Funny thing is, I doubt you've ever used an 8 bit general purpose PC. The x86 architecture was never 8 bit, it always had a 16 bit data bus. The 8088 only made 8 data lines externally available and thus needed multiplexing but it too was 16 bit, the 8086 just gave you all the lines externally rather than multiplexed.
8 bit consoles aren't really 8 bit, just 256 color. The Atari 2600 could access far more than 256 bytes of memory directly, so it wasn't really 8 bit either.
Basically, you don't remember it cause it didn't happen in the public's eye.
Of course, I understand what 64 bit means, and if my browser is hitting the 32 bit memory limit, I'm dumping the fucking browser anyway.
I've been developing for years, have apps for windows that are 32 and 64 bit, and several fat OSX binaries that support 32 and 64bit, if the 64 bit version runs differently than the 32 bit version, you did it wrong.
I have nothing against making it a 64 bit binary in general, but there really is absolutely no advantage to doing so. If your browser is eating more than 3 gigs of memory, your browser is broken, you should fix that problem first, not make it so it can eat more memory.
They didn't have anything to hide and nothing happened to them, if you're trying to make a point make it, but getting someone checking out out because you have high end optics on a tripod on the top of a mountain... IN A FUCKING WARZONE is not exactly an odd thing to ask.
Now *that's* rock-hard dedication to getting some astronomical observations.
actually its just far more likely that the media has convinced you that its a lot scarier than it is, the fact that people are bothering to do it shows its reasonably safe in some areas. If life was bad, they wouldn't be have time to dick around look at the stars. They'd be more concerened with eating and surviving.
If by a lot you mean a very small portion of the population with tin foil hates on who overreact to things they don't understand, then sure, you're dead on.
Considering just accepting a message via SMTP requires 'scanning' (by the definition being used for this discussion), its a safe bet you're rambling on about shit which you totally don't understand. Yahoo (and every other SMTP server) scans every message it accepts over the network.
Well, technical, what they are calling 'scanning' happens in every email message sent via SMTP, the server 'scans' every message that comes in off the network so it can find the bits of the message that tell it what to do.
The irony of it is, the same people bitching are the same morons who use those little store specific 'loyalty' cards... whose sole purpose is to collect the same sort of information about a person.
You are the product, not the consumer. It is not even a little bit free, you are working for them in exchange for some crappy webmail.
Lets just ignore the fact that from a technical perspective, every mail server 'scans' the message looking for various identifiers it uses to process the message.
Anyone who is 'freaked out' by what Yahoo is doing is an idiot who is completely unaware of the fact that the entire Internet would fall apart if everyone stopped 'scanning' other peoples data.
Can't route packets without scanning them.
Can't route emails without scanning them.
Can't even make the SMTP protocol work without scanning messages.
The post office 'scans' your mail too, both manually and electronically. The difference is, you put your letter in an envelope, hide from plain view of the poor sorters and processors who have to process it. The standard way unencrypted messages flow across the Internet is about like if people wrote all their letters on the back of a post card for everyone, including the postman, to see.
If you want privacy, don't put your message out there for anyone to see.
Don't bitch because your front yard isn't private when you don't put up a privacy fence, moron.
Probably your SSD is one of the original/cheap ones that is really bad and locks up the system bus for a half second doing writes.
Which would still put it light years ahead of traditional hard drives in every measurable way.
A slow, needs TRIM'd EVERYWHERE SSD will still run circles around a great spinning platter disk any day, a SSD that needs TRIM'd is just not as fast as one that has been TRIM'd, but it is by no means anywhere near as slow as a traditional drive.
You'll be using simply "Firefox". Version numbers are for internal project tracking only.
Then why display them at all? Why do we know there is a Firefox 8?
If it was done for the MARKETERS, wouldn't you expect Firefox versions to advertise their version number?
So you're saying that it isn't used for marketing purposes... like the model year on a car isn't either I presume. If it wasn't used for marketing purposes why change it? Why not stick with what everyone else is used to and what ever other commercial software package uses already?
If it was JUST an internal reference point we wouldn't be having this discussion, but what happened is marketing learned of version numbers a few years back and decided to twist that for themselves/against others and piss off everything that uses that internal reference number for something meaningful... to which the mozilla team has removed any useful meaning.
When I do development, you get major.minor.patch.build as the version, build is just the revision id from the source control system... basically the same number used by Mozilla now. They started using the build number as a major version number basically.
If the version number wasn't being used for marketing, we wouldn't say 'Firefox 8 is faster than Firefox 5.
It is now. It wasn't once before. At one point, version numbers had meaning, that is until marketing and people such as yourself decided it really didn't matter.
I've worked doing both support and development and for me, a version number is not 'just a number'. It tells me something about what I can expect.
The number should be as follows: major.minor.patch.build
A major version bump means there WILL be compatibility issues. API changes require a major bump. Massive UI/Feature changes warrent a major bump a lot of the time.
A minor version number means it probably won't break anything unless you have some dependency on a specific bug that has been fixed, which should be unlikely if you followed documented APIs and such. May introduce minor new features, should mostly be features that you missed on the release or where incomplete due to deadlines. Occasionally the 'heh, I forgot that obvious small feature that makes a world of difference' goes here, but for the most part this should be reserved for fixes that may accidently break compatibility.
A patch version number change means you shouldn't notice any difference other than a security/bug fix. The build number is a unique identifier for the developer to reference internally as an exact point in time snapshot of the package. Thats the number that allows the dev to reproduce the exact same build.
With the exception of a major number change, all other changes shouldn't result in massive breakages, for instance a major version change is the only thing that should break Firefox plugins en masse, and it should be avoided if there is any possible way to do so.
I want to know what to expect from an upgrade, traditional version numbers help me at a glance determine my risk.
Firefox (and Chrome) is taking an approach that I could only describe as amateur and completely lacking of any experience of having to support someone elses software product. It indicates you (Mozilla) don't give a flying fuck about what happens to the people who use the browser or what their experience is like, just that they get their way.
And for the record, going from 4.05 to 4.08 generally would result in my response being something like:
Great, another Firefox release, wonder how much this one breaks?
The only people who randomly see a new version of software and get excited for no reason aren't relevant to this conversation. Normal people (the majority of us) have better things to do than worry about the latest release of Firefox. Anyone who does get excited needs to seek counseling.
Bruce... you of all people should know better than to spread this sort of FUD.
You and I both know that you can't put OSS back in the box after its out there.
The worse that can happen is that you contribute a bit of code to an OSS project which then goes closed source so you don't get newer versions, nothing at all stops you from getting the version you contributed to, unless someone magically deletes every copy in existence.
It doesn't matter than Samba 3 or 4 are now close sourced, I still have the source to the version I can contributed too and several revisions after that.
They can't 'take your work private', all they can do is stop making their own contributions public and available to you, which is entirely different than 'taking it private'.
You've been hanging around RMS too long, you're losing your ability to make rational statements.
When they 'take it private'... what exactly do you lose? Nothing that you already have, only what you might possibly get in the future. 'take it private' is exactly the same as 'dropped off the face of the earth/went out of business/abandon the project' for all intents and purposes OTHER than a silly FUD campaign based on falsehoods.
Your patch... which changed a pre-increment to a post-increment... doesn't entitle you to endless updates from the people working on the project till the end of time. I realize that your contributions are more often than not far larger than moving a couple pluses around, but the point remains the same, don't you think?
I suppose there may be some weird license/agreement out there that someone considers to be OSS that retroactively revokes your right to use old versions or something but those don't fit into any definition of OSS that anyone here would use, certainly none of the OSI 'approved' licenses.
If you have talent, the Internet has made the RIAA and MPIAA companies irrelevent.
With a little effort, and if you're not good at it, that effort may mean finding a friend to be your promoter, you can make your own way by starting to peddle your warez on the Internet.
Now the problem with it is, you have to actually have talent. When you go for the *IAAs, they can/will use technology to make you not suck if you have a pretty face, you'll have to do it on your own with out them.
Its not hard for an artist to get a bigger cut, it just takes more work. Unfortunatly, most 'artists' would rather whine about their suffering than put the effort into going it alone. And for most of them its much smarter to do so as most don't have actual talent once you take makeup and autotune out of the picture.
It's not suspicious at all that most of the ISPs signing on for this are owned by or own media companies.
Why would it be? You would have to be absolutely retarded to think they wouldn't look out for their own best interests. Do you think it would be a good idea for your mother to say 'I'm protecting the privacy of your father by not telling the cops' while he rapes you repeatedly?
Why the fuck would they not want to cooperate with their own internal groups? Do you not treat your family differently than some random stranger?
Really? I can buy debian programs via apt-get? What? No?
There have been software repositories for Windows and Mac for OSS/free software for years, so they weren't included by default, you'd probably be screaming anti-trust if they were.
If you want to get technical, OSX and Windows (since 95 at least) both include web browsers which have access to every publicly available app in existence via a quick google search, which is arguably easier than apt-get .... fuck, what am I looking for a gain? oh yea, a email client... okay... apt-get email-client
How well did that work for you? Oh, thats not what you'd do? You know all the command line search options? Oh... well grandma doesn't and doesn't give a shit about learning it either, even she has more to live for than you apparently.
While the new 'appstores' are similar to OSS repositories, they are only slightly less similar to calling a web browser and google as software repository. If you were to do so... well, apt-get has less features.
But... having that argument shows the point has been missed.
Its not that there is a problem with having different feature lists and focusing on the parts that are important to you...
The problem is that the focus in the Linux world is on retarded shit no one, not even the Linux community ACTUALLY GIVES A SHIT about.
Its easy to find a Windows or an OSX app, they are popular, easy to search for, not really a massive NEED for the app store unless you want some sort of regulation, which I'm sure you'd refer to as censorship. For Linux however, the more of a newbie you are, the harder it is, unless you have repositories. Do you remember what it was like running Linux without package managers? I do.
You're worried about getting deltas for updates... NO ONE FUCKING CARES YOU DORK. Thats not a feature anyone gives a shit about save a few fanatical dorks like yourself. You missed the GPs point entirely. Its not 'the OSS guys argue over whats right and wrong' its that 'the OSS guys are arguing about shit we don't give a flying fuck about, while the commercial guys made some pretty GUIs... and things I can plugin and just work in my car, and on my PC at work, and blah blah blah', the list is endless.
Someone says 'Linux is clunky' and you respond 'you don't know how to use it'. Someone says 'OSX makes it hard to do this', Apple says 'hmmm, well, what you really want to do is this, and here, we'll make that easier for you!' and you say 'we've had that in Linux for years!'... except you really had some other half assed implementation of something that sorta worked like it (example: sudo versus UAC)...
and Linux fanatics who sit around and argue over stupid shit... like why apt doesn't do deltas, or why KDE bends over to Gnome or vice versa finally ending up with someone making the statement 'If they do XXX with Ubuntu, it'll be the year of the Linux desktop'.
Rather than making a snide 'YOU DO IT TOO!' comment maybe you should take moment to analyze the situation and contemplate exactly why the statement was made and if there is something meaningful you can gather from it rather than just being an arrogant prick and writing it off as someone insulting your child.
See heres the thing, when your Internet connection goes down or your providers webmail servers are down...
I can still read, send and reply to messages.
I can read anything my client already has cached, because I don't need to get data from the server.
I can send and reply and my client will be happy to queue the message and send it the instant the server becomes available without me doing anything.
My email client knows about incoming messages the instant they hit my inbox, thanks to IMAP NOTIFY, so it tells me when I have mail, I don't have to check it.
I can always access my IMAP mailbox via any one of a dozen web mail clients that allow you to connect to any server and access all my mail.
I'm not continually wasting bandwidth just viewing messages.
I have a choice of email clients I can use, each with many unique features and many that allow me to extend them in trivial ways all the way to complete overhaul should I want.
I have every single feature you have and many many more.
Because to coordinate meetings via iCal (or exchange), everyone has to be on the same iCal (or exchange) server/cluster. Your iCal server won't connect to my iCal server to tell it about the meetings you want to coordinate. gmail/google apps for your domain allow you to cross boundaries slightly, but only because you're really still on the same 'server'. Your gmail ical server still won't talk to mine.
Or...
You can email specially formatted messages to each other with the meeting information.
And thats why you want email integration. So you can just auto-email the information, and other clients see the message, parse it, handle the request as if it was done via iCal.
Thunderbird and its relation can't just pop off to the built in OS sendmail method because one of the OSes they favor doesn't have a built in standard API for sending and checking mail that is easily configurable by a desktop user.
Lightning on a Mac or Windows could certainly just use the built in stuff to access mailboxes... well, assuming that the user is also using an app that properly uses the OS native interfaces (Apple Mail and Outlook or any other MAPI based client on Windows). Sure, gnome may have integration methods as does KDE... but why reinvent the wheel, you need a gecko engine for lightning anyway, might as well just piggy back it on an email client you can target that works across all your supported OSes and provides you a consistent interface to access messages... and interface which SOMEONE ELSE maintains the OS native integration with.
How many times do you want to have to tell software your email account info?
Consider SMTP a backup transport for iCal data when not using a shared server, thats why it requires email integration (or at least, thats why it has it).
And thats probably what everyone thinks when they heard the statement 'removing evolution from the system'.
I'm pretty sure no one actually thought it was going to forcibly uninstall it on upgrade. I can't imagine why you would assume that unless at some point in the past an Ubuntu upgrade forced an uninstall of some app? I can't say I've heard of that happening though, have you?
Yea, I fucking hate it when someone bothers to take the time to make my applications start working together rather than all of them fumbling around like the only application in existence and trying to do EVERYTHING you could possibly want themselves.
The unix philosophy of chaining smaller apps together to get a lot more flexibility while still working in confined amounts of memory while still allowing work on large things is a great way to go.
However, realize it or not, the reason all those nice chained command lines work so well together is because people have thought about how they integrate with each other. If you think cut, grep, find, cat, touch, and most of the rest of/usr/bin aren't integrated with each other, you're just blind. Some of them, like xargs even exist almost soley as an integrator.
Don't be afraid of integration, just avoid shitty integration. Windows is an example of app integration that sucks. OS X is an example of it done reasonably well (At least for native apps on both accounts).
God, how much of a pussy do you have to be that you're afraid to stand up to a boss?
Whats he going to do? FIRE YOU? Do you know anyone who has been turned down for a job because 'oh yea, and I stood up to bill gates and he fired me'? No, no one anywhere would give a shit.
This is America. You can find a job. No boss can 'destroy' you, only your fear will destroy you. Your boss is just a man, same as you (or female, but you get the point). If you're afraid of Bill Gates, you have bigger issues than anything he can do to your career.
MS didn't 'PAY' anyone anything... unless by pay... you mean gave them a discount...
MS discounted the school $250k off the price they quoted them to perform the data conversion and import.
The school will still be paying MS very large sums of money and at no point will any of it be pointed in the direction of the school.
Learn the difference between a discount and pay off. The discount happens in pretty much every business.
Basically, Microsoft waived the 'new cell phone activation fee for signing a 2 year contract'. So does that mean Cingular has been paying me $36 every time I give them $200-600 for a new phone?
Slashdot Mirror
Funny thing is, I doubt you've ever used an 8 bit general purpose PC. The x86 architecture was never 8 bit, it always had a 16 bit data bus. The 8088 only made 8 data lines externally available and thus needed multiplexing but it too was 16 bit, the 8086 just gave you all the lines externally rather than multiplexed.
8 bit consoles aren't really 8 bit, just 256 color. The Atari 2600 could access far more than 256 bytes of memory directly, so it wasn't really 8 bit either.
Basically, you don't remember it cause it didn't happen in the public's eye.
Of course, I understand what 64 bit means, and if my browser is hitting the 32 bit memory limit, I'm dumping the fucking browser anyway.
I've been developing for years, have apps for windows that are 32 and 64 bit, and several fat OSX binaries that support 32 and 64bit, if the 64 bit version runs differently than the 32 bit version, you did it wrong.
I have nothing against making it a 64 bit binary in general, but there really is absolutely no advantage to doing so. If your browser is eating more than 3 gigs of memory, your browser is broken, you should fix that problem first, not make it so it can eat more memory.
They didn't have anything to hide and nothing happened to them, if you're trying to make a point make it, but getting someone checking out out because you have high end optics on a tripod on the top of a mountain ... IN A FUCKING WARZONE is not exactly an odd thing to ask.
Now *that's* rock-hard dedication to getting some astronomical observations.
actually its just far more likely that the media has convinced you that its a lot scarier than it is, the fact that people are bothering to do it shows its reasonably safe in some areas. If life was bad, they wouldn't be have time to dick around look at the stars. They'd be more concerened with eating and surviving.
If by a lot you mean a very small portion of the population with tin foil hates on who overreact to things they don't understand, then sure, you're dead on.
Considering just accepting a message via SMTP requires 'scanning' (by the definition being used for this discussion), its a safe bet you're rambling on about shit which you totally don't understand. Yahoo (and every other SMTP server) scans every message it accepts over the network.
Well, technical, what they are calling 'scanning' happens in every email message sent via SMTP, the server 'scans' every message that comes in off the network so it can find the bits of the message that tell it what to do.
The irony of it is, the same people bitching are the same morons who use those little store specific 'loyalty' cards ... whose sole purpose is to collect the same sort of information about a person.
STOP USING FREE EMAIL PROVIDERS.
You are the product, not the consumer. It is not even a little bit free, you are working for them in exchange for some crappy webmail.
Lets just ignore the fact that from a technical perspective, every mail server 'scans' the message looking for various identifiers it uses to process the message.
Anyone who is 'freaked out' by what Yahoo is doing is an idiot who is completely unaware of the fact that the entire Internet would fall apart if everyone stopped 'scanning' other peoples data.
Can't route packets without scanning them.
Can't route emails without scanning them.
Can't even make the SMTP protocol work without scanning messages.
The post office 'scans' your mail too, both manually and electronically. The difference is, you put your letter in an envelope, hide from plain view of the poor sorters and processors who have to process it. The standard way unencrypted messages flow across the Internet is about like if people wrote all their letters on the back of a post card for everyone, including the postman, to see.
If you want privacy, don't put your message out there for anyone to see.
Don't bitch because your front yard isn't private when you don't put up a privacy fence, moron.
One reason would be to write an app that ignored/deleted known SMS spammers?
I'd actually love one for my phone that would delete all the obnoxious AT&T spam text messages about new services and crap.
Probably your SSD is one of the original/cheap ones that is really bad and locks up the system bus for a half second doing writes.
Which would still put it light years ahead of traditional hard drives in every measurable way.
A slow, needs TRIM'd EVERYWHERE SSD will still run circles around a great spinning platter disk any day, a SSD that needs TRIM'd is just not as fast as one that has been TRIM'd, but it is by no means anywhere near as slow as a traditional drive.
You'll be using simply "Firefox". Version numbers are for internal project tracking only.
Then why display them at all? Why do we know there is a Firefox 8?
If it was done for the MARKETERS, wouldn't you expect Firefox versions to advertise their version number?
So you're saying that it isn't used for marketing purposes ... like the model year on a car isn't either I presume. If it wasn't used for marketing purposes why change it? Why not stick with what everyone else is used to and what ever other commercial software package uses already?
If it was JUST an internal reference point we wouldn't be having this discussion, but what happened is marketing learned of version numbers a few years back and decided to twist that for themselves/against others and piss off everything that uses that internal reference number for something meaningful ... to which the mozilla team has removed any useful meaning.
When I do development, you get major.minor.patch.build as the version, build is just the revision id from the source control system ... basically the same number used by Mozilla now. They started using the build number as a major version number basically.
If the version number wasn't being used for marketing, we wouldn't say 'Firefox 8 is faster than Firefox 5 .
It is now. It wasn't once before. At one point, version numbers had meaning, that is until marketing and people such as yourself decided it really didn't matter.
I've worked doing both support and development and for me, a version number is not 'just a number'. It tells me something about what I can expect.
The number should be as follows: major.minor.patch.build
A major version bump means there WILL be compatibility issues. API changes require a major bump. Massive UI/Feature changes warrent a major bump a lot of the time.
A minor version number means it probably won't break anything unless you have some dependency on a specific bug that has been fixed, which should be unlikely if you followed documented APIs and such. May introduce minor new features, should mostly be features that you missed on the release or where incomplete due to deadlines. Occasionally the 'heh, I forgot that obvious small feature that makes a world of difference' goes here, but for the most part this should be reserved for fixes that may accidently break compatibility.
A patch version number change means you shouldn't notice any difference other than a security/bug fix.
The build number is a unique identifier for the developer to reference internally as an exact point in time snapshot of the package. Thats the number that allows the dev to reproduce the exact same build.
With the exception of a major number change, all other changes shouldn't result in massive breakages, for instance a major version change is the only thing that should break Firefox plugins en masse, and it should be avoided if there is any possible way to do so.
I want to know what to expect from an upgrade, traditional version numbers help me at a glance determine my risk.
Firefox (and Chrome) is taking an approach that I could only describe as amateur and completely lacking of any experience of having to support someone elses software product. It indicates you (Mozilla) don't give a flying fuck about what happens to the people who use the browser or what their experience is like, just that they get their way.
And for the record, going from 4.05 to 4.08 generally would result in my response being something like:
Great, another Firefox release, wonder how much this one breaks?
The only people who randomly see a new version of software and get excited for no reason aren't relevant to this conversation. Normal people (the majority of us) have better things to do than worry about the latest release of Firefox. Anyone who does get excited needs to seek counseling.
Bruce ... you of all people should know better than to spread this sort of FUD.
You and I both know that you can't put OSS back in the box after its out there.
The worse that can happen is that you contribute a bit of code to an OSS project which then goes closed source so you don't get newer versions, nothing at all stops you from getting the version you contributed to, unless someone magically deletes every copy in existence.
It doesn't matter than Samba 3 or 4 are now close sourced, I still have the source to the version I can contributed too and several revisions after that.
They can't 'take your work private', all they can do is stop making their own contributions public and available to you, which is entirely different than 'taking it private'.
You've been hanging around RMS too long, you're losing your ability to make rational statements.
When they 'take it private' ... what exactly do you lose? Nothing that you already have, only what you might possibly get in the future. 'take it private' is exactly the same as 'dropped off the face of the earth/went out of business/abandon the project' for all intents and purposes OTHER than a silly FUD campaign based on falsehoods.
Your patch ... which changed a pre-increment to a post-increment ... doesn't entitle you to endless updates from the people working on the project till the end of time. I realize that your contributions are more often than not far larger than moving a couple pluses around, but the point remains the same, don't you think?
I suppose there may be some weird license/agreement out there that someone considers to be OSS that retroactively revokes your right to use old versions or something but those don't fit into any definition of OSS that anyone here would use, certainly none of the OSI 'approved' licenses.
If you have talent, the Internet has made the RIAA and MPIAA companies irrelevent.
With a little effort, and if you're not good at it, that effort may mean finding a friend to be your promoter, you can make your own way by starting to peddle your warez on the Internet.
Now the problem with it is, you have to actually have talent. When you go for the *IAAs, they can/will use technology to make you not suck if you have a pretty face, you'll have to do it on your own with out them.
Its not hard for an artist to get a bigger cut, it just takes more work. Unfortunatly, most 'artists' would rather whine about their suffering than put the effort into going it alone. And for most of them its much smarter to do so as most don't have actual talent once you take makeup and autotune out of the picture.
I guess the first problem with your statement is that I don't think you actually know how the Senate itself works.
It's not suspicious at all that most of the ISPs signing on for this are owned by or own media companies.
Why would it be? You would have to be absolutely retarded to think they wouldn't look out for their own best interests. Do you think it would be a good idea for your mother to say 'I'm protecting the privacy of your father by not telling the cops' while he rapes you repeatedly?
Why the fuck would they not want to cooperate with their own internal groups? Do you not treat your family differently than some random stranger?
Really? I can buy debian programs via apt-get? What? No?
There have been software repositories for Windows and Mac for OSS/free software for years, so they weren't included by default, you'd probably be screaming anti-trust if they were.
If you want to get technical, OSX and Windows (since 95 at least) both include web browsers which have access to every publicly available app in existence via a quick google search, which is arguably easier than apt-get . ... fuck, what am I looking for a gain? oh yea, a email client ... okay ... apt-get email-client
How well did that work for you? Oh, thats not what you'd do? You know all the command line search options? Oh ... well grandma doesn't and doesn't give a shit about learning it either, even she has more to live for than you apparently.
While the new 'appstores' are similar to OSS repositories, they are only slightly less similar to calling a web browser and google as software repository. If you were to do so ... well, apt-get has less features.
But ... having that argument shows the point has been missed.
Its not that there is a problem with having different feature lists and focusing on the parts that are important to you ...
The problem is that the focus in the Linux world is on retarded shit no one, not even the Linux community ACTUALLY GIVES A SHIT about.
Its easy to find a Windows or an OSX app, they are popular, easy to search for, not really a massive NEED for the app store unless you want some sort of regulation, which I'm sure you'd refer to as censorship. For Linux however, the more of a newbie you are, the harder it is, unless you have repositories. Do you remember what it was like running Linux without package managers? I do.
You're worried about getting deltas for updates ... NO ONE FUCKING CARES YOU DORK. Thats not a feature anyone gives a shit about save a few fanatical dorks like yourself. You missed the GPs point entirely. Its not 'the OSS guys argue over whats right and wrong' its that 'the OSS guys are arguing about shit we don't give a flying fuck about, while the commercial guys made some pretty GUIs ... and things I can plugin and just work in my car, and on my PC at work, and blah blah blah', the list is endless.
Someone says 'Linux is clunky' and you respond 'you don't know how to use it'. Someone says 'OSX makes it hard to do this', Apple says 'hmmm, well, what you really want to do is this, and here, we'll make that easier for you!' and you say 'we've had that in Linux for years!' ... except you really had some other half assed implementation of something that sorta worked like it (example: sudo versus UAC) ...
and Linux fanatics who sit around and argue over stupid shit ... like why apt doesn't do deltas, or why KDE bends over to Gnome or vice versa finally ending up with someone making the statement 'If they do XXX with Ubuntu, it'll be the year of the Linux desktop'.
Rather than making a snide 'YOU DO IT TOO!' comment maybe you should take moment to analyze the situation and contemplate exactly why the statement was made and if there is something meaningful you can gather from it rather than just being an arrogant prick and writing it off as someone insulting your child.
They have that option, I think its called *INSERT ANY OTHER DISTRO NAME HERE*
Then you drink too much ... or don't actually do anything in outlook.
See heres the thing, when your Internet connection goes down or your providers webmail servers are down ...
I can still read, send and reply to messages.
I can read anything my client already has cached, because I don't need to get data from the server.
I can send and reply and my client will be happy to queue the message and send it the instant the server becomes available without me doing anything.
My email client knows about incoming messages the instant they hit my inbox, thanks to IMAP NOTIFY, so it tells me when I have mail, I don't have to check it.
I can always access my IMAP mailbox via any one of a dozen web mail clients that allow you to connect to any server and access all my mail.
I'm not continually wasting bandwidth just viewing messages.
I have a choice of email clients I can use, each with many unique features and many that allow me to extend them in trivial ways all the way to complete overhaul should I want.
I have every single feature you have and many many more.
Because to coordinate meetings via iCal (or exchange), everyone has to be on the same iCal (or exchange) server/cluster. Your iCal server won't connect to my iCal server to tell it about the meetings you want to coordinate. gmail/google apps for your domain allow you to cross boundaries slightly, but only because you're really still on the same 'server'. Your gmail ical server still won't talk to mine.
Or ...
You can email specially formatted messages to each other with the meeting information.
And thats why you want email integration. So you can just auto-email the information, and other clients see the message, parse it, handle the request as if it was done via iCal.
Thunderbird and its relation can't just pop off to the built in OS sendmail method because one of the OSes they favor doesn't have a built in standard API for sending and checking mail that is easily configurable by a desktop user.
Lightning on a Mac or Windows could certainly just use the built in stuff to access mailboxes ... well, assuming that the user is also using an app that properly uses the OS native interfaces (Apple Mail and Outlook or any other MAPI based client on Windows). Sure, gnome may have integration methods as does KDE ... but why reinvent the wheel, you need a gecko engine for lightning anyway, might as well just piggy back it on an email client you can target that works across all your supported OSes and provides you a consistent interface to access messages ... and interface which SOMEONE ELSE maintains the OS native integration with.
How many times do you want to have to tell software your email account info?
Consider SMTP a backup transport for iCal data when not using a shared server, thats why it requires email integration (or at least, thats why it has it).
You do realize that Tags in the web interface are exposed as folders on the IMAP side ... and they can be nested just like folders ... right?
I've been using gmail for years, I have at least 3 levels deep of folders (Year -> Month -> General or TopicBasedFolder) under the inbox.
I can access them both in my desktop client (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and Outlook, depending on the OS at the moment).
And thats probably what everyone thinks when they heard the statement 'removing evolution from the system'.
I'm pretty sure no one actually thought it was going to forcibly uninstall it on upgrade. I can't imagine why you would assume that unless at some point in the past an Ubuntu upgrade forced an uninstall of some app? I can't say I've heard of that happening though, have you?
Yea, I fucking hate it when someone bothers to take the time to make my applications start working together rather than all of them fumbling around like the only application in existence and trying to do EVERYTHING you could possibly want themselves.
The unix philosophy of chaining smaller apps together to get a lot more flexibility while still working in confined amounts of memory while still allowing work on large things is a great way to go.
However, realize it or not, the reason all those nice chained command lines work so well together is because people have thought about how they integrate with each other. If you think cut, grep, find, cat, touch, and most of the rest of /usr/bin aren't integrated with each other, you're just blind. Some of them, like xargs even exist almost soley as an integrator.
Don't be afraid of integration, just avoid shitty integration. Windows is an example of app integration that sucks. OS X is an example of it done reasonably well (At least for native apps on both accounts).
If you stood up to Gates, you were destroyed.
God, how much of a pussy do you have to be that you're afraid to stand up to a boss?
Whats he going to do? FIRE YOU? Do you know anyone who has been turned down for a job because 'oh yea, and I stood up to bill gates and he fired me'? No, no one anywhere would give a shit.
This is America. You can find a job. No boss can 'destroy' you, only your fear will destroy you. Your boss is just a man, same as you (or female, but you get the point). If you're afraid of Bill Gates, you have bigger issues than anything he can do to your career.
And you should learn to read before you speak.
MS didn't 'PAY' anyone anything ... unless by pay ... you mean gave them a discount ...
MS discounted the school $250k off the price they quoted them to perform the data conversion and import.
The school will still be paying MS very large sums of money and at no point will any of it be pointed in the direction of the school.
Learn the difference between a discount and pay off. The discount happens in pretty much every business.
Basically, Microsoft waived the 'new cell phone activation fee for signing a 2 year contract'. So does that mean Cingular has been paying me $36 every time I give them $200-600 for a new phone?