> True, but some big IT shops are going to have a serious issue with software that can override security features.
If you're talking about the software firewall built into Windows, that's really only relevant for home users and small businesses. Any place large enough to have a competent network administrator will have external firewalls isolating the different segments of their network. We've got two of them where I work (both, as it happens, using IP Tables firewall technology), an inner firewall protecting the line-of-business network (about a dozen workstations running Windows XP and/or Vista, and one production server and one training server running WS2003) and an outer firewall that protects our entire network (including a wireless access point, several Linux systems, and some Windows XP systems, several of which are used by members of the public) from the rest of the internet.
The software firewall built into Windows is still turned on, because it can be, and because it adds a small amount of secondary protection (in case there's ever a compromised host on the LAN), but we don't count on it for enforcing our security policies, especially as regards outbound traffic. If we want to block a port, we block it at the external firewall. (Actually, I should say "unblock", because we use the sane type of configuration wherein things that are specifically needed are expressly permitted by the FORWARD chain, and everything *not* expressly permitted is not forwarded by default.)
> This will be even more wonderful because all of that spam will now have your name and email address on it.
If all spam had the name and email address of the owner of the computer that was used to send the message, that would be a five-thousand-fold improvement over the current situation, wherein each individual spam message has a new random email address either pulled from a database of harvested addresses, or just made up on the spot by the automated sending software.
In Ohio, a "city" is legally defined as a municipality with a population of at least some number of people (ten thousand IIRC) as of the last census. There are fiscal advantages to a municipality if it has this status, so ones that are on the borderline (e.g., Crestline, just up the road from here) go out of their way at census time to make a big public deal out of the fact that they need absolutely everyone to be real sure to fill out the census forms, because they don't want to lose their city status.
Smaller municipalities are usually called towns, although I think the technical legal term is "incorporated village" or something along those lines.
Somewhat. It's not nearly as good as IE8, but it does support real transparency, more CSS descriptors than IE6, native XMLHttpRequest (without going through ActiveX), and a couple of other goodies. So yeah, it's better than IE6.
Note here that I'm talking about how well it renders sites. To a web developer, the UI isn't really the issue. (The UI of IE7 is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the toolbars and menubar are a mess. On the other hand, it has tabbed browsing, which is pretty essential these days. But web content creators don't care about how the user's browser handles either of those things. They care about how well it renders their site, and what weird hoops it makes them jump through to get their site looking like they want it. And in terms of those things, IE6 is bad juju.)
> Why are Apple's updater and Perl's CPAN shell both trying to update the same file? > If the file's there as part of the Apple OS then only the OS's package manager should touch it,
I would say the reverse: if the file is part of Perl, then CPAN.pm should handle all updates to it. That's what CPAN.pm is *for*. If Apple's system-wide automatic updates system wants a certain Perl module to be updated, it should just tell CPAN.pm to do that. Why re-invent the wheel?
Especially if the best you can do is a wooden octagon and the built-in wheel (CPAN.pm) is nice and round with a steel rim and a good radial tire. When it comes to updating Perl modules, there *are* other tools that are better than CPAN.pm, e.g., CPANPLUS, but I triple-guarantee you the operating system's "automatic updates" facility is *NOT* in that category, on any platform.
> The problem only affects certain "knowledgeable" users who changed certain operating system files. > An operating system update can hardly be expected to work-around all the hacks people have made > to the operating system's own files.
You're not making any sense.
Installing modules from the CPAN is not some weird hack that alters the operating system in unexpected ways. It's a normal, expected, and frequently required activity. A mechanism specifically designed the express purpose of doing this, CPAN.pm, is included as a core part of Perl (not the "core language" in the sense a linguistic purist would mean, but one of the core modules that ship with every major distribution of Perl, _including_ Apple's).
Why would Apple include CPAN.pm in their OS if you aren't supposed to use CPAN.pm? Why would they include a tool the use of which constitutes a "hack" that would screw up "the operating system's own files" if you use it?
> As for being constrained to the release cycle most new software runs in > XP still... how much new Mac software runs in less than 10.3? not much.
Indeed, this is really my biggest beef with the system I'm currently using (Debian).
Take right now, for instance. A new release (5.0 Lenny) just came out a few days ago. I don't really want to upgrade my entire system, lock stock and barrel, to the new version. I mean, upgrading is kind of a pain. But I will have to do it, because otherwise I'll be stuck in Fi^H^HIceweasel 2.x indefinitely, among other things. New versions of applications won't run on the old version of the OS. Frankly, there are a couple of things that I've wanted to upgrade for several months now, but I can't, because, you know, they won't run on the old version of the OS. So I've got to do the whole OS upgrade.
In this case, I don't think it's the OS distributor's fault, though. I can't upgrade to Firefox 3.0 on Debian 4.0 Etch, *not* because Debian doesn't provide the update (that would be very understandable) but rather because the Mozilla folks chose to require a hyper-recent version of some system library or another. I couldn't install Firefox 3 on my current OS even if I were willing to compile it myself -- which I might be, but it's not an option. It's not just Firefox either. Firefox springs immediately to mind (perhaps because I use it a lot, but also perhaps at least partly because the Mozilla folks have been haranguing for months and months that version 2.x is worse than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and nobody should even think about using it anymore), but there are several other applications I might want to update, if only I could, but I can't unless I update the whole OS.
This despite the fact that the version of Debian that I'm using is less than two years old -- or, at least, it was declared stable and officially released less than two years ago. I SHOULDN'T HAVE to update it yet, just to be able to run current applications. New releases of applications SHOULD run just fine on a two-year-old OS. But no.
> Some would argue that Perl has been broken for a long time before Apple started meddling!
Apparently you've never used CPAN.pm (much less any of the improved versions, e.g., CPANPLUS).
I wondered for years whether other packaging and installation systems (urmpi, portage, BSD ports,...) can't seem to manage to be as convenient or do a similarly good job.
Then I started using Debian again (which I hadn't messed with since the bad old days of dselect), and I discovered that while I was away they'd got a new and much improved system for this (apt), which does a lot of the things CPAN.pm has always done. It's a big step in the right direction. Hopefully other distributions will take note.
> >...the list contains one entry: "*.*" > At least my intranet site will be ok then:o)
Will it? ISTR that, under DOS at least, the wildcard *.* matches all files whether they have an extension or not, because the * means "zero or more characters".
> Is there any technical reason Firefox can't implement ActiveX? No.
You mean aside from the fact that ActiveX is inherently Win32-only, and Firefox is a cross-platform product?
(Of course, the real problem with ActiveX is that it's an inherently bad idea, one of the most egregiously irresponsible things Microsoft has ever done, from a security perspective. But that's why Firefox *shouldn't* implement it, and you asked for "can't", which is different.)
If you want to correct for the weird incompatibilities in the crusty broken legacy versions of IE, without screwing up compliant browsers, use alternate stylesheets. Every halfway-decent browser, including IE8, will recognize them as alternatives and pick between them, choosing the first one by default. Unfortunately, most browsers, including IE8, don't remember the user's choice between the alternatives for the site, so they go back to the default (first) one every time a page is loaded. Also the UI for picking a different alternative is usually not very good and often pretty well buried. Nonetheless, all decently standards-compliant browsers fundamentally understand that these are alternatives, and one of them should be used at a time.
IE6 and IE7 try to apply them *all*. Really.
So you create several alternate versions of your stylesheet for compliant browsers -- a default one, and then maybe a large print one, and one that uses a different color scheme (light-on dark instead of dark-on-light, or vice versa), whatever... and then you create one last "alternate" stylesheet, called something like "Legacy IE6/7 Style", and that's where you put all the non-standard corrections.
> What on earth are you doing to it?! I don't remember the last time I reinstalled > windows because my PC still runs like a dream, and I've punished the crap out of it.
You're probably using an NT-based version, such as Windows XP.
The Windows 95/98/Me product line had a very strong tendency to need reinstalled every year or two, and I can easily see how with heavy use it might need it more often. The other poster said "back when I still used Windows", so he may have switched from this now-discontinued product line. Although, he also mentions Ubuntu, which if I'm not mistaken is at least a couple of years newer than Windows XP. Then again, Windows XP had a pretty bad reputation for the first couple of years, so some people avoided it, kind of like people are avoiding Vista now. So he may have still been using Windows 98, even though XP was available, and dual-booting to Ubuntu.
> I do know that every variation in use today is in the casino's favor unless you can count cards.
I believe Poker is equally in the casino's favor whether you count cards or not, because you're betting strictly against the other players. The casino just takes a percentage cut off the top, irrespective of which players win or lose.
> For this reason, casinos will always have to do their own work to detect card-counters and > enforce their own rules against them (by throwing them out and banning them from returning).
It's not that tough. You don't have to know the details of what's going on in side their head (e.g., "He's keeping five separate counts, for aces, faces, 7-9, 4-6, and 2-3). All you have to know is, "He's winning more than three grand an hour, consistently." It doesn't matter why.
Up to a point, but there's such a thing as winning *too* much. Carefully-practiced precise card-counting (not just high-low, but actually knowing which cards have been played and which haven't), which you need an unnaturally good memory in the first place to be able to do well, is the usual way. And yeah, if you get greedy and win too much, they WILL ask you to leave.
> Actually, in Nevada it's a Felony. They don't ask you to leave, > they ask you to leave in custody of the nice police officer.
That's only if they have reason to believe you're cheating. If you're just *winning* too much, they'll just ask you to leave. Which is what they do to people who have unnaturally good memories and apply them to card-counting.
> My advice is simple: Start gconf-editor and disable the configuration key >/apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop to get rid of all desktop icons.
I'll go you one better: remove Nautilus from your Gnome session. It's a system hog, and I promise you don't need it. Graphical file managers are nothing but a worthless annoying pain ever since tab completion was invented. As for icons on the desktop, why would you want to have to minimize everything every single time you want to start a program? Create a second panel (I recommend left-side) and put your launchers there.
I got rid of Nautilus years ago, just a few hours after upgrading to a distribution that included it. RAM was more expensive back then, and so my new fresh install was manifesting undesirable performance characteristics due to swapping all the time. I did some checking, and one of the biggest memory users was this thing called Nautilus. "What's this", I asked, "and why is something I've never heard of before, which I *certainly* didn't make a conscious decision to run, using almost as much RAM as OpenOffice?"
At the time I didn't know how to remove things from my Gnome session, so I just did chmod -x and kill. Solved.
Indeed. We put server apps, such as Apache, in their own unprivileged user accounts, because they handle untrusted data from the internet. Desktop applications that do that (most notably, web browsers and mail readers) really need to be restricted as well, and for approximately the same reasons.
> Linux noobs you should be using OpenBSD from a shell.
I used BSD for a couple of years, but I got tired of spending three days compiling everything in the ports tree, including basic system tools and libraries, every time I wanted to update anything, including the web browser.
> We train users to double-click all the time. Suppose you were teaching your grandma > how to use email and receive a file. I bet you would explain to her something like: > right-click and choose to save the attachment, and then do you see it in the desktop? > OK now double-click to open it...
No, no, I wouldn't.
In the first place, the desktop would NEVER EVER be the default save location on any computer I'd been close enough to that I could show someone how to do anything on it.
Second, I would give my grandma a mailreader that can display common-format image attachments (.png and.jpg mainly, probably also.gif) right there in the mailreader, so she doesn't have to mess around with saving them just to view them. So then there's no need to teach her how to save attachments, because nobody (except the spammers) needs to send her any kind of attachments other than photographs.
Third, I'd give her a mailreader (Pegasus Mail) that doesn't allow saving executable-format attachments without a big scary "Could be a Virus" warning. Pegasus doesn't alarm on.desktop files, but that's because they aren't executable, or even meaningful, on the operating system Pegasus Mail runs on. It *does* give you the virus warning if you try to save an attached.bat or.scr file, or anything like that. And the default button is the safe one. Security is one of several reasons that Pegasus is the ONLY mailreader I recommend for end users. It's also VERY easy to learn to use, and yet fairly featureful if you start exploring the more advanced functionality. I used it myself until I needed something that would run on platforms other than Windows, and then I switched to Gnus. Gnus is more powerful than Pegasus Mail in some ways (better threading, better editing capabilities, quoted-text rewrapping, and it's MUCH more customizeable), but its filtering system is considerably less advanced, and it doesn't do multi-tasking things as well (like, say, checking for new messages while you're writing a reply), and of course it has too much learning curve for most users.
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> True, but some big IT shops are going to have a serious issue with software that can override security features.
If you're talking about the software firewall built into Windows, that's really only relevant for home users and small businesses. Any place large enough to have a competent network administrator will have external firewalls isolating the different segments of their network. We've got two of them where I work (both, as it happens, using IP Tables firewall technology), an inner firewall protecting the line-of-business network (about a dozen workstations running Windows XP and/or Vista, and one production server and one training server running WS2003) and an outer firewall that protects our entire network (including a wireless access point, several Linux systems, and some Windows XP systems, several of which are used by members of the public) from the rest of the internet.
The software firewall built into Windows is still turned on, because it can be, and because it adds a small amount of secondary protection (in case there's ever a compromised host on the LAN), but we don't count on it for enforcing our security policies, especially as regards outbound traffic. If we want to block a port, we block it at the external firewall. (Actually, I should say "unblock", because we use the sane type of configuration wherein things that are specifically needed are expressly permitted by the FORWARD chain, and everything *not* expressly permitted is not forwarded by default.)
> This will be even more wonderful because all of that spam will now have your name and email address on it.
If all spam had the name and email address of the owner of the computer that was used to send the message, that would be a five-thousand-fold improvement over the current situation, wherein each individual spam message has a new random email address either pulled from a database of harvested addresses, or just made up on the spot by the automated sending software.
That's why I use uuencoded .tar.bz2 files. HTH.HAND.
> Seriously, I use IE6 and I love it. I've tried both firefox and ie7 and I didn't like them.
Have you tried Netscape 4? It's even older and crustier than IE6, and its CSS support is *worse*. You'd love it.
In Ohio, a "city" is legally defined as a municipality with a population of at least some number of people (ten thousand IIRC) as of the last census. There are fiscal advantages to a municipality if it has this status, so ones that are on the borderline (e.g., Crestline, just up the road from here) go out of their way at census time to make a big public deal out of the fact that they need absolutely everyone to be real sure to fill out the census forms, because they don't want to lose their city status.
Smaller municipalities are usually called towns, although I think the technical legal term is "incorporated village" or something along those lines.
> Is IE 7 really an improvement?
Somewhat. It's not nearly as good as IE8, but it does support real transparency, more CSS descriptors than IE6, native XMLHttpRequest (without going through ActiveX), and a couple of other goodies. So yeah, it's better than IE6.
Note here that I'm talking about how well it renders sites. To a web developer, the UI isn't really the issue. (The UI of IE7 is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the toolbars and menubar are a mess. On the other hand, it has tabbed browsing, which is pretty essential these days. But web content creators don't care about how the user's browser handles either of those things. They care about how well it renders their site, and what weird hoops it makes them jump through to get their site looking like they want it. And in terms of those things, IE6 is bad juju.)
> Why are Apple's updater and Perl's CPAN shell both trying to update the same file?
> If the file's there as part of the Apple OS then only the OS's package manager should touch it,
I would say the reverse: if the file is part of Perl, then CPAN.pm should handle all updates to it. That's what CPAN.pm is *for*. If Apple's system-wide automatic updates system wants a certain Perl module to be updated, it should just tell CPAN.pm to do that. Why re-invent the wheel?
Especially if the best you can do is a wooden octagon and the built-in wheel (CPAN.pm) is nice and round with a steel rim and a good radial tire. When it comes to updating Perl modules, there *are* other tools that are better than CPAN.pm, e.g., CPANPLUS, but I triple-guarantee you the operating system's "automatic updates" facility is *NOT* in that category, on any platform.
> The problem only affects certain "knowledgeable" users who changed certain operating system files.
> An operating system update can hardly be expected to work-around all the hacks people have made
> to the operating system's own files.
You're not making any sense.
Installing modules from the CPAN is not some weird hack that alters the operating system in unexpected ways. It's a normal, expected, and frequently required activity. A mechanism specifically designed the express purpose of doing this, CPAN.pm, is included as a core part of Perl (not the "core language" in the sense a linguistic purist would mean, but one of the core modules that ship with every major distribution of Perl, _including_ Apple's).
Why would Apple include CPAN.pm in their OS if you aren't supposed to use CPAN.pm? Why would they include a tool the use of which constitutes a "hack" that would screw up "the operating system's own files" if you use it?
> As for being constrained to the release cycle most new software runs in
> XP still... how much new Mac software runs in less than 10.3? not much.
Indeed, this is really my biggest beef with the system I'm currently using (Debian).
Take right now, for instance. A new release (5.0 Lenny) just came out a few days ago. I don't really want to upgrade my entire system, lock stock and barrel, to the new version. I mean, upgrading is kind of a pain. But I will have to do it, because otherwise I'll be stuck in Fi^H^HIceweasel 2.x indefinitely, among other things. New versions of applications won't run on the old version of the OS. Frankly, there are a couple of things that I've wanted to upgrade for several months now, but I can't, because, you know, they won't run on the old version of the OS. So I've got to do the whole OS upgrade.
In this case, I don't think it's the OS distributor's fault, though. I can't upgrade to Firefox 3.0 on Debian 4.0 Etch, *not* because Debian doesn't provide the update (that would be very understandable) but rather because the Mozilla folks chose to require a hyper-recent version of some system library or another. I couldn't install Firefox 3 on my current OS even if I were willing to compile it myself -- which I might be, but it's not an option. It's not just Firefox either. Firefox springs immediately to mind (perhaps because I use it a lot, but also perhaps at least partly because the Mozilla folks have been haranguing for months and months that version 2.x is worse than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and nobody should even think about using it anymore), but there are several other applications I might want to update, if only I could, but I can't unless I update the whole OS.
This despite the fact that the version of Debian that I'm using is less than two years old -- or, at least, it was declared stable and officially released less than two years ago. I SHOULDN'T HAVE to update it yet, just to be able to run current applications. New releases of applications SHOULD run just fine on a two-year-old OS. But no.
Perl works just fine, though.
> Some would argue that Perl has been broken for a long time before Apple started meddling!
...) can't seem to manage to be as convenient or do a similarly good job.
Apparently you've never used CPAN.pm (much less any of the improved versions, e.g., CPANPLUS).
I wondered for years whether other packaging and installation systems (urmpi, portage, BSD ports,
Then I started using Debian again (which I hadn't messed with since the bad old days of dselect), and I discovered that while I was away they'd got a new and much improved system for this (apt), which does a lot of the things CPAN.pm has always done. It's a big step in the right direction. Hopefully other distributions will take note.
> The worst thing on the internet is a site that only works in IE.
Apparently you've never seen a site that works only in Netscape 4.
"I'm sorry, this pages uses layers. To view this site, please install a web browser that supports layers."
> > ...the list contains one entry: "*.*" :o)
> At least my intranet site will be ok then
Will it? ISTR that, under DOS at least, the wildcard *.* matches all files whether they have an extension or not, because the * means "zero or more characters".
> Is there any technical reason Firefox can't implement ActiveX? No.
You mean aside from the fact that ActiveX is inherently Win32-only, and Firefox is a cross-platform product?
(Of course, the real problem with ActiveX is that it's an inherently bad idea, one of the most egregiously irresponsible things Microsoft has ever done, from a security perspective. But that's why Firefox *shouldn't* implement it, and you asked for "can't", which is different.)
If you want to correct for the weird incompatibilities in the crusty broken legacy versions of IE, without screwing up compliant browsers, use alternate stylesheets. Every halfway-decent browser, including IE8, will recognize them as alternatives and pick between them, choosing the first one by default. Unfortunately, most browsers, including IE8, don't remember the user's choice between the alternatives for the site, so they go back to the default (first) one every time a page is loaded. Also the UI for picking a different alternative is usually not very good and often pretty well buried. Nonetheless, all decently standards-compliant browsers fundamentally understand that these are alternatives, and one of them should be used at a time.
IE6 and IE7 try to apply them *all*. Really.
So you create several alternate versions of your stylesheet for compliant browsers -- a default one, and then maybe a large print one, and one that uses a different color scheme (light-on dark instead of dark-on-light, or vice versa), whatever... and then you create one last "alternate" stylesheet, called something like "Legacy IE6/7 Style", and that's where you put all the non-standard corrections.
> What on earth are you doing to it?! I don't remember the last time I reinstalled
> windows because my PC still runs like a dream, and I've punished the crap out of it.
You're probably using an NT-based version, such as Windows XP.
The Windows 95/98/Me product line had a very strong tendency to need reinstalled every year or two, and I can easily see how with heavy use it might need it more often. The other poster said "back when I still used Windows", so he may have switched from this now-discontinued product line. Although, he also mentions Ubuntu, which if I'm not mistaken is at least a couple of years newer than Windows XP. Then again, Windows XP had a pretty bad reputation for the first couple of years, so some people avoided it, kind of like people are avoiding Vista now. So he may have still been using Windows 98, even though XP was available, and dual-booting to Ubuntu.
> Recently the standard of Slashdot articles about Microsoft has
> taken a huge nosedive, any opportunity to bash them seems to be taken.
Recently?
You must be new here. Microsoft-bashing has been one of the major purposes of slashdot since the mid nineties.
> I do know that every variation in use today is in the casino's favor unless you can count cards.
I believe Poker is equally in the casino's favor whether you count cards or not, because you're betting strictly against the other players. The casino just takes a percentage cut off the top, irrespective of which players win or lose.
> For this reason, casinos will always have to do their own work to detect card-counters and
> enforce their own rules against them (by throwing them out and banning them from returning).
It's not that tough. You don't have to know the details of what's going on in side their head (e.g., "He's keeping five separate counts, for aces, faces, 7-9, 4-6, and 2-3). All you have to know is, "He's winning more than three grand an hour, consistently." It doesn't matter why.
> One winner just encourages the crowd of losers.
Up to a point, but there's such a thing as winning *too* much. Carefully-practiced precise card-counting (not just high-low, but actually knowing which cards have been played and which haven't), which you need an unnaturally good memory in the first place to be able to do well, is the usual way. And yeah, if you get greedy and win too much, they WILL ask you to leave.
> Actually, in Nevada it's a Felony. They don't ask you to leave,
> they ask you to leave in custody of the nice police officer.
That's only if they have reason to believe you're cheating. If you're just *winning* too much, they'll just ask you to leave. Which is what they do to people who have unnaturally good memories and apply them to card-counting.
> actual cheating by the casino at a card game is very rare.
They don't need to cheat. The rules are designed to ensure that they make a trainload of money.
> My advice is simple: Start gconf-editor and disable the configuration key /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop to get rid of all desktop icons.
>
I'll go you one better: remove Nautilus from your Gnome session. It's a system hog, and I promise you don't need it. Graphical file managers are nothing but a worthless annoying pain ever since tab completion was invented. As for icons on the desktop, why would you want to have to minimize everything every single time you want to start a program? Create a second panel (I recommend left-side) and put your launchers there.
I got rid of Nautilus years ago, just a few hours after upgrading to a distribution that included it. RAM was more expensive back then, and so my new fresh install was manifesting undesirable performance characteristics due to swapping all the time. I did some checking, and one of the biggest memory users was this thing called Nautilus. "What's this", I asked, "and why is something I've never heard of before, which I *certainly* didn't make a conscious decision to run, using almost as much RAM as OpenOffice?"
At the time I didn't know how to remove things from my Gnome session, so I just did chmod -x and kill. Solved.
> Processes are not the users that run them.
Indeed. We put server apps, such as Apache, in their own unprivileged user accounts, because they handle untrusted data from the internet. Desktop applications that do that (most notably, web browsers and mail readers) really need to be restricted as well, and for approximately the same reasons.
> Linux noobs you should be using OpenBSD from a shell.
I used BSD for a couple of years, but I got tired of spending three days compiling everything in the ports tree, including basic system tools and libraries, every time I wanted to update anything, including the web browser.
> We train users to double-click all the time. Suppose you were teaching your grandma
.jpg mainly, probably also .gif) right there in the mailreader, so she doesn't have to mess around with saving them just to view them. So then there's no need to teach her how to save attachments, because nobody (except the spammers) needs to send her any kind of attachments other than photographs.
.desktop files, but that's because they aren't executable, or even meaningful, on the operating system Pegasus Mail runs on. It *does* give you the virus warning if you try to save an attached .bat or .scr file, or anything like that. And the default button is the safe one. Security is one of several reasons that Pegasus is the ONLY mailreader I recommend for end users. It's also VERY easy to learn to use, and yet fairly featureful if you start exploring the more advanced functionality. I used it myself until I needed something that would run on platforms other than Windows, and then I switched to Gnus. Gnus is more powerful than Pegasus Mail in some ways (better threading, better editing capabilities, quoted-text rewrapping, and it's MUCH more customizeable), but its filtering system is considerably less advanced, and it doesn't do multi-tasking things as well (like, say, checking for new messages while you're writing a reply), and of course it has too much learning curve for most users.
> how to use email and receive a file. I bet you would explain to her something like:
> right-click and choose to save the attachment, and then do you see it in the desktop?
> OK now double-click to open it...
No, no, I wouldn't.
In the first place, the desktop would NEVER EVER be the default save location on any computer I'd been close enough to that I could show someone how to do anything on it.
Second, I would give my grandma a mailreader that can display common-format image attachments (.png and
Third, I'd give her a mailreader (Pegasus Mail) that doesn't allow saving executable-format attachments without a big scary "Could be a Virus" warning. Pegasus doesn't alarm on