> Based on what I gather in my country the use of Perl is actually in decline
Perhaps. But Perl is so widely used, it could decline steadily for forty years and still be more important than C#.
I think a larger factor is that Perl is not usually given to a strong emphasis on presentation, brand names, buzzwords, and such. Perl is a very *practical* language, grounded in the idea of getting things done, and getting them done quickly, conveniently, and efficiently.
Some languages would want to run in the.NET environment for ideological reasons ("managed code" blah blah blah) or in order to attract programmers and/or managers who have bought into the whole.NET thing, but for Perl the only real reason to run perl in the.NET environment, as opposed to the normal way of doing things, would be if it provided some concrete practical advantages; I'm not aware of any. I'm not saying.NET wouldn't provide an advantage for *some* languages. C/C++, for instance, were in dire need of some of the things that.NET can provide, not least higher-level variable types that automatically take care of things like reallocating more space when needed. But for Perl, as far as I'm aware, the.NET environment is a solution in search of a problem.
Also, just because there's no "IronPerl Project" running around enthusiastically talking about the importance of running Perl in a.NET environment doesn't mean there aren't modules on the CPAN for interfacing with.NET code. Perl is, after all, a major glue language, so it's accustomed to interfacing with code that runs in different environments. There are probably at least three different approaches to it, with different strengths and weaknesses for different situation. I don't happen to know what they are, because I've never had any reason to work with.NET, but I if I wanted to know, I sure wouldn't ask on slashdot and sift through thousands of irrelevant posts in hopes of finding the answer. I'd go straight to a (gasp) Perl forum (e.g., Perlmonks) or a Perl mailing list, someplace with an SNR above 1.
Actually, I think the majority of Perl programmers write Windows-only code. (They're not the *better* Perl programmers, but hey.)
> That's like buying an extremely overpowered, difficult to setup > and impossible to maintain turbo for your Yugo.
Perl is only difficult to set up or maintain if you insist on compiling it yourself, which would be extremely unusual position for a Windows user to take. Most Windows users who want Perl just get it from ActiveState. (There are other options, e.g., Strawberry Perl, or Cygwin, but those tend to be used more by people who were already familiar with Perl first and then found themselves having to support Windows for one reason or another.)
Personally I think Microsoft should work out a deal with ActiveState or somebody and actually ship Perl out of the box like every other operating system. But I might be biased, since having Perl (and Emacs) is way more important to me than what OS I am running. I happen not to prefer Windows, and mostly use other systems (currently, Debian). But I'd be much more willing to use Windows with Perl than Linux without Perl. So, as I said, I'm biased.
Having said that, I'm a little hazy on exactly what IronPerl would be, if it existed, and what actual problem it would solve that standard Perl doesn't, other than filling out one more space on somebody's Buzzword Bingo card. Maybe someone who knows more about.NET could elaborate on this?
Because it made the news, and so everyone is watching to see what they do. If they didn't do anything, it would look like they were soft on computer crime. (Yeah, okay, so I'm cynical. My philosophy prof, Dr. Forbes, told me I was too young to be so cynical. But I'm a few years older now, so maybe it's okay.)
> The Windows clipboard already knows what format the content has. It shouldn't be a big deal.
The clipboard doesn't know the format in the sense of being able to interpret or convert it. It only knows what the program that placed the information there told it. Programs that put information on the clipboard can send that information in more than one format, and they often do. A word processing program, for instance, will commonly send information to the clipboard in its own format, in a more basic richtext format, and as plain text. (Some word processors, such as OpenOffice.org Writer, also send it as HTML.)
The receiving program can't just ask for the information in any format it wants. It can only choose between the available options. (If the program supports more than one of the available options, it may offer a Paste Special option so the user can choose. This is useful, for instance, when you are copying information into a word processing document but you *don't* want the original formatting; you can paste the plain-text version, assuming the information is available that way, which is generally the case because practically everything supports plain text.) What format options are available for pasting is up to the program that puts the information *onto* the clipboard. The only way you're going to get HTML off the clipboard is if the program that copies the information onto the clipboard sends it as HTML.
> For example, if I select a range of cells in Excel [...] and copy them, I can paste the results > into Notepad and it automatically converts it to tab-delimited text - my formulas are gone.
Yes, but Notepad didn't do the conversion, and the Windows clipboard didn't do the conversion. Excel did the conversion when you copied the information. This is possible because Excel knows its own format, and it also understands tab-delimited text.
> In other words, the "spreadsheet cells" data object has some sort of "toString()" method.
An interesting notion, but the stuff in the clipboard is not active in that way. It's just data, though it may be available in multiple formats.
> If I paste the spreadsheet cells into Outlook Express, it shows up as an HTML table.
If so, then that means Excel put it there that way. (I was not specifically aware that Excel put its data onto the clipboard in HTML format, though I guess it's not very surprising. The last time I used Excel very much, it was running on Windows 3.1, so you expect some new features.)
I still don't consider HTML email to be legitimate in a general internet context. Maybe in a corporate intranet environment where you know what software the recipient is using and the recipient knows that the sender necessarily isn't malicious because all messages originate within the company.
> However, I'd still say "it'd be a good feature if I was able to paste part > of a spreadsheet into a message as a TABLE element".
But a range of spreadsheet cells *isn't* a TABLE element, unless your spreadsheet program puts it on the clipboard that way, which is, in a word, unlikely.
> pasting into rich text should "work", i.e. it should LOOK approximately the > same even if it doesn't have all the capabilities of the original data
In the general case, there's no mechanism whereby an application that you paste something into can know what the stuff you are pasting looked like visually in the original application it came from. Copying and pasting has never EVER worked that way, with any software on any platform, unless the content in question was an image. Otherwise, if the visual appearance is what you want, the usual way to get that is to take a screenshot.
I believe Windows Vista even comes with a nifty utility for taking quick screenshots of arbitrary rectangular areas of the screen, so you don't even have to break out an image editor for cropping. Gnome used to have a feature like that in 1.x, but, sadly, I'm pretty sure that was done away for version 2.0 by the same Extremist Anti-Features Jihad that took away floating panels and always-on-top panels, among other things. (I'd still be using Gnome 1.x, but it's not really compatible with current versions of other things. Any application you wanted to install would complain that your version of some library or another is too old, and the old version of Gnome won't work with the newer library versions. I'm thinking of switching to KDE, but it doesn't have panel drawers, which are a real must-have for me.)
You can actually send inline images with a plain-text messages too, and they'll be displayed inline if the user's mailreader supports that. Software that doesn't support that (e.g., text-based clients) will generally treat it as an attachment.
> E-mails aren't supposed to be "active" anyway. You get it, you read it, you don't change > anything. Actually, there's a reason OLE didn't really catch on... the e-mail composer > isn't supposed to take on the abilities of Excel
Exactly.
But have a look at the message I was originally responding to, umm, here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=982019&cid=25220767
The author of that message seemed to be implying that open-source developers were just being unnecessarily difficult and inappropriately user-hostile when they said "you don't need it to do that" in response to a request for exactly this feature.
Feature requests *do* have to be vetted (or triaged, or whatever you want to call it) for practicality.
> I'm pretty sure that every e-mail I send in GMail is sent in the HTML format.
I regularly receive email that was sent from GMail accounts, and it's plain text. (Umm, it's vaguely possible that it's actually multipart/alternative and I haven't noticed.)
> What are the other two?
text/enriched and text/ms-rtf, IIRC. Also note that all HTML mail support is not created equal.
> Also, maybe the OSS user-base doesn't think HTML mail is a priority feature > (although you yourself said your client does actually have the feature)
As I said, Gnus has every feature, whether it's a priority or not. It can also decode morse code. How many people do you know who send messages in *that* format, eh? It can run on a dumb terminal with no graphics capability (and can do syntax coloring if the terminal has color), but if it's running in a graphical environment it can display images inline. It supports Face and X-Face headers. It does folding, adaptive scoring, grouping-symbol-matching, per-folder customization of all outgoing header fields, up to and including calculating them on the fly for each message with user-defined functions. Where most mail clients only support POP3, IMAP, and maybe one other method of message retrieval, Gnus supports something like a dozen different ways to get new mail, including kibozing. If you look up "creeping featurism" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen.
So the fact that Gnus supports something really doesn't mean it is widely accepted.
(Note that I'm not saying the feature creep in Gnus is a bad thing. It is the mailreader I've chosen to use myself, after all. I wouldn't recommend it to most end-users, though.)
> HTML is sent as an attachment. HTML-capable mail readers cleverly disguise this fact.
Umm, I think you are confused about what the word "attachment" means. It does not just mean "any MIME part", or the body of a regular old plain text email would be an attachment too, if you sent an attachment along with it.
> I think you have to be "mean" for the sake of being mean sometimes though. Mostly in just not > letting them have their way all the time even if there is no specific reason other than "I said so"
On the one hand, you certainly do have to teach them that they can't always have everything that strikes their fancy, and sometimes that means just making an arbitrary decision that on this particular occasion they can't have the candy (or whatever) just because it's not good for them to always have everything they think they want. If that's what you mean by the above, then your point is absolutely valid. However, "mean for the sake of being mean" is *definitely* not the wording I would have chosen to express this concept.
> or occassionally "overreacting" for a relatively minor infraction.
I suppose that depends on how you define "overreacting". It would certainly be easy to take that too far. But I don't mean to imply either that you should always just let all "minor" infractions slide.
> Part of being successful in life is learning how to lose gracefully and that life isn't always fair.
I do agree here. Life is not fair, is not supposed to be fair. And if it were fair, you wouldn't like it.
> We also don't tend to give much sympathy when they hurt themselves doing something we told them not to do.
Heh. I'm not going to argue too much with that one, but I will note that you can't count on this necessarily happening with every behavior you think it will happen with. My parents and school teachers tried for neigh on two decades to get me to stop tipping back chairs. I'm pretty sure they thought I'd hurt myself at some point by this practice and learn my lesson, but so far I have never gotten hurt that way (well, not beyond falling off and giving some people a good laugh once or twice). On the other hand, I was never significantly punished for it, mostly just warned and fussed at (like I said, I'm pretty sure they thought I'd learn the lesson naturally by getting hurt). For some odd reason, I've never really left off doing it, either. (Yeah, I'm middle-aged and still tip back chairs, habitually, without even noticing I'm doing it. Really. My boss caught me doing it in my office chair just a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately I don't think she was significantly bother by it, though she probably wasn't too impressed with my good judgment either.)
> > HTML table cells don't do the things a spreadsheet's cells do (e.g., calculation) > No, and they don't if you paste them into Word, either.
Well, I haven't used a recent version of Word, but that *used* to work, back in the days of Windows 3.1. It was called OLE, and after pasting the spreadsheet cells into the word processing document, if you changed some of the numbers, the formulas would recalculate just like you'd expect. The equivalent functionality works in OpenOffice.org today (pasting Calc cells into Writer). I have doubts about the usefulness of this feature, but it is possible because all the applications in the office suite are all present on the computer. That is to say, it only ever worked in Word if the computer you were opening the document on also had Excel installed. If you took the Word document to a computer that only had Word (not all of Office), it wouldn't work. So for email that would be a complete non-starter even if it were technically possible to embed an OLE object in an email message (which it's not anyhow) because you have no way to know what computer the recipient will open the message on nor what software it will have installed.
> > For every email client you name that supports HTML messages, I'll name one that doesn't. > But... why?
A lot of reasons. Because it's completely unnecessary. Because there are grave security concerns. Because 99.999% of all HTML mail is spam anyway. Because people who really want to write web pages can always do exactly that and put them up on the web. But mostly because it's one of at least three competing non-standard rich text formats for email, none of which is necessary, and none of which has ever reached a level of usage that would make it a priority feature for most mail clients. There's always something else more important to implement, such as unicode support, spam filtering, anti-phishing features, encrypting and signing, and so on and so forth.
Actually, the mailreader I use theoretically has support for HTML mail (because, on principle, Gnus has _every_ feature, including the kitchen sink; for instance, it can also decode morse code), and I don't even have its HTML mail support enabled, for several of the above-listed reasons, the most important being, HTML is not a standard format for email. HTML is a standard format for the world wide web. Plain text is the standard format for email message bodies. (HTML, like any other format, could be sent as an attachment, but that's another matter.)
> If you are hitting them to hurt them you are doing it wrong.
I would say that applies to all forms of discipline. Whether we're talking about spanking or a lecture or grounding or corner time or whatever, the same principle applies: If you're doing it to be mean, you're doing it wrong. You're supposed to discipline your children *for their benefit*.
Oh, there *are* times when you need to yell at a kid, and/or stick them in a corner. But if that's the only way you know how to handle discipline, you're a few tools shy of a full workshop.
Actually, you can't multiply the average per year by the number of years and get the number of divorced people. You'll get an artificially high number, because of repeat divorces. The failure rate in second marriages is several times as high as for first marriages, and for third-plus it's basically 100% (less a few that end in death within a small number of years, before they have time to fail).
In other words, the long-term *success* rate for marriages is much higher than the averages would seem to indicate, because once someone is in a successful marriage, they don't contribute to the average again and again and again. Fiftieth anniversaries are surprisingly common, and I've known several couples who made it past sixty-five.
Also, marriages don't fail because being in a marriage isn't easy. That's true, but it's not why they fail. Marriages fail because too many people don't take marriage seriously in the first place. If your job and your hobby are more important to you than your spouse, you're in for a rocky relationship, and it's not right to blame this on "marriage is hard". Your priorities didn't *support* marriage. (This is also why the same people fail again and again.)
> with gaming, it's almost an inelastic demand. if you want a particular game, > there's only one publisher. you can't substitute a competing product for it
OTOH, if you haven't got the money, you can't buy the game. This doesn't apply to everyone: some people devote a portion of their regular income to buying games, sure, so they can just continue to buy them. However, other people regularly sell off their old games to scrape together the cash for new ones. If they get significantly less for the old games, they can't buy as many new ones. So then they start deciding which ones they can afford to get as soon as they're out, and which ones they're just going to have to wait a bit for and get from the bargain bin, or, in some cases, which ones they won't be able to buy at all.
These are both simple scenarios, of course, and so the truth, amortized over tens of thousands of customers, is rather more complicated. But the ability to resell games used *does* have an impact on the market for new games.
Radio stations don't like to play Weird Al that much, because the percentage of their listeners who *upon hearing it* are actually into it, isn't high enough. Weird Al appeals to a certain kind of listener, and it's not the kind of listener most radio stations cultivate. So he doesn't get much air time.
But people who do like him actually *like* him, so he gets good word-of-mouth response, and has developed a substantial following.
> Perhaps - oh, I don't know - as a TABLE element? Most e-mail clients should already support that.
For every email client you name that supports HTML messages, I'll name one that doesn't. But in any event, HTML table cells don't do the things a spreadsheet's cells do (e.g., calculation), so you couldn't actually implement the requested feature based on that, anyway.
No, geographically, it really is big, no matter what kind of map projection or globe you look at. Well, okay, it's not as big as Russia, but not much is. (Several of the continents have less land area than Russia.) But Canada is big, bigger, in terms of land area, than any *other* country (besides Russia) that you care to name, including the US.
But, as I said, that can be deceptive, because, to put it bluntly, a lot of that land area has a higher population density of polar bears than people. Most of the human population is concentrated in the southern third of the country, and even there it's not very densely populated by US standards.
Well, I don't know about honorable... but there's your garden-variety betrayal of the "I'm not willing to support you any more, I know you were counting on me, sorry, but I just can't do it" variety. If timed badly, that can still really hurt, and it will certainly land you in a court marshal at the very least (dereliction of duty and so forth), and if timed very badly it could potentially lead to charges of treason. So I wouldn't really call that honorable. Nonetheless, it's categorically not the same thing as what Arnold did, which was more along the lines of "Hey, I know you were really counting on me, but I've been actively cooperating with the enemy and just lead you into a big trap, haha."
This is interesting to me even though I don't run Windows on my own computer, because sometimes other people use Windows, and since I am an IT professional that means I occasionally encounter it. YMMV.
However, there may be some significant differences between Linux and the NT kernel, both in terms of the design and the implementation. It may be that not everything that's hard to do with one of them is automatically also hard to do with the other.
While it's true that doesn't follow automatically, I tend to think Weird Al is a great example of an artist who can and should pursue non-traditional distribution mechanisms. On the one hand he has a large enough following and existing name to be able to get the ball rolling, but on the other hand he appeals very much to a niche audience (a sizeable niche, but a niche nonetheless) that impedes the effectiveness of traditional distribution channels in getting his work out there. Radio stations, for example, don't like to play him that much, because too many listeners aren't really into it. The popularity of his music spreads mostly by word of mouth. It always has. Online distribution is a perfect match for that.
Now, I don't know that releasing individual songs is necessarily the best way for him to go. But I don't know that it's not, either. Best way to find out is probably to try it and see how it goes.
It does seem like a really good match. Read the series and you will understand more fully, but, briefly, internet-based realities and interaction and gaming and so forth are very wrapped up in the central themes of the Otherland series. In fact, the titles of the four books are all references to phenomena encountered by the book's characters in the context of exploring a virtual world, and the title of the series is the name of said virtual world itself. There are also several _other_ virtual worlds in the series, most notably the Inner District (which is kind of like Second Life on steroids, but with more real-world implications), the Middle Kingdom (pretty much a traditional fantasy MMO), and Treehouse (built and operated by and for computer geeks).
Slashdot Mirror
> Based on what I gather in my country the use of Perl is actually in decline
.NET environment for ideological reasons ("managed code" blah blah blah) or in order to attract programmers and/or managers who have bought into the whole .NET thing, but for Perl the only real reason to run perl in the .NET environment, as opposed to the normal way of doing things, would be if it provided some concrete practical advantages; I'm not aware of any. I'm not saying .NET wouldn't provide an advantage for *some* languages. C/C++, for instance, were in dire need of some of the things that .NET can provide, not least higher-level variable types that automatically take care of things like reallocating more space when needed. But for Perl, as far as I'm aware, the .NET environment is a solution in search of a problem.
.NET environment doesn't mean there aren't modules on the CPAN for interfacing with .NET code. Perl is, after all, a major glue language, so it's accustomed to interfacing with code that runs in different environments. There are probably at least three different approaches to it, with different strengths and weaknesses for different situation. I don't happen to know what they are, because I've never had any reason to work with .NET, but I if I wanted to know, I sure wouldn't ask on slashdot and sift through thousands of irrelevant posts in hopes of finding the answer. I'd go straight to a (gasp) Perl forum (e.g., Perlmonks) or a Perl mailing list, someplace with an SNR above 1.
Perhaps. But Perl is so widely used, it could decline steadily for forty years and still be more important than C#.
I think a larger factor is that Perl is not usually given to a strong emphasis on presentation, brand names, buzzwords, and such. Perl is a very *practical* language, grounded in the idea of getting things done, and getting them done quickly, conveniently, and efficiently.
Some languages would want to run in the
Also, just because there's no "IronPerl Project" running around enthusiastically talking about the importance of running Perl in a
Actually, I think the majority of Perl programmers write Windows-only code. (They're not the *better* Perl programmers, but hey.)
.NET could elaborate on this?
> That's like buying an extremely overpowered, difficult to setup
> and impossible to maintain turbo for your Yugo.
Perl is only difficult to set up or maintain if you insist on compiling it yourself, which would be extremely unusual position for a Windows user to take. Most Windows users who want Perl just get it from ActiveState. (There are other options, e.g., Strawberry Perl, or Cygwin, but those tend to be used more by people who were already familiar with Perl first and then found themselves having to support Windows for one reason or another.)
Personally I think Microsoft should work out a deal with ActiveState or somebody and actually ship Perl out of the box like every other operating system. But I might be biased, since having Perl (and Emacs) is way more important to me than what OS I am running. I happen not to prefer Windows, and mostly use other systems (currently, Debian). But I'd be much more willing to use Windows with Perl than Linux without Perl. So, as I said, I'm biased.
Having said that, I'm a little hazy on exactly what IronPerl would be, if it existed, and what actual problem it would solve that standard Perl doesn't, other than filling out one more space on somebody's Buzzword Bingo card. Maybe someone who knows more about
> why are the FBI and Secret Service involved?
Because it made the news, and so everyone is watching to see what they do. If they didn't do anything, it would look like they were soft on computer crime. (Yeah, okay, so I'm cynical. My philosophy prof, Dr. Forbes, told me I was too young to be so cynical. But I'm a few years older now, so maybe it's okay.)
> The Windows clipboard already knows what format the content has. It shouldn't be a big deal.
The clipboard doesn't know the format in the sense of being able to interpret or convert it. It only knows what the program that placed the information there told it. Programs that put information on the clipboard can send that information in more than one format, and they often do. A word processing program, for instance, will commonly send information to the clipboard in its own format, in a more basic richtext format, and as plain text. (Some word processors, such as OpenOffice.org Writer, also send it as HTML.)
The receiving program can't just ask for the information in any format it wants. It can only choose between the available options. (If the program supports more than one of the available options, it may offer a Paste Special option so the user can choose. This is useful, for instance, when you are copying information into a word processing document but you *don't* want the original formatting; you can paste the plain-text version, assuming the information is available that way, which is generally the case because practically everything supports plain text.) What format options are available for pasting is up to the program that puts the information *onto* the clipboard. The only way you're going to get HTML off the clipboard is if the program that copies the information onto the clipboard sends it as HTML.
> For example, if I select a range of cells in Excel [...] and copy them, I can paste the results
> into Notepad and it automatically converts it to tab-delimited text - my formulas are gone.
Yes, but Notepad didn't do the conversion, and the Windows clipboard didn't do the conversion. Excel did the conversion when you copied the information. This is possible because Excel knows its own format, and it also understands tab-delimited text.
> In other words, the "spreadsheet cells" data object has some sort of "toString()" method.
An interesting notion, but the stuff in the clipboard is not active in that way. It's just data, though it may be available in multiple formats.
> If I paste the spreadsheet cells into Outlook Express, it shows up as an HTML table.
If so, then that means Excel put it there that way. (I was not specifically aware that Excel put its data onto the clipboard in HTML format, though I guess it's not very surprising. The last time I used Excel very much, it was running on Windows 3.1, so you expect some new features.)
I still don't consider HTML email to be legitimate in a general internet context. Maybe in a corporate intranet environment where you know what software the recipient is using and the recipient knows that the sender necessarily isn't malicious because all messages originate within the company.
> However, I'd still say "it'd be a good feature if I was able to paste part
> of a spreadsheet into a message as a TABLE element".
But a range of spreadsheet cells *isn't* a TABLE element, unless your spreadsheet program puts it on the clipboard that way, which is, in a word, unlikely.
> pasting into rich text should "work", i.e. it should LOOK approximately the
> same even if it doesn't have all the capabilities of the original data
In the general case, there's no mechanism whereby an application that you paste something into can know what the stuff you are pasting looked like visually in the original application it came from. Copying and pasting has never EVER worked that way, with any software on any platform, unless the content in question was an image. Otherwise, if the visual appearance is what you want, the usual way to get that is to take a screenshot.
I believe Windows Vista even comes with a nifty utility for taking quick screenshots of arbitrary rectangular areas of the screen, so you don't even have to break out an image editor for cropping. Gnome used to have a feature like that in 1.x, but, sadly, I'm pretty sure that was done away for version 2.0 by the same Extremist Anti-Features Jihad that took away floating panels and always-on-top panels, among other things. (I'd still be using Gnome 1.x, but it's not really compatible with current versions of other things. Any application you wanted to install would complain that your version of some library or another is too old, and the old version of Gnome won't work with the newer library versions. I'm thinking of switching to KDE, but it doesn't have panel drawers, which are a real must-have for me.)
You can actually send inline images with a plain-text messages too, and they'll be displayed inline if the user's mailreader supports that. Software that doesn't support that (e.g., text-based clients) will generally treat it as an attachment.
But MIME has no provision for spreadsheet cells.
> E-mails aren't supposed to be "active" anyway. You get it, you read it, you don't change
> anything. Actually, there's a reason OLE didn't really catch on... the e-mail composer
> isn't supposed to take on the abilities of Excel
Exactly.
But have a look at the message I was originally responding to, umm, here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=982019&cid=25220767
The author of that message seemed to be implying that open-source developers were just being unnecessarily difficult and inappropriately user-hostile when they said "you don't need it to do that" in response to a request for exactly this feature.
Feature requests *do* have to be vetted (or triaged, or whatever you want to call it) for practicality.
> I'm pretty sure that every e-mail I send in GMail is sent in the HTML format.
I regularly receive email that was sent from GMail accounts, and it's plain text. (Umm, it's vaguely possible that it's actually multipart/alternative and I haven't noticed.)
> What are the other two?
text/enriched and text/ms-rtf, IIRC. Also note that all HTML mail support is not created equal.
> Also, maybe the OSS user-base doesn't think HTML mail is a priority feature
> (although you yourself said your client does actually have the feature)
As I said, Gnus has every feature, whether it's a priority or not. It can also decode morse code. How many people do you know who send messages in *that* format, eh? It can run on a dumb terminal with no graphics capability (and can do syntax coloring if the terminal has color), but if it's running in a graphical environment it can display images inline. It supports Face and X-Face headers. It does folding, adaptive scoring, grouping-symbol-matching, per-folder customization of all outgoing header fields, up to and including calculating them on the fly for each message with user-defined functions. Where most mail clients only support POP3, IMAP, and maybe one other method of message retrieval, Gnus supports something like a dozen different ways to get new mail, including kibozing. If you look up "creeping featurism" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen.
So the fact that Gnus supports something really doesn't mean it is widely accepted.
(Note that I'm not saying the feature creep in Gnus is a bad thing. It is the mailreader I've chosen to use myself, after all. I wouldn't recommend it to most end-users, though.)
> HTML is sent as an attachment. HTML-capable mail readers cleverly disguise this fact.
Umm, I think you are confused about what the word "attachment" means. It does not just mean "any MIME part", or the body of a regular old plain text email would be an attachment too, if you sent an attachment along with it.
> I think you have to be "mean" for the sake of being mean sometimes though. Mostly in just not
> letting them have their way all the time even if there is no specific reason other than "I said so"
On the one hand, you certainly do have to teach them that they can't always have everything that strikes their fancy, and sometimes that means just making an arbitrary decision that on this particular occasion they can't have the candy (or whatever) just because it's not good for them to always have everything they think they want. If that's what you mean by the above, then your point is absolutely valid. However, "mean for the sake of being mean" is *definitely* not the wording I would have chosen to express this concept.
> or occassionally "overreacting" for a relatively minor infraction.
I suppose that depends on how you define "overreacting". It would certainly be easy to take that too far. But I don't mean to imply either that you should always just let all "minor" infractions slide.
> Part of being successful in life is learning how to lose gracefully and that life isn't always fair.
I do agree here. Life is not fair, is not supposed to be fair. And if it were fair, you wouldn't like it.
> We also don't tend to give much sympathy when they hurt themselves doing something we told them not to do.
Heh. I'm not going to argue too much with that one, but I will note that you can't count on this necessarily happening with every behavior you think it will happen with. My parents and school teachers tried for neigh on two decades to get me to stop tipping back chairs. I'm pretty sure they thought I'd hurt myself at some point by this practice and learn my lesson, but so far I have never gotten hurt that way (well, not beyond falling off and giving some people a good laugh once or twice). On the other hand, I was never significantly punished for it, mostly just warned and fussed at (like I said, I'm pretty sure they thought I'd learn the lesson naturally by getting hurt). For some odd reason, I've never really left off doing it, either. (Yeah, I'm middle-aged and still tip back chairs, habitually, without even noticing I'm doing it. Really. My boss caught me doing it in my office chair just a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately I don't think she was significantly bother by it, though she probably wasn't too impressed with my good judgment either.)
> > HTML table cells don't do the things a spreadsheet's cells do (e.g., calculation)
> No, and they don't if you paste them into Word, either.
Well, I haven't used a recent version of Word, but that *used* to work, back in the days of Windows 3.1. It was called OLE, and after pasting the spreadsheet cells into the word processing document, if you changed some of the numbers, the formulas would recalculate just like you'd expect. The equivalent functionality works in OpenOffice.org today (pasting Calc cells into Writer). I have doubts about the usefulness of this feature, but it is possible because all the applications in the office suite are all present on the computer. That is to say, it only ever worked in Word if the computer you were opening the document on also had Excel installed. If you took the Word document to a computer that only had Word (not all of Office), it wouldn't work. So for email that would be a complete non-starter even if it were technically possible to embed an OLE object in an email message (which it's not anyhow) because you have no way to know what computer the recipient will open the message on nor what software it will have installed.
> > For every email client you name that supports HTML messages, I'll name one that doesn't.
> But... why?
A lot of reasons. Because it's completely unnecessary. Because there are grave security concerns. Because 99.999% of all HTML mail is spam anyway. Because people who really want to write web pages can always do exactly that and put them up on the web. But mostly because it's one of at least three competing non-standard rich text formats for email, none of which is necessary, and none of which has ever reached a level of usage that would make it a priority feature for most mail clients. There's always something else more important to implement, such as unicode support, spam filtering, anti-phishing features, encrypting and signing, and so on and so forth.
Actually, the mailreader I use theoretically has support for HTML mail (because, on principle, Gnus has _every_ feature, including the kitchen sink; for instance, it can also decode morse code), and I don't even have its HTML mail support enabled, for several of the above-listed reasons, the most important being, HTML is not a standard format for email. HTML is a standard format for the world wide web. Plain text is the standard format for email message bodies. (HTML, like any other format, could be sent as an attachment, but that's another matter.)
> If you kid is glued all day to the computer or game console,
> take him outside and introduce him to sunlight.
Hey, there's no need to go over the top and get *violent* with the kid. I mean, seriously, *sunlight*? What kind of person are you?
> If you are hitting them to hurt them you are doing it wrong.
I would say that applies to all forms of discipline. Whether we're talking about spanking or a lecture or grounding or corner time or whatever, the same principle applies: If you're doing it to be mean, you're doing it wrong. You're supposed to discipline your children *for their benefit*.
Oh, there *are* times when you need to yell at a kid, and/or stick them in a corner. But if that's the only way you know how to handle discipline, you're a few tools shy of a full workshop.
Actually, you can't multiply the average per year by the number of years and get the number of divorced people. You'll get an artificially high number, because of repeat divorces. The failure rate in second marriages is several times as high as for first marriages, and for third-plus it's basically 100% (less a few that end in death within a small number of years, before they have time to fail).
In other words, the long-term *success* rate for marriages is much higher than the averages would seem to indicate, because once someone is in a successful marriage, they don't contribute to the average again and again and again. Fiftieth anniversaries are surprisingly common, and I've known several couples who made it past sixty-five.
Also, marriages don't fail because being in a marriage isn't easy. That's true, but it's not why they fail. Marriages fail because too many people don't take marriage seriously in the first place. If your job and your hobby are more important to you than your spouse, you're in for a rocky relationship, and it's not right to blame this on "marriage is hard". Your priorities didn't *support* marriage. (This is also why the same people fail again and again.)
> with gaming, it's almost an inelastic demand. if you want a particular game,
> there's only one publisher. you can't substitute a competing product for it
OTOH, if you haven't got the money, you can't buy the game. This doesn't apply to everyone: some people devote a portion of their regular income to buying games, sure, so they can just continue to buy them. However, other people regularly sell off their old games to scrape together the cash for new ones. If they get significantly less for the old games, they can't buy as many new ones. So then they start deciding which ones they can afford to get as soon as they're out, and which ones they're just going to have to wait a bit for and get from the bargain bin, or, in some cases, which ones they won't be able to buy at all.
These are both simple scenarios, of course, and so the truth, amortized over tens of thousands of customers, is rather more complicated. But the ability to resell games used *does* have an impact on the market for new games.
Let me rephrase, for greater clarity:
Radio stations don't like to play Weird Al that much, because the percentage of their listeners who *upon hearing it* are actually into it, isn't high enough. Weird Al appeals to a certain kind of listener, and it's not the kind of listener most radio stations cultivate. So he doesn't get much air time.
But people who do like him actually *like* him, so he gets good word-of-mouth response, and has developed a substantial following.
> Perhaps - oh, I don't know - as a TABLE element? Most e-mail clients should already support that.
For every email client you name that supports HTML messages, I'll name one that doesn't. But in any event, HTML table cells don't do the things a spreadsheet's cells do (e.g., calculation), so you couldn't actually implement the requested feature based on that, anyway.
> Canada's big, but it's not that big.
No, geographically, it really is big, no matter what kind of map projection or globe you look at. Well, okay, it's not as big as Russia, but not much is. (Several of the continents have less land area than Russia.) But Canada is big, bigger, in terms of land area, than any *other* country (besides Russia) that you care to name, including the US.
But, as I said, that can be deceptive, because, to put it bluntly, a lot of that land area has a higher population density of polar bears than people. Most of the human population is concentrated in the southern third of the country, and even there it's not very densely populated by US standards.
Well, I don't know about honorable... but there's your garden-variety betrayal of the "I'm not willing to support you any more, I know you were counting on me, sorry, but I just can't do it" variety. If timed badly, that can still really hurt, and it will certainly land you in a court marshal at the very least (dereliction of duty and so forth), and if timed very badly it could potentially lead to charges of treason. So I wouldn't really call that honorable. Nonetheless, it's categorically not the same thing as what Arnold did, which was more along the lines of "Hey, I know you were really counting on me, but I've been actively cooperating with the enemy and just lead you into a big trap, haha."
This is interesting to me even though I don't run Windows on my own computer, because sometimes other people use Windows, and since I am an IT professional that means I occasionally encounter it. YMMV.
However, there may be some significant differences between Linux and the NT kernel, both in terms of the design and the implementation. It may be that not everything that's hard to do with one of them is automatically also hard to do with the other.
> I now feel like I'm livin' in a Slashdot paradise.
Yeah, well I've spent all my *life* livin' in a Slashdot paradise.
(Err, okay, perhaps not *all* my life...)
While it's true that doesn't follow automatically, I tend to think Weird Al is a great example of an artist who can and should pursue non-traditional distribution mechanisms. On the one hand he has a large enough following and existing name to be able to get the ball rolling, but on the other hand he appeals very much to a niche audience (a sizeable niche, but a niche nonetheless) that impedes the effectiveness of traditional distribution channels in getting his work out there. Radio stations, for example, don't like to play him that much, because too many listeners aren't really into it. The popularity of his music spreads mostly by word of mouth. It always has. Online distribution is a perfect match for that.
Now, I don't know that releasing individual songs is necessarily the best way for him to go. But I don't know that it's not, either. Best way to find out is probably to try it and see how it goes.
It does seem like a really good match. Read the series and you will understand more fully, but, briefly, internet-based realities and interaction and gaming and so forth are very wrapped up in the central themes of the Otherland series. In fact, the titles of the four books are all references to phenomena encountered by the book's characters in the context of exploring a virtual world, and the title of the series is the name of said virtual world itself. There are also several _other_ virtual worlds in the series, most notably the Inner District (which is kind of like Second Life on steroids, but with more real-world implications), the Middle Kingdom (pretty much a traditional fantasy MMO), and Treehouse (built and operated by and for computer geeks).