edge alpha versions of some software, e.g., Mozilla). No big deal.
I expected to have to reboot because of Windows going wonky all the time,
but that's only happened once or twice. The networking-suddenly-doesn't-work
thing (which I've seen before many times on other systems) annoyed me, but
again that only happened once. The little things that annoy me constantly
are UI issues. The telnet that comes with Windows refuses to run in the
shell window I start it from, so I have to type C:\cygwin\bin\telnet.exe
in order to get a telnet that will run inside of (e.g.) eshell. I don't
have my leftside panel-full-of-drawers, so I have to make do with either
the start menu or icons on the desktop. Icons on the desktop are hidden
by N maximised windows -- yeah, I could "show desktop", but I don't *want*
to, because I really still want those Windows where they are. As for the
start menu, it's always been klunky (which is, I'm convinced, why most
Windows users litter their desktop with a billion icons), but it's gotten
worse in newer versions; now most of the options are hidden, and I have to
click the little double-arrow thingies all the time, as if navigating the
start menu didn't have enough steps already. Also, missing my left panel
means I don't have the date always showing (and the clock only if I set the
taskbar not to autohide, which is annoying particularly if I have a lot of
windows open and need more than one row) and don't have a meter showing my
RAM/swap usage; a small thing, but I've become accustomed to it, and it *is*
useful. Additionally, every time I put a CD in, Windows Media junk insists
on opening, even though it's *not* the CD player app I want to use. I can't
figure out how to disable that. Also, my drive letters, for reasons I'm not
confident I can explain perfectly, have changed around two or three times
in the last week, even though none of the drives in question have been
removed or changed cables or anything. (I do have way more partitions than
the usual Windows quota of one, but it *ought* to handle that better.) In
Linux
I've got a pair of needlenose pliers that my dad gave me when I went
away to college. I have no idea when he got them, but I suppose they
are probably older than I am...
Oh, you meant _computer_ hardware? Then that would probably be the
Model M keyboard that's hooked up to the Pentium/90 that is my dialup
router. The oldest thing in my _desktop_ is a Matrox Mystique.
The oldest thing in my desktop also is my video card -- but it's a
Matrox Mystique. I kept it from my previous system because it's
still good. Sure, it doesn't do 3D acceleration, but... I don't
care about that. (Games? Sure, I play games... Oh, you mean
Yet Another Doom Knock-Off? No, sorry, I got tired of those before
hardware 3D acceleration even got popular; if you've played one of
those you've played them all.) My Matrox Mystique is supported by
every OS in the known universe (well, every one that runs on x86),
and its 2D capabilities are rock-solid.
I have older hardware, but not in my desktop. For example, my
dialup gateway is a Pentium/90. I also have a MicroVax 3100-40...
but I haven't turned that on recently. I guess the "that you're
still using", assuming it really means "that you're still using
with any frequency at all", pretty much stops me at the Pentium/90,
or maybe the IBM Model M keyboard that's hooked up to it.
Unless you count non-computer hardware... I've got a screwdriver
that dates to 1992, and a pair of needlenose pliers that goes back
at _least_ to the 80s...
> Windows as an OS isn't that bad, generally. I don't like it,
> but it's not that bad.
Yeah, that used to be my opinion. I'd switched from Win95 to Linux,
because there were a couple of things about Linux that I liked better
(primarily, stability -- and Win95 is not the most stable Windows
available), so my opinion was that Windows was okay, in itself. I
even kept a Windows partition (WinMe) around on my multiboot desktop,
in case I should ever want it for any reason.
Yeah. Then we had the big power outage, and I started having some
filesystem problems, which eventually came to a head and forced me
to leave off using my root filesystem. No problem, I'll get a new
hard drive (and, while I'm at it, a UPS), install Linux on there,
copy over my data from my old filesystem, and be good to go -- and
meanwhile I'll just run Windows while I wait for my new HD and UPS
to arrive.
So I've been running Windows for a week or so now, and it's way,
way more annoying than it used to be before I was used to Mandrake.
When I was using Mandrake, I was like, "Well, I prefer this, but
Windows isn't so bad." Only now that I'm using it again, Windows
*sucks*. There are a thousand little things, each individually no
big deal, that continually annoy me. I can't *wait* for my order
to arrive so I can get back to normal.
There are, however, two things that are better in Windows than
in Mandrake. First, Emacs has better scrollbars. It's a very
small thing, since normally I use the cursor-movement keys way
more than the scrollbars, but the scrollbars in NTEmacs are
without question absolutely better than the Athena 3D junk you
get in Emacs under X. The second thing is, OpenOffice under
Windows knows how to use my system colours on the screen and
automagically translate them to black and white when printing.
This won't matter for people who leave their system colours set
to black on white, but for those of us who don't like going
snowblind, this is a major plus. I'm going to miss this feature
in OpenOffice when I go back to Linux. (However, I only use
OpenOffice a few minutes at a time a few times a week, so it's
not worth staying in Windows over.)
Oh, yeah: and the other day my sister wanted me to look at
something that's on the other computer upstairs, and I told her
I couldn't get to it because networking wasn't working, and so
Windows probably needed to be rebooted. (TCP/IP was working
fine, of course, just NetBIOS was hosed -- usually a good sign
you need to reboot.) So, she told me, "Well, so reboot", but
I was like, "But I just rebooted _yesterday_." Then I realised
what I'd just said. Sarah made fun of me. It's funny; when I
used Windows, I was never convinced by the rebooting argument,
because I figured I turned my computer off at night anyway when
I wasn't using it. But after using Linux for a year or so I have
become addicted to leaving windows open for days on end and never
needing to _finish_ with everything at once in order to reboot.
Power outages annoy me a lot more than they used to. Yeah, I'm
getting a UPS, and I can't wait until my package arrives.
Okay, so Windows isn't that bad -- if you're used to it. But I
want my real system back. Soon. I hope my package comes tomorrow.
Oh, and Mandrake 9.2? Oh, yes, I want that too.
> | So it doesn't surprise me that vim is more popular
> | than Emacs. Heck, C is more popular than Perl,
> | too; that doesn't make it better.
> but in this case Emacs would be rather compared to Java.
Don't be absurd. elisp is a much higher-level language than Java.
Java is, by comparison, much more like C or C++. elisp is not
quite Perl, but it's the next best thing, and actually it has
a couple of really nice facilities that are better than anything
comparable that Perl has -- notably, buffers and markers.
> And still this would be less bloat and less complex than Emacs
The reputation of Emacs for bloat is quite overblown. Yeah, the
source code tarball is rather on the large side of enormous, but
due to the miracle of autoloading, roughly zero percent of that
is loaded in memory at any given time. This "Emacs is huge and
bloated" idea came into being during an era when a megabyte of
RAM was a very large amount, more than the whole multiuser system
probably had available. In today's terms, it's rather small.
As far as complexity... well, yeah, Emacs is complex, because it
has lots and lots of features, but you only have to learn the
features you need.
The only situation I can think of where Emacs is too large is the
bootable floppy scenerio, and frankly vim is too large really for
that too. For bootable floppies, I go with UED, which is small
enough to go on a bootable single-sided, single-density 5.25"
floppy with room to spare and will load from the hard drive on
an 8086 at 4.7MHz faster than the screen can refresh. Try *that*
with vim. Ha.
> Sorry, but Outlook simply rocks.
Yeah? Other than the ability to catch viruses, name for me one
feature Outlook has that Pegasus Mail and Gnus don't both have,
or that isn't more flexible and extensible in Gnus and more
intuitive in Pegasus Mail.
The reverse (naming features it _lacks_, that pmail and Gnus have
been all over for quite a while) is *easy*. There are the really
obvious things, first of all, like an attachment UI that end users
don't have to call tech support about because it makes sense, and
the more advanced poweruser features like extensible filtering.
With Gnus the list goes on and on -- the ability to correctly rewrap
nested quotations; full scriptability of absolutely everything; an
advanced scoring system; pluggable storage backends; full bayesian
mail classification (for all categories, not just spam); fully
scriptable filters with access to the complete headers and body
of every message, plus parent messages in the thread if needed...
optional automatic folding of replies nested past a configurable
depth, and the user can unfold and refold them as desired just by
clicking on the attribution line; Faces support; ability (optionally)
to strip markup from HTML messages and show the text; ability to
apply syntax coloring and automatic indentation and custom folding
and whatnot to all or part of any message at the user's whim; those
are just the features *I* use; there are dozens more I've not
explored yet...
> Evolution is a mere shadow of what Outlook is.
For that, I'll take your word. It's not hard to believe (in all
respects except for security, of course); I've tried Evolution,
and it's junk; how anyone considers it an acceptable mailreader
is quite beyond me. (Then again, I have the same view of most
mail clients, including Mozilla Messenger and Eudora. I guess
I got spoiled early on Pegasus Mail, and now that I've used Gnus
I tend to expect quite a lot, feature-wise, out of mail software,
more than almost anything can deliver, I guess.)
So, I'll give Outlook the benefit of the doubt and figure that
you're right, it's many times better than Evolution (in all
respects except for security; Outlook's track record in that
regard is pretty solidly established as abysmal).
> The auto-diallers will happily wait a long time for someone to
> pick up.
Do they? My experience suggests otherwise. (I'm one of those
annoying people who doesn't even _notice_ the phone ringing for
several rings, then gets to a stopping place with whatever I was
doing, _then_ gets up and _walks_ to the phone... it can be the
tenth ring before I pick up even normally. It often quits before
I get there, but I haven't answered a telemarketer call in quite a
few months. Members of my family who answer more promptly (when
they are around to answer at all), however, get them daily.
Maybe it's a coincidence, related to what times of day I'm the only
one around to answer the phone? Or maybe the telemarketers who have
our particular number are atypical? Dunno.
> Oh yes: The Gentoo Linux Installation Manual is sure to create
> some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt among those who want to look
> into Linux as a replacement for their pre-installed Windows.
Gentoo is not really intended for first-timers. If they've never
used anything besides Windows before, give 'em Mandrake or something
like that and let them get their feet wet gradually. Gentoo is for
people who know enough to have specific ideas about how they want
their system built, what kernel options they want, and what apps they
want, people who are likely to understand the value of compiling
from source, people who are going to want to update certain packages
at certain times (when new versions of certain things are available).
That's all great, but none of it describes someone who has never
used anything but Windows before. Give them a more newbie-friendly
distro and let them learn to swim in the deep end of the pool before
you throw them into the middle of the Pacific.
> We all know that more people prefer emacs and it would have won
.... Oh, am I
> if it's vote wasn't split between GNU emacs and Xemacs.
No, I'm afraid there are many who prefer vim. Some nonsense about
it taking less time to load (which is of course silly considering
you only ever need to load your editor after you upgrade it (or
upgrade your kernel)), or something about cursor-movement keys being
for wussies, or somesuch, or meaningless complaints about the default
key bindings being bad (well, of course the defaults are bad; that's
why you _change_ them...) -- you know how people are -- they prefer
what they're used to, and don't like to take the time to learn
something (e.g., lisp) even if it will ultimately save them lots
of time. So it doesn't surprise me that vim is more popular than
Emacs. Heck, C is more popular than Perl, too; that doesn't make
it better. Back in my day, we didn't tolerate such whining and
infighting; all we had was software we wrote with our own hands in
binary using vacuum tubes, and we _appreciated_ it, because we knew
where we came from and understood discipline and
rambling? Let me tell you about rambling, sonny, why, when I was
a young whippersnapper...
> Evolution is just like Outlook.
This explains a great deal. Given how cra^H^H^Hlousy Evolution is,
it makes me glad I have never had the misfortune to use Outlook.
Mandrake 9 comes with most of what you need, so mostly you're going ...),
...).
to pack that CD out with Windows equivalents. For email, for Windows,
NOTHING comes close to Pegasus Mail. For Linux, you're stuck either
learning a geek-oriented user interface (Gnus) or using something
that's highly inferior feature-wise (e.g., Evolution, Mozilla,
but for Windows, don't skimp; get Pegasus Mail. It's freeware, it's
been around the block a few times, has had most of the major features
people care about since 1995, has virtually no learning curve to
get going initially and a passable learning curve for the more
advanced features, has the most advanced filtering system I've ever
seen that doesn't require you to write scripts, and generally rocks.
I recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to learn a scripting
language in order to customise their mailreader. (For those who
do, of course, there's Gnus (the official motto of which is "Kitchen
sink? We didn't need to add that because Emacs already has it
since version 19").)
> A handy web browser?
Mozilla, of course. Also go to plugins.netscape.com and get any
of the plugins you happen to want.
> What would you consider the top 10 (or so) pieces of software for
> a new home system, bearing in mind that I need software for both
> the Windows and Linux side of things?"
1. TweakUI, from Microsoft. Windows isn't finished being installed
until you have this. Using Windows without it is inconceivable.
Some of the other Power Toys may be useful also, but this one
is the must-have.
2. A good text editor. Notepad is NOT acceptable. PFE is decent
enough if you're not picky, is freeware, and has basically no
learning curve. It's not suitable for most programmers, though,
as it doesn't have the high-end features (syntax highlighting,
automatic (re)indentation, folding, full scriptability,
It does have basic macros. UltraEdit is a bit better but has
a registration fee. If you're looking for the one that has had
everything including the kitchen sink since three major versions
ago and has added more features since, that's Emacs, but be
forewarned that Emacs has a significant learning curve.
Mandrake comes with all the editors you need, so you only need
to include one for Windows.
3. Mozilla. Yeah, it's big. It's worth it. Mandrake comes with
it, so you only need the Windows version.
4. OpenOffice, which you already know about. Mandrake comes with
this, so you only need the Windows version.
5. Perl. Okay, so I'm a geek, and if you're not, you might skip
this one. But if you are a geek, you'll want this. Get the
Windows build from ActiveState. (Mandrake, of course, comes
with Perl already.)
6. Ad-Aware or one of the equivalents that the other posters
mentioned. You need this for any Windows system. Linux at
least so far doesn't need it, though in principle there's no
reason spyware couldn't be written for Linux; there aren't the
same barriers as there would be for a virus. But anyway,
get Ad-Aware or something like it, and run it once a month
or any time you notice Windows performing very badly even
after reboots.
7. Pegasus Mail, if you can stand only getting your mail in
Windows. If you need to also be able to get your mail in
Linux, you'll want to look into a cross-platform solution
such as Gnus or Mozilla Messenger; in that case, store the
mail on a FAT32 partition and in Mandrake create a symlink
pointing to it from the appropriate place in your Linux
filesystem, so that your mailreaders on Windows and on
Linux will be working with the same mail folders and stuff.
You may be able to symlink the browser bookmarks in th
FOTR just should have been two movies, one for Book I and one for
Book II. Likewise, TTT should have been two movies, one for Book III
and one for Book IV.
ROTK could probably get by with one movie, because everything
starting with chapter 6 of Book VI is sufficiently anticlimactic
to be greatly shortened for the movie series without loss of much
action, and Books V and VI are shorter than the others anyway (to
make room for the monster appendix at the end of the third volume,
probably).
This approach would have allowed for saner movie lengths, _plus_
the inclusion of more plot elements (and more action scenes, such
as Old Man Willow, the Barrow Wight, et cetera), _and_ a relaxing
of the pace. (The first movie felt like a _race_ more than a quest.)
Plus, of course, five movies means more tickets than three movies
and more videotapes and more DVDs and more money. But do they
listen to me? No.
> no toilet breaks, because it's all part of a contest ...
;-)
> to distinguish who is really a hardcore LOTR fan
So, you're saying I should sneak in a gallon or so of lemon iced
tea, just to impress a bunch of lamers with how much I can retain?
About four hours in, I'd run low on tea to drink, and be able to
torment people by swishing the ice around in the bottom of the jug
Yes, I was going to say that. The talk program has been available on
Unix since nobody knows when and is essentially like IM only much
more realtime; each character typed is seen immediately by everone
on the talk session.
The only way this wouldn't qualify as prior art would be if the patent
method talks specifically about transmitting information from a client
machine to a server which transmits it to other clients (the usual IM
modus operandi), as talk does not work that way.
> What would be nice is if there was a standard for email "read"
> notices. Is there one? I sort of doubt it, considering the hacks
> I've seen to try and emulate it. Outlook has a proprietary thing
> that I doubt works.
This is a fairly old standard. (Pegasus Mail supported it in 2.0,
which was out WAY before there was an Outlook and, for that matter,
before there was a Netscape.) The problem is that privacy fanatics
lobbied the mail client writers to have this feature disabled by
default, even in the mail clients that did support it, and so it
never became reliable and never caught on. Today, of course,
turning it on by default would be insane, because of spam, but
that was not the reason ten years ago. People were concerned that
the sender might know when they read the message and so might
expect an immediate response, and they wanted to be able to claim
they hadn't seen the message yet, if they didn't have time to
respond or just didn't feel like it.
> A four-hour window is just way too small.
No, four hours is long beyond the bounds of all reason. If a message
can't go through in two hours, one of two things is wrong: either
it was improperly addressed, or the recipient's business or ISP has
serious network problems of the sort normally associated with gross
imcompetence or a major disaster (building fire, tornado, earthquake,
or what-have-you). Four HOURS? What, don't they have a spare
server they can press into MTA service in a pinch? Or was it
down for three hours before they even noticed? If my ISP didn't
take their job more seriously than that, I'd have switched ISPs
long ago.
If it's a major disaster, the recipient will have other worries than
receiving your message, so the long timeouts are appropriate. If
it's gross incompetence on the part of the recipient's IT department
or ISP, which is not as unusual as we might wish, the recipient may
not realise this and may blame the problem on you -- which means,
you need to know about the problem so you can make arrangements to
contact the recipient another way. If it was improperly addressed,
the sender needs to know, and the sooner the quicker.
For a mail server that handles residential customers, I would leave
the timeouts long. If a residential customer gets a warning that
the message isn't going through, they're either going to shrug and
blame themselves or their computer (in which case, it makes no
difference whether it's been ten minutes or ten days since the
message was sent) or else they're going to call tech support. So
you want to send as few of these as possible, hence, long timeouts.
For an MTA at a business used by employees to send mostly business
mail, I would definitely shorten the timeouts. If a message does
not go through in a timely fashion, what will the user do? Call
you? Maybe the first couple of times, but you instruct your tier-1 guy to explain that it could be a result of the recipient's network
having problems, and before long your users are trained that if
they get the warning and the message has to be timely, they need
to make other arrangements.
Frankly, thirty minutes seems quite long to me, for the warning.
Most messages go through in thirty seconds. A ten-minute warning
will only fire occasionally, and when it does you'd usually still
be getting the warning if the timeout was set to ninety minutes.
You do want to leave the bounce timeout set in days, though,
because many messages (yes, even many business messages) are not
quite so urgent, and you don't want to make the user retry manually
every couple of hours; that would be a much bigger hassle.
And I agree with whoever said you only want the timeout short
for the first warning; you don't want a warning *every* ten
minutes (oh, my word, no), only after the first ten minutes,
and perhaps another one after a day or so, and that's enough,
until it bounces. The user already has the idea it's not
going through in a timely fashion; if they weren't concerned
enough to take action the first time, they won't be the second
time or the third time either.
> When I was a kid, I used to think that a 2400 modem was really fast.
2400? Let me tell you somethin' sonny, you ain't never had it rough.
2400 *is* mighty fast, or was back in the day at any rate. [mutters
something about that new-fangled UUCP network and snotty children]
> I don't think this is something you can do with sendmail.
So if you need to do that, don't use sendmail. Use one of the
other options -- Net::Server::Mail, for example, can surely be
made to handle such things.
All you really want is to program your phone to ring silently the
first N rings, and _then_ start ringing on the N+1th ring. The
right value of N will effectively prevent telemarketers from ever
reaching you, period, but anyone who knows you can be told, "Just
let it ring about eight times", which is what anyone with a real
and urgent need to reach you will do anyway.