Running your own email server from a retail ISP's service is becoming less useful as admins tighten up the places from which they are prepared to recieve mail. There are already lists of IP ranges allocated to customers of retail Internet services, and these are being blocked because the odds are that a mail server at one of these addresses is a virus pumping out garbage and not a clueful home user running a properly configured server.
Yes, this is not fair, but it's the way things are, and there's no sense railing against it. Considering how inexpensively you can get mail hosting, it's not hard to deal with, much as I too would like to put on my control-freak hat and run my own mail server.
One of the vital tasks of the ABC is to provide balance. Since several of our major newspapers are owned by an American and the commercial TV stations are full of American shows rippled with ads from American companies, the ABC would be failing desperately in its duty if it were anything BUT anti-American.
Note for non-Australians: ABC = Australia's government-owned national broadcaster.
Other US satellite countries claim to be the 51st state. Joe Strummer once said he was from the USS Great Britain, a large American aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Europe. Things are no better here on the USS Australia, a large American listening station in the Pacific Ocean.
Our government doesn't bother to ask 'How high, sir?' it just jumps. Abandonment of basic civil liberties in the War on Errorism? Yep. Willingness to lie for electoral advantage? Yep. Total lack of shame when caught? Yep.
To put this dumb stunt into some sort of perspective, there's an annual bike race up Mt Washington. This year's winner, Tom Danielson, rode up in 51 minutes and 5 seconds.
Danielson is an elite athlete, but most of the far-more-ordinary 500+ riders completed the trip to the top in under 2.5 hours, including all those in the '60-65 Male' category.
The Segway isn't faster than a 60-year-old on a bicycle. I think that says it all.
I've been using Thunderbird as my main mail client at home and the office for -- well, it feels like a few months, but it can't be. A while anyway.
Reasons for sticking with it:
Less crashy than Eudora. I was a die-hard Eudora user on the Mac OS 9 and below, but had to switch to Windows at work and was never able to get Eudora to be acceptably stable under Windows 2000. Despite the TBird builds to date being nominally alphas, they have been more reliable for me than release versions of Eudora.
IMAP. As an IMAP client, Thunderbird Just Works. I have no higher praise for an application.
It's not OE. Nuff said.
The killer for me though, is the junk mail filtering. I work for a website (www.cyclingnews.com if anyone's interested) that has its main editorial addresses on every single page. As a result we get vast amounts of spam, and because we're in the address books of hundreds if not thousands of people over the world we also get vast amounts of viruses. Even with filtering at server level that catches most of the junk we're assailed by, we get perhaps 80 or 90 pieces of junk per day, from around 300 emails.
After a few days of teaching Thunderbird what was and was not junk, and whitelisting the people I definitely wanted to hear from, that junk flood is down to a trickle. Skimming subject lines in the Junk folder for likely non-junk is far less onerous than deleting spam after spam till you have an inevitable spam-spasm and delete the wrong thing.
Other features I like:
*The quick sorts provided by the 'View:' and 'Sender or Subject contains:' pop-up menus
*Ability to sort by order received - though I note this seems to be broken in thelatest release.
*Control. I get to decide whether to read mail as plain text or subject myself to some drooling cretin's idea of 'design'. I can turn off loading of remote images. I can view attached content in the message or not (if TBird can handle it, of course). My choice.
That last may seem trivial, but it's surprisingly not. Eudora seems to be randomly unable to display some attached jpgs; Mulberry (a very powerful IMAP client) can't display them at all; persuading OE NOT to show you attached pics... well, I gave up trying; I'm sure it can be done, but grinding through Microsoft's broken idea of a prefs system just to use that disgusting, broken child's-toy email client... fnuh.
Things I'd like to see improved:
Importing from Eudora is clunky. I just switched my wife's email as she was drowning in spam; the imported messages show up as if they were plain text, so you get to see all the code in html messages. Not great.
General speed and responsiveness. It's fine on a fast machine, but the 800 MHz AMD I have at the office chugs a bit.
Thunderbird asks for a password the first time you try to 'get mail' after setting up a new account, and at that point offers you the option of a) letting the password manager look after it for you so any snoopy git can wander up to your workstation while you're at lunch and read your abusive emails about your boss; or b) not, so you can forget your password and plead to your BOFH to change it for you...
No no no-itty no! It's the nuts that should be given guns. The ones you have to look out for are the *quiet* types. After all, whenever someone goes rampant-crazy-apeshit with a semi-automatic because his aspidistra told him the local 7-11 was actually a nest of demons preparing for the apocalypse (it was at building 666, right, so it's *obvious*!) his neighbours always say, "Oh but he was so quiet." They never say "yeah he was obviously a total nutjob, we've been able to see this coming for years."
Guns should therefore only be available to those prepared to turn up at the licence office foaming at the mouth, dressed in rainbow motley and a tricorn, playing the bagpipes and shouting 'stop the parade, Mrs Jalopy, I'm a tea-kettle.'
Canon is widely thought to have jumped from G3 to G5 for the same reason Palm went from III to V - in Japanese the word for 'four' sounds almost identical to the word for 'death'.
Some of your analysis is negated by looking at Apple's marjeting house style a bit more closely.
The rest of Apples site would say "3 USB Ports" not "Three". Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0. I take this as one point impossible
Apple uses words for numbers less then 10 all over the place. This is generally considered good style in old-fashioned publishing circles (that is, those who believe they exist to create something that people will read, rather than something that fills the space between the ads).
For example, from the first Apple page I bothered to examine (http://www.apple.com/powermac/specs.html)
"Four 3.5-inch hard drive expansion bays"
"Four DIMM slots"
"One AGP 4X slot with graphics card installed"
and so on.
Off the style subject, as Apple now ships USB 2.0-capable iPods, it's not hard to believe USB 2.0 PowerMacs.
optical audio in a graphics machine?
Macs are widely used in professional audio circles. Go hang out in any Mac IRC channel - wall-to-wall musos.
The official announcement is planned for Monday, so this is a tiny leak as far as the time scale goes. G4s are reliably rumoured to be in short supply, and Mac dealers alledgedly have back rooms full of boxes marked 'Do not open till June 23 or we'll cut your goolies off' or like that.
Now, can someone please write a bot that trots out both sides of the Mac religionist argument so that those of us who simply find Apple's activities interesting can ignore one post instead of dozens? Thenkyew.
Short answer: it doesn't taste very good. Even if you're using a good grinder and espresso machine and are a reasonably skilled barista, you can't make espresso or espresso-based drinks from decaf beans that taste as good as ones that start with regular beans. The decaffeination process removes other things from the coffee that go to make up its taste - hardly surprising as a lot of the taste of coffee comes from some fairly light, volatile substances. They don't stick around in the cup for long after espresso is made, so you'd expect them to hitch a ride when the caffeine departs.
As for 'who would drink GM/engineered decaf?' well, my wife for one. She loves coffee, but gets bad effects from the caffeine if she has more than a couple of cappuccinos a day. Okay, I make them strong (there's a double shot of espresso in any coffee served here) but that's how she and everyone else seems to like them, so that's not about to change. If someone came up with a bean strain that tasted good and had even 50 percent of the caffeine content of regular Arabica, we'd be customers, and I know we wouldn't be alone - the roaster I use sells lots of decaf even though he freely admits it doesn't taste great.
That's going to be a challenge for the guys doing this research, by the way. Just about any coffee you get served anywhere is made from a blend of different beans, grown in different places to produce a well-rounded, balanced drink. Even, say, 'Colombian' isn't going to be one bean from one estate. This product is initially going to be, in effect, a single-strain, single-estate coffee. Even if GMing out the caffeine leaves everything else alone, the resulting drink could be, ah, interesting...
Slashdot Mirror
Running your own email server from a retail ISP's service is becoming less useful as admins tighten up the places from which they are prepared to recieve mail. There are already lists of IP ranges allocated to customers of retail Internet services, and these are being blocked because the odds are that a mail server at one of these addresses is a virus pumping out garbage and not a clueful home user running a properly configured server.
Yes, this is not fair, but it's the way things are, and there's no sense railing against it. Considering how inexpensively you can get mail hosting, it's not hard to deal with, much as I too would like to put on my control-freak hat and run my own mail server.
One of the vital tasks of the ABC is to provide balance. Since several of our major newspapers are owned by an American and the commercial TV stations are full of American shows rippled with ads from American companies, the ABC would be failing desperately in its duty if it were anything BUT anti-American.
Note for non-Australians: ABC = Australia's government-owned national broadcaster.
Think again.
Other US satellite countries claim to be the 51st state. Joe Strummer once said he was from the USS Great Britain, a large American aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Europe. Things are no better here on the USS Australia, a large American listening station in the Pacific Ocean.
Our government doesn't bother to ask 'How high, sir?' it just jumps. Abandonment of basic civil liberties in the War on Errorism? Yep. Willingness to lie for electoral advantage? Yep. Total lack of shame when caught? Yep.
I think it's time to learn French.
Test-driving a Segway cripples your ability to use the shift key!
Grounds for banning them in and of itself.
To put this dumb stunt into some sort of perspective, there's an annual bike race up Mt Washington. This year's winner, Tom Danielson, rode up in 51 minutes and 5 seconds.
Danielson is an elite athlete, but most of the far-more-ordinary 500+ riders completed the trip to the top in under 2.5 hours, including all those in the '60-65 Male' category.
The Segway isn't faster than a 60-year-old on a bicycle. I think that says it all.
>Dibbell has more to fear from the IRS.
Or Top cat getting the better of him again.
I've been using Thunderbird as my main mail client at home and the office for -- well, it feels like a few months, but it can't be. A while anyway.
Reasons for sticking with it:
Less crashy than Eudora. I was a die-hard Eudora user on the Mac OS 9 and below, but had to switch to Windows at work and was never able to get Eudora to be acceptably stable under Windows 2000. Despite the TBird builds to date being nominally alphas, they have been more reliable for me than release versions of Eudora.
IMAP. As an IMAP client, Thunderbird Just Works. I have no higher praise for an application.
It's not OE. Nuff said.
The killer for me though, is the junk mail filtering. I work for a website (www.cyclingnews.com if anyone's interested) that has its main editorial addresses on every single page. As a result we get vast amounts of spam, and because we're in the address books of hundreds if not thousands of people over the world we also get vast amounts of viruses. Even with filtering at server level that catches most of the junk we're assailed by, we get perhaps 80 or 90 pieces of junk per day, from around 300 emails.
After a few days of teaching Thunderbird what was and was not junk, and whitelisting the people I definitely wanted to hear from, that junk flood is down to a trickle. Skimming subject lines in the Junk folder for likely non-junk is far less onerous than deleting spam after spam till you have an inevitable spam-spasm and delete the wrong thing.
Other features I like:
*The quick sorts provided by the 'View:' and 'Sender or Subject contains:' pop-up menus
*Ability to sort by order received - though I note this seems to be broken in thelatest release.
*Control. I get to decide whether to read mail as plain text or subject myself to some drooling cretin's idea of 'design'. I can turn off loading of remote images. I can view attached content in the message or not (if TBird can handle it, of course). My choice.
That last may seem trivial, but it's surprisingly not. Eudora seems to be randomly unable to display some attached jpgs; Mulberry (a very powerful IMAP client) can't display them at all; persuading OE NOT to show you attached pics... well, I gave up trying; I'm sure it can be done, but grinding through Microsoft's broken idea of a prefs system just to use that disgusting, broken child's-toy email client... fnuh.
Things I'd like to see improved:
Importing from Eudora is clunky. I just switched my wife's email as she was drowning in spam; the imported messages show up as if they were plain text, so you get to see all the code in html messages. Not great.
General speed and responsiveness. It's fine on a fast machine, but the 800 MHz AMD I have at the office chugs a bit.
Thunderbird asks for a password the first time you try to 'get mail' after setting up a new account, and at that point offers you the option of a) letting the password manager look after it for you so any snoopy git can wander up to your workstation while you're at lunch and read your abusive emails about your boss; or b) not, so you can forget your password and plead to your BOFH to change it for you...
No no no-itty no! It's the nuts that should be given guns. The ones you have to look out for are the *quiet* types. After all, whenever someone goes rampant-crazy-apeshit with a semi-automatic because his aspidistra told him the local 7-11 was actually a nest of demons preparing for the apocalypse (it was at building 666, right, so it's *obvious*!) his neighbours always say, "Oh but he was so quiet." They never say "yeah he was obviously a total nutjob, we've been able to see this coming for years."
Guns should therefore only be available to those prepared to turn up at the licence office foaming at the mouth, dressed in rainbow motley and a tricorn, playing the bagpipes and shouting 'stop the parade, Mrs Jalopy, I'm a tea-kettle.'
Because we are manly computer users and therefore need a mouse with balls (or at least one of them).
The sentient boss!
Linkin Park IS a boy band trying to play metal.
Canon is widely thought to have jumped from G3 to G5 for the same reason Palm went from III to V - in Japanese the word for 'four' sounds almost identical to the word for 'death'.
What are Powermac G4s called in Japan, I wonder?
Some of your analysis is negated by looking at Apple's marjeting house style a bit more closely.
The rest of Apples site would say "3 USB Ports" not "Three". Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0. I take this as one point impossible
Apple uses words for numbers less then 10 all over the place. This is generally considered good style in old-fashioned publishing circles (that is, those who believe they exist to create something that people will read, rather than something that fills the space between the ads).
For example, from the first Apple page I bothered to examine (http://www.apple.com/powermac/specs.html)
"Four 3.5-inch hard drive expansion bays"
"Four DIMM slots"
"One AGP 4X slot with graphics card installed"
and so on.
Off the style subject, as Apple now ships USB 2.0-capable iPods, it's not hard to believe USB 2.0 PowerMacs.
optical audio in a graphics machine?
Macs are widely used in professional audio circles. Go hang out in any Mac IRC channel - wall-to-wall musos.
The official announcement is planned for Monday, so this is a tiny leak as far as the time scale goes. G4s are reliably rumoured to be in short supply, and Mac dealers alledgedly have back rooms full of boxes marked 'Do not open till June 23 or we'll cut your goolies off' or like that.
Now, can someone please write a bot that trots out both sides of the Mac religionist argument so that those of us who simply find Apple's activities interesting can ignore one post instead of dozens? Thenkyew.
Warning: coffee tragic at keyboard.
Short answer: it doesn't taste very good. Even if you're using a good grinder and espresso machine and are a reasonably skilled barista, you can't make espresso or espresso-based drinks from decaf beans that taste as good as ones that start with regular beans. The decaffeination process removes other things from the coffee that go to make up its taste - hardly surprising as a lot of the taste of coffee comes from some fairly light, volatile substances. They don't stick around in the cup for long after espresso is made, so you'd expect them to hitch a ride when the caffeine departs.
As for 'who would drink GM/engineered decaf?' well, my wife for one. She loves coffee, but gets bad effects from the caffeine if she has more than a couple of cappuccinos a day. Okay, I make them strong (there's a double shot of espresso in any coffee served here) but that's how she and everyone else seems to like them, so that's not about to change. If someone came up with a bean strain that tasted good and had even 50 percent of the caffeine content of regular Arabica, we'd be customers, and I know we wouldn't be alone - the roaster I use sells lots of decaf even though he freely admits it doesn't taste great.
That's going to be a challenge for the guys doing this research, by the way. Just about any coffee you get served anywhere is made from a blend of different beans, grown in different places to produce a well-rounded, balanced drink. Even, say, 'Colombian' isn't going to be one bean from one estate. This product is initially going to be, in effect, a single-strain, single-estate coffee. Even if GMing out the caffeine leaves everything else alone, the resulting drink could be, ah, interesting...
You don't need CGI to implement lousy physics, just Bruce Willis. One word: Armageddon.