Pirates of the Caribbean is a trilogy, and that's generally the way it works. You get one good movie, with a conclusion, and people like it enough that someone decides to make more, so they turn it into a trilogy. The second movie will expand on the first, opening up a larger universe, but leaves the story entirely unfinished -- in fact, it's often deliberately some sort of cliffhanger. Then you get the third movie, and a conclusion -- and if it's a good series, the conclusion is worth the wait.
After all, the ending of Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back was pretty unsatisfying, and deliberately so. Then we get Return of the Jedi, and a real ending.
Lord of the Rings. First movie was pretty good -- not much closure, but it was still pretty good. Second movie was lots of fighting, actually somewhat of a grind, but still some good elements. And the third movie made it all worthwhile.
The Matrix: Reloaded. Ends with the main character passed out, possibly dead, and a couple of other things. I'm not saying Revolutions answered everything I wanted it to, but again, it did provide closure.
I don't like episodes that run on forever, certainly not if I have to pay for them. But episodic doesn't mean never-ending. Consider: The first 50 episodes or so of Naruto were actually pretty decent, and closed some very good storylines. But, now they're up to some 220 episodes, and it's definitely getting old. Last I checked, they still really hadn't done much about Sasuke or Orochimaru.
And, compare that to, say, Fullmetal Alchemist. Ended after 50 episodes. Or Trigun, or Cowboy Bebop, or Outlaw Star, or Noir -- many good animes end after a season of 25 episodes or so.
By that token, I'm really appreciating the Half-Life 2 episodes, because I know there will be exactly three of them. It helps to know that there's an ending coming, but that we don't have to buy anymore episodes if the first one sucked. It also helps to be able to provide feedback -- and that, combined with the nature of game development, means subsequent episodes can keep getting better. Or Halo 2 -- we know Halo 3 will finish it.
If you don't like it, wait till the conclusion is made, then buy the whole thing -- earlier episodes (or games) will be cheaper by then.
DOS is a much more mature operating system than Vista, it is older than Vista, by about a decade. Yippee! Let's write all our next-gen games for DOS! Anyone got a DOS Blu-Ray player? Time to dig out the WordPerfect, it's the most mature word processor out there!
What you're forgetting: ancient != mature.
Linux is mature. Not as old as Solaris, but mature enough -- and when it was made, they knew of at least a few other attempts (probably including Solaris) -- so you could even see it as a rewrite of Solaris, if you like.
Doesn't apply to Windows. Linux is already massively better than Windows, in places where it counts to developers. Also, we can't hack on the Windows kernel (or the OSX kernel, anymore), so the choice is really between Linux, the various BSDs, Plan9, HURD, and Solaris.
I can't find the exact reference, but they only consider your ability to reproduce after the fact, not whether you actually have before the fact -- because that is hard to track reliably even if everyone's being honest, and you're ignoring stuff like bastard children who think their mother's husband is their father....
Does GPLv3 prevent you (the voter) from verifying a checksum? Absolutely not.
All it does is force the machine to run the software flawlessly.
Thus, it should be entirely possible for you, or for election officials, to verify that the signatures match. Doesn't mean the machines wouldn't run, it just means you'd know instantly that they were running a modified version, and you could request that they flash it to the correct version.
It's even possible that someone smarter than me will come up with an even better solution, involving some sort of manual challenge/response where you enter numbers and read other numbers off the screen and conclude that the checksum is valid.
By the way, I don't want it to be absolutely secure. I'd be satisfied if it was at least as secure as fucking slot machines are required to be.
Why do you think absolutely everyone on Linux was using Mozilla? It was the main Gecko program, and your other options kind of sucked. Mozilla got the job done, and everyone was developing for it -- you were guaranteed to have new and interesting stuff (Flash, Java, RSS, tabbed browsing, etc) on Mozilla, either before it was anywhere else, or within a month of it being implemented elsewhere.
Of course, some things never made it into Mozilla -- for instance, Amaya is both a web browser and a WYSIWYG editor, and you can jump into any webpage and edit, and save the new version somewhere -- there may even be a mechanism for re-uploading it. But there must not be that much demand for such features -- after all, most of us either use Notepad (or vim), or we use some nicely-done AJAX WYSIWYG.
You could point to Firefox, but remember: Firefox was originally named "Pheonix", because it rose from the ashes of Mozilla. Had Firefox been written from scratch, it would never have gotten where it is today -- old Mozilla bugs and all.
That is what will happen with Linux and OpenSolaris.
Linux is already much, much more popular than BSD or OpenSolaris -- or, for that matter, Plan 9. So, we take the best ideas from other OSes, so long as we can reasonably implement them, and we also toy with new things of our own. If I remember right,/proc was ripped off wholesale from Plan 9. If ZFS is ultimately such a great idea, most of its advantages will be absorbed into Linux, so eventually you'll have OpenSolaris, which implements ZFS perfectly and may have slightly better-looking code, and Linux, which does almost everything you need from ZFS, but also has binary blobs from nVidia and ATI, can run in usermode, has suspend to disk, runs on an iPod, and does many other things that Solaris will still be catching up with.
The only way this picture changes is if Solaris is so ridiculously better than Linux that the few people hacking on it now are enough for it to surpass Linux -- keep in mind, there will be plenty more people hacking on Linux at the same time. This has happened in the past, on a smaller scale, but I just don't think Solaris is better enough -- remember, evangelizing won't work. You won't get me to hack on Solaris till it runs on my Powerbook, at least -- and you need people like me to make it run on that Powerbook. You need it to already be almost as good as Linux, if not significantly better -- and not just in a few areas I don't care about -- in order to get me to hack on it.
If you really want to replace Linux, come up with something that's both better enough that it takes half the time to write it in FooOS than in Linux, and can run a Linux kernel alongside it (do something tricky with UML, or something like what Apple did with Mach/Darwin), so that I can load up my nVidia driver and play Quake 4, and still hack around with something cool like, say, a new cluster filesystem. You have to do it right, though -- I should be able to load my Linux kernel, nVidia driver, and Quake4 binary (and maps) from my own FooOS cluster filesystem.
If you can do that, and provide compelling enough development tools to sway the Linux kernel devs, then we might actually lose the Linux kernel -- slowly -- and replace it with something better. Unless you can do that, Linux will remain the best we've got, now and forever.
I won't be quite as extreme, as there are a few places I believe the baggage of this kind of a scheme is necessary. For instance, we don't have a common game engine, therefore each game must ship with software, so any commercial game is automatically somewhat locked down and proprietary, and you can't do everything you want to with it.
Further, I'm perfectly alright with buying things with completely, pathetically defeated DRM. DVDs encrypted with CSS are fine -- I just rend them and rip them, or buy them and rip them.
However, I'm avoiding Windows Vista as long as I can, depending on how much usefulness I can get out of Linux. I'm also not going to buy or rent a single Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movie, so long as it's impossible for me to pop it into a Linux box and play it with mplayer. If I buy music, it'll be in the form of CDs or FLAC files.
Basically, what I'm hoping for is to create an example that others can follow, without boycotting being a monumental PITA. Then, when they come around with surveys, asking why we don't all have Blu-Ray, we can tell them we don't like them bricking our players because we might be able to use them to pirate.
The Mac OS (Classic, not OS X) combined spatial Finder with a sort of visual tab-completion, so you could jump to Engineering->Plasma->Conduit by typing, say, "e-n-cmd+o-p-l-cmd+o-c-o-n..."
And so does OS X, and so does Windows, and last I checked, GNOME and KDE both did that. Wasn't always cmd-o, but it was the same principle.
What they lack are the suggestions when something can't be completed. They just automatically select the first possible completion, it's not easy to move between multiple possible completions. And I also have bash-completion, which knows the arguments to a lot of commands -- it's not always filenames, and even when it is always filenames, it's a nice, consistent interface for doing more than just opening said file with the first thing the OS thought of.
Tab-completion kind of destroys that. First off, remember in Star Trek, they didn't always have a display, just voice responses coming back. So your way is more like:
You: Engineering Computer: Possible choices in Engineering are Personnel, Controls, Systems, Pr... You: Systems. Computer: Possible choices in Systems are...
Now, you're correct, give it a visual display and we're talking. But still, I'd argue a touchscreen is faster. In any case, tab-completion wins -- I may not be able to type "engineering" faster than you can say it, but I can type "en<tab>" faster than you can say "engineering", and I don't have to memorize the whole line:
Me: en<tab>/sys<tab>/en<tab>/
hmm, what goes here? I forget... something to do with plasma: plas<tab><tab>
(computer shows me possible completions: plasma conduits, plasma coolant, etc, and fils in "plasma c" ond<tab>/sec<tab>XYZ/St<tab><enter>
People think I type probably 20x faster than I do, for that reason alone.
Google Spreadsheets is just a spreadsheet. Gmail is just email. Do one job and do it well.
Last time I looked at a "WebOS", I saw something horrible. Someone was collecting a bunch of worthless AJAX apps and wrapping them in an AJAX windowing system.
You know what? If I want to use Google Maps and Yahoo Mail, that's my choice. No way I'm getting all of my apps from one place, just so someone can implement a windowing system in the browser (which sucks donkey balls), instead of using the existing windowing system provided by my real OS! If I want to look at gmail and spreadsheets side-by-side, I'll open two browser windows!
I don't get it. They're basically offering huge steaming gobs of bandwidth so that lazy people don't have to deal with routing and VPN issues. What's the catch?
...The trouble is, they should've done this ten years ago. At least the HTML mail... It's a bit scary that the DoD is taking so long to get reasonably secure. Department of Defense, people!
Well, of what you listed... What some other poster said. MGS is pretty much confirmed cross-platform, Devil May Cry seems likely, and Final Fantasy... Well, their lead developer was hired by Microsoft awhile ago.
Personally, I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude. Maybe eventually there will be enough good games for the PS3, and the prices will have gone down far enough, to counter my moral disgust at supporting a company that somehow manages to be more evil than Microsoft.
Perhaps. I can setup an IMAP server in about five minutes, probably less. The rest depends on how easy it is to setup an account in Evolution, but in Thunderbird, it takes another 2 minutes, maybe, then just drag all my mail over to the IMAP server.
Set up a rule to automatically bounce the message with a friendly reminder that you need to know which site is theirs, so you can sort their mail accordingly.
As for calendar, I guess if graphics float your boat... I mean, they're already sorted by date by default.
server-side spam filtering which can also take easily feedback from the client on what proved to not be spam, or what was and was missed.
I do this already, using IMAP and inotify on a Linux server. See this post that I made earlier.
server-side addressbook
This can be done with LDAP. To be fair, I've never gotten it to work properly, but I know it can be done.
It would be nice to automatically bounce office files with a message to tell the person to send stuff as PDF or plain text.
Hell, block the PDFs. Maybe allow HTML mail...
Communicating with an email server over IMAP makes for a klunky experience (*particularly* over a latent connection), and it shouldn't need to be this way.
While other posts would seem to support this, I don't see it in practice. My IMAP server is always pretty responsive, and Thunderbird seems to keep multiple connections open to make sure it stays that way.
It's certainly better than any other way I've tried -- like, say, Gmail.
Keep the client's disk archive of the mailbox synchronised with the server so that searching is easy, and do so inobtrusively (all the IMAP clients I've used are quite obtrusive and brittle as the number of possible connections rises), but reflect changes to the client back on the server (I don't think fetchmail does this)
Do you understand how IMAP searching works?
As far as I can tell, IMAP has a SEARCH command that is run on the server. So this isn't a bad email client, just that there aren't any decent servers (that do indexing and such).
The only reason you need a local cache is to make it run faster -- which is kind of in line with what I said about IMAP seeming pretty fast to me. Most of the time, caching the headers is enough anyway.
Frankly, my only complaint about Thunderbird and email in general is that I miss Jabber -- I already have my spamfiltering and sorting happen instantly when mail arrives, and I'd like to be told instantly that there's something there -- not on some 5 minute poll. I'm guessing that if someone really wanted to put in the effort, they could create something -- probably starting with Jabber -- that would replace both email and IM.
I'm with you on message notification, but it's not a huge issue for me -- I just check it frequently on my (Linux) desktop, and watch the Dock icon on my Powerbook. But if you know of a better Linux email client I could be using, I'm listening -- my solution works with ANY IMAP client. Read on...
I use bogofilter, but it's the same thing: spam, unsure, and everywhere else.
Advantages:
- Filters on the server, as messages come in.
- All the features you're talking about, from any IMAP client.
Disadvantages:
- Linux only (uses inotify to detect messages dropped to the "spam" folder)
- Any other filters (LKML goes here, girlfriend's stuff goes here) must be implemented on the server, currently Maildrop only.
- Filters on the server. If you have limited server resources, this may be a problem.
- Could conceivably lose mail during a retrain, due to the (admittedly stupid) way in which I handle retrains.
- While it works on any client, no client that I know of has decent keyboard shortcuts to help me out.
Basically, when a message comes in, it goes through bogofilter first, then maildrop. Maildrop looks for a bogofilter header, and drops it in the "spam" or "unsure" folder when it finds it. Otherwise, it goes to the rest of my maildrop rules, which mostly sort things into folders by mailing list.
There are also retrain folders: Retrain as spam/innocent. When a message is dragged to retrain/spam, it's retrained as spam and dumped in the spam folder. When it's dragged to retrain/innocent, it's retrained as innocent, with an extra header added (I think it's a bogofilter commandline option) to specify that it was reclassified (as it still might have a score of spam), and then is sent through the maildrop filters again. The maildrop filters look for that retrain flag, so it's guaranteed not to end up in spam this time, and gets sorted according to mailing list rules, etc.
This is where inotify comes in -- which means it MUST be a Linux server for this to work. As soon as the message appears in that folder, maildir structure guarantees it's just been rename'd in, so it's complete and safe to touch. Therefore, I can immediately retrain stuff, meaning the wait is less than a second, but I don't have to poll.
Boring implementation details follow:
The one major design bug is that I don't really know how to deal with maildir folders, so when I see a message appear in one of the retrain folders, I immediately open it, then unlink the file, to prevent Thunderbird or my own script from touching it until I finish piping it through the retrain process. I probably should be putting it in some temporary place, and indeed, maildir folders do have a "tmp" dir, but I simply don't know how to use it properly -- and I would have to rename it where I'm unlinking now. Basically, if the rename/unlink succeeds, it means I've beat the client to it. But if it fails, it means the client has done that stupid thing it does where the message is "delivered" to the folder as new, then the client marks it as read, which moves it from the "new" to the "cur" dir within that maildir.
I suppose I could build this into the IMAP server, but I like how this solution has already been ported from Exim/Courier-IMAP to Postfix/BincIMAP. I could write it as an IMAP proxy, but that's both more complicated and potentially slows down operation other than retrains -- an IMAP proxy would have to intercept and parse every line, whereas I only get to notice when an actual file is created in the retrain dir, and until that happens, my script does absolutely nothing.
If there's anything wrong with JavaScript, it's the speed of execution. As far as I know, we still don't have a decent bytecode engine for it, making it at least as slow as Ruby.
Combined with HTML/CSS, it's worse. But actually, XHTML/CSS is the best we've got. Don't get me wrong, I wish we had something better...
And we do have something for rounded corners, drop shadows, and the like. It's called SVG. But I'm not convinced SVG is really any better than XHTML/CSS with transparent PNGs. (Yes, I know what vector graphics is, I'm talking about confusing standards/implementations.)
Slashdot Mirror
Pirates of the Caribbean is a trilogy, and that's generally the way it works. You get one good movie, with a conclusion, and people like it enough that someone decides to make more, so they turn it into a trilogy. The second movie will expand on the first, opening up a larger universe, but leaves the story entirely unfinished -- in fact, it's often deliberately some sort of cliffhanger. Then you get the third movie, and a conclusion -- and if it's a good series, the conclusion is worth the wait.
After all, the ending of Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back was pretty unsatisfying, and deliberately so. Then we get Return of the Jedi, and a real ending.
Lord of the Rings. First movie was pretty good -- not much closure, but it was still pretty good. Second movie was lots of fighting, actually somewhat of a grind, but still some good elements. And the third movie made it all worthwhile.
The Matrix: Reloaded. Ends with the main character passed out, possibly dead, and a couple of other things. I'm not saying Revolutions answered everything I wanted it to, but again, it did provide closure.
I don't like episodes that run on forever, certainly not if I have to pay for them. But episodic doesn't mean never-ending. Consider: The first 50 episodes or so of Naruto were actually pretty decent, and closed some very good storylines. But, now they're up to some 220 episodes, and it's definitely getting old. Last I checked, they still really hadn't done much about Sasuke or Orochimaru.
And, compare that to, say, Fullmetal Alchemist. Ended after 50 episodes. Or Trigun, or Cowboy Bebop, or Outlaw Star, or Noir -- many good animes end after a season of 25 episodes or so.
By that token, I'm really appreciating the Half-Life 2 episodes, because I know there will be exactly three of them. It helps to know that there's an ending coming, but that we don't have to buy anymore episodes if the first one sucked. It also helps to be able to provide feedback -- and that, combined with the nature of game development, means subsequent episodes can keep getting better. Or Halo 2 -- we know Halo 3 will finish it.
If you don't like it, wait till the conclusion is made, then buy the whole thing -- earlier episodes (or games) will be cheaper by then.
DOS is a much more mature operating system than Vista, it is older than Vista, by about a decade. Yippee! Let's write all our next-gen games for DOS! Anyone got a DOS Blu-Ray player? Time to dig out the WordPerfect, it's the most mature word processor out there!
What you're forgetting: ancient != mature.
Linux is mature. Not as old as Solaris, but mature enough -- and when it was made, they knew of at least a few other attempts (probably including Solaris) -- so you could even see it as a rewrite of Solaris, if you like.
Doesn't apply to Windows. Linux is already massively better than Windows, in places where it counts to developers. Also, we can't hack on the Windows kernel (or the OSX kernel, anymore), so the choice is really between Linux, the various BSDs, Plan9, HURD, and Solaris.
I can't find the exact reference, but they only consider your ability to reproduce after the fact, not whether you actually have before the fact -- because that is hard to track reliably even if everyone's being honest, and you're ignoring stuff like bastard children who think their mother's husband is their father....
And neither do most others.
Does GPLv3 prevent you (the voter) from verifying a checksum? Absolutely not.
All it does is force the machine to run the software flawlessly.
Thus, it should be entirely possible for you, or for election officials, to verify that the signatures match. Doesn't mean the machines wouldn't run, it just means you'd know instantly that they were running a modified version, and you could request that they flash it to the correct version.
It's even possible that someone smarter than me will come up with an even better solution, involving some sort of manual challenge/response where you enter numbers and read other numbers off the screen and conclude that the checksum is valid.
By the way, I don't want it to be absolutely secure. I'd be satisfied if it was at least as secure as fucking slot machines are required to be.
Could happen, if Solaris was already massively better than Linux. I don't think that will happen.
/proc was ripped off wholesale from Plan 9. If ZFS is ultimately such a great idea, most of its advantages will be absorbed into Linux, so eventually you'll have OpenSolaris, which implements ZFS perfectly and may have slightly better-looking code, and Linux, which does almost everything you need from ZFS, but also has binary blobs from nVidia and ATI, can run in usermode, has suspend to disk, runs on an iPod, and does many other things that Solaris will still be catching up with.
The simple reason is: Worse is better.
Why do you think absolutely everyone on Linux was using Mozilla? It was the main Gecko program, and your other options kind of sucked. Mozilla got the job done, and everyone was developing for it -- you were guaranteed to have new and interesting stuff (Flash, Java, RSS, tabbed browsing, etc) on Mozilla, either before it was anywhere else, or within a month of it being implemented elsewhere.
Of course, some things never made it into Mozilla -- for instance, Amaya is both a web browser and a WYSIWYG editor, and you can jump into any webpage and edit, and save the new version somewhere -- there may even be a mechanism for re-uploading it. But there must not be that much demand for such features -- after all, most of us either use Notepad (or vim), or we use some nicely-done AJAX WYSIWYG.
You could point to Firefox, but remember: Firefox was originally named "Pheonix", because it rose from the ashes of Mozilla. Had Firefox been written from scratch, it would never have gotten where it is today -- old Mozilla bugs and all.
That is what will happen with Linux and OpenSolaris.
Linux is already much, much more popular than BSD or OpenSolaris -- or, for that matter, Plan 9. So, we take the best ideas from other OSes, so long as we can reasonably implement them, and we also toy with new things of our own. If I remember right,
The only way this picture changes is if Solaris is so ridiculously better than Linux that the few people hacking on it now are enough for it to surpass Linux -- keep in mind, there will be plenty more people hacking on Linux at the same time. This has happened in the past, on a smaller scale, but I just don't think Solaris is better enough -- remember, evangelizing won't work. You won't get me to hack on Solaris till it runs on my Powerbook, at least -- and you need people like me to make it run on that Powerbook. You need it to already be almost as good as Linux, if not significantly better -- and not just in a few areas I don't care about -- in order to get me to hack on it.
If you really want to replace Linux, come up with something that's both better enough that it takes half the time to write it in FooOS than in Linux, and can run a Linux kernel alongside it (do something tricky with UML, or something like what Apple did with Mach/Darwin), so that I can load up my nVidia driver and play Quake 4, and still hack around with something cool like, say, a new cluster filesystem. You have to do it right, though -- I should be able to load my Linux kernel, nVidia driver, and Quake4 binary (and maps) from my own FooOS cluster filesystem.
If you can do that, and provide compelling enough development tools to sway the Linux kernel devs, then we might actually lose the Linux kernel -- slowly -- and replace it with something better. Unless you can do that, Linux will remain the best we've got, now and forever.
I won't be quite as extreme, as there are a few places I believe the baggage of this kind of a scheme is necessary. For instance, we don't have a common game engine, therefore each game must ship with software, so any commercial game is automatically somewhat locked down and proprietary, and you can't do everything you want to with it.
Further, I'm perfectly alright with buying things with completely, pathetically defeated DRM. DVDs encrypted with CSS are fine -- I just rend them and rip them, or buy them and rip them.
However, I'm avoiding Windows Vista as long as I can, depending on how much usefulness I can get out of Linux. I'm also not going to buy or rent a single Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movie, so long as it's impossible for me to pop it into a Linux box and play it with mplayer. If I buy music, it'll be in the form of CDs or FLAC files.
Basically, what I'm hoping for is to create an example that others can follow, without boycotting being a monumental PITA. Then, when they come around with surveys, asking why we don't all have Blu-Ray, we can tell them we don't like them bricking our players because we might be able to use them to pirate.
Yes, they were told beforehand that they were shocking a computer program. Even so, they felt increased stress levels.
Now, is it still unethical?
Aside from the exception you've just layed down, when, exactly, does a modern OS move files you've placed so carefully?
And so does OS X, and so does Windows, and last I checked, GNOME and KDE both did that. Wasn't always cmd-o, but it was the same principle.
What they lack are the suggestions when something can't be completed. They just automatically select the first possible completion, it's not easy to move between multiple possible completions. And I also have bash-completion, which knows the arguments to a lot of commands -- it's not always filenames, and even when it is always filenames, it's a nice, consistent interface for doing more than just opening said file with the first thing the OS thought of.
Tab-completion kind of destroys that. First off, remember in Star Trek, they didn't always have a display, just voice responses coming back. So your way is more like:
You: Engineering
Computer: Possible choices in Engineering are Personnel, Controls, Systems, Pr...
You: Systems.
Computer: Possible choices in Systems are...
Now, you're correct, give it a visual display and we're talking. But still, I'd argue a touchscreen is faster. In any case, tab-completion wins -- I may not be able to type "engineering" faster than you can say it, but I can type "en<tab>" faster than you can say "engineering", and I don't have to memorize the whole line:
Me: en<tab>/sys<tab>/en<tab>/
hmm, what goes here? I forget... something to do with plasma:
plas<tab><tab>
(computer shows me possible completions: plasma conduits, plasma coolant, etc, and fils in "plasma c"
ond<tab>/sec<tab>XYZ/St<tab><enter>
People think I type probably 20x faster than I do, for that reason alone.
Google Spreadsheets is just a spreadsheet. Gmail is just email. Do one job and do it well.
Last time I looked at a "WebOS", I saw something horrible. Someone was collecting a bunch of worthless AJAX apps and wrapping them in an AJAX windowing system.
You know what? If I want to use Google Maps and Yahoo Mail, that's my choice. No way I'm getting all of my apps from one place, just so someone can implement a windowing system in the browser (which sucks donkey balls), instead of using the existing windowing system provided by my real OS! If I want to look at gmail and spreadsheets side-by-side, I'll open two browser windows!
I don't get it. They're basically offering huge steaming gobs of bandwidth so that lazy people don't have to deal with routing and VPN issues. What's the catch?
And if they tell it long enough, it becomes the truth.
Penguins is SERIOUS! And you can buy a shirt, too!
I'm not associated with this comic at all, I just think it's hilarious.
...The trouble is, they should've done this ten years ago. At least the HTML mail... It's a bit scary that the DoD is taking so long to get reasonably secure. Department of Defense, people!
Well, of what you listed... What some other poster said. MGS is pretty much confirmed cross-platform, Devil May Cry seems likely, and Final Fantasy... Well, their lead developer was hired by Microsoft awhile ago.
Personally, I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude. Maybe eventually there will be enough good games for the PS3, and the prices will have gone down far enough, to counter my moral disgust at supporting a company that somehow manages to be more evil than Microsoft.
I was considering firing up my 32-bit browser or my Mac to check out the Flash, but then they had to hit me with a DHTML... I mean, an AJAX popup.
Well, fuck them. It wasn't very interesting anyway.
Perhaps. I can setup an IMAP server in about five minutes, probably less. The rest depends on how easy it is to setup an account in Evolution, but in Thunderbird, it takes another 2 minutes, maybe, then just drag all my mail over to the IMAP server.
Set up a rule to automatically bounce the message with a friendly reminder that you need to know which site is theirs, so you can sort their mail accordingly.
As for calendar, I guess if graphics float your boat... I mean, they're already sorted by date by default.
I do this already, using IMAP and inotify on a Linux server. See this post that I made earlier.
This can be done with LDAP. To be fair, I've never gotten it to work properly, but I know it can be done.
Hell, block the PDFs. Maybe allow HTML mail...
While other posts would seem to support this, I don't see it in practice. My IMAP server is always pretty responsive, and Thunderbird seems to keep multiple connections open to make sure it stays that way.
It's certainly better than any other way I've tried -- like, say, Gmail.
Do you understand how IMAP searching works?
As far as I can tell, IMAP has a SEARCH command that is run on the server. So this isn't a bad email client, just that there aren't any decent servers (that do indexing and such).
The only reason you need a local cache is to make it run faster -- which is kind of in line with what I said about IMAP seeming pretty fast to me. Most of the time, caching the headers is enough anyway.
Frankly, my only complaint about Thunderbird and email in general is that I miss Jabber -- I already have my spamfiltering and sorting happen instantly when mail arrives, and I'd like to be told instantly that there's something there -- not on some 5 minute poll. I'm guessing that if someone really wanted to put in the effort, they could create something -- probably starting with Jabber -- that would replace both email and IM.
Could you elaborate?
IMAP does all of the searching on the server, which means if the server indexes stuff, searches should be instantaneous.
And what's wrong with the other ones?I'm with you on message notification, but it's not a huge issue for me -- I just check it frequently on my (Linux) desktop, and watch the Dock icon on my Powerbook. But if you know of a better Linux email client I could be using, I'm listening -- my solution works with ANY IMAP client. Read on...
I use bogofilter, but it's the same thing: spam, unsure, and everywhere else.
Advantages:
- Filters on the server, as messages come in.
- All the features you're talking about, from any IMAP client.
Disadvantages:
- Linux only (uses inotify to detect messages dropped to the "spam" folder)
- Any other filters (LKML goes here, girlfriend's stuff goes here) must be implemented on the server, currently Maildrop only.
- Filters on the server. If you have limited server resources, this may be a problem.
- Could conceivably lose mail during a retrain, due to the (admittedly stupid) way in which I handle retrains.
- While it works on any client, no client that I know of has decent keyboard shortcuts to help me out.
Basically, when a message comes in, it goes through bogofilter first, then maildrop. Maildrop looks for a bogofilter header, and drops it in the "spam" or "unsure" folder when it finds it. Otherwise, it goes to the rest of my maildrop rules, which mostly sort things into folders by mailing list.
There are also retrain folders: Retrain as spam/innocent. When a message is dragged to retrain/spam, it's retrained as spam and dumped in the spam folder. When it's dragged to retrain/innocent, it's retrained as innocent, with an extra header added (I think it's a bogofilter commandline option) to specify that it was reclassified (as it still might have a score of spam), and then is sent through the maildrop filters again. The maildrop filters look for that retrain flag, so it's guaranteed not to end up in spam this time, and gets sorted according to mailing list rules, etc.
This is where inotify comes in -- which means it MUST be a Linux server for this to work. As soon as the message appears in that folder, maildir structure guarantees it's just been rename'd in, so it's complete and safe to touch. Therefore, I can immediately retrain stuff, meaning the wait is less than a second, but I don't have to poll.
Boring implementation details follow:
The one major design bug is that I don't really know how to deal with maildir folders, so when I see a message appear in one of the retrain folders, I immediately open it, then unlink the file, to prevent Thunderbird or my own script from touching it until I finish piping it through the retrain process. I probably should be putting it in some temporary place, and indeed, maildir folders do have a "tmp" dir, but I simply don't know how to use it properly -- and I would have to rename it where I'm unlinking now. Basically, if the rename/unlink succeeds, it means I've beat the client to it. But if it fails, it means the client has done that stupid thing it does where the message is "delivered" to the folder as new, then the client marks it as read, which moves it from the "new" to the "cur" dir within that maildir.
I suppose I could build this into the IMAP server, but I like how this solution has already been ported from Exim/Courier-IMAP to Postfix/BincIMAP. I could write it as an IMAP proxy, but that's both more complicated and potentially slows down operation other than retrains -- an IMAP proxy would have to intercept and parse every line, whereas I only get to notice when an actual file is created in the retrain dir, and until that happens, my script does absolutely nothing.
Doesn't Evolution support IMAP? And if so, can't you easily switch over by setting up an IMAP server somewhere?
If there's anything wrong with JavaScript, it's the speed of execution. As far as I know, we still don't have a decent bytecode engine for it, making it at least as slow as Ruby.
Combined with HTML/CSS, it's worse. But actually, XHTML/CSS is the best we've got. Don't get me wrong, I wish we had something better...
And we do have something for rounded corners, drop shadows, and the like. It's called SVG. But I'm not convinced SVG is really any better than XHTML/CSS with transparent PNGs. (Yes, I know what vector graphics is, I'm talking about confusing standards/implementations.)