What exactly are they going to store on the OpenLDAP server? Shares? Permissions? Application settings? Where can I learn more about the integration of OpenLDAP and Windows 2000/XP?
I'm interested because we do some work with clients that have 2000/XP on the desktop. We use Samba right now but we want to move from the simple sharing to domains. I know Samba can be a PDC and we are working on that but I'm wondering where OpenLDAP fits into all of it.
Well... I dunno... I use TeraNews.com for rec.photo.digital, some other rec.photo groups, and local groups. So far it has been much more reliable than my provider (who really stinks - DirecTvInternet, formerly Telocity, worst news server ever!). So far I've found completion to be pretty good... I haven't roamed into the binaries there so I can't comment on that.
I agree that news.cis.dfn.de is really the best deal as no credit card, etc.. TeraNews.com was installing some new nntp software and I was locked out for a couple days.
This reminds me to go signup again as I've definately lost my account details.
[extended rant on my DSL providers nntp service] Actually DirecTvInternet doesn't have the worst ever news server(s) - it's just that they fired the one admin that:
a. knew what the hell he was doing
b. actually posted to the directv.* support groups For some reason DirecTvInternet has a corporate mandate against communicating with the customer. He was fired for communicated with us! Can you believe that? From posts in the directv.* groups I also know they have clueless tech support people (least at level 1 and getting higher is a pain). I've never dealt with them but I believe it...
Why would such a company fire the people who communicate and keep the people who suck? It makes no sense from the customers viewpoint... Of course after the news admin left they tried to keep the one overloaded server still going by limiting the kb/sec to the server to near 56k modem speeds! Then they lowered the number of connections, throttled it after a coupe megs, tinkered some more, wiped the entire disks every couple weeks (really fucks up mozilla's newsreader), and put on a 250mb/day limit.
Finally they seperated the text and binary groups but they still don't know how to properly expire the text groups as every couple of weeks they do a wipe and yet again mozilla shits bricks (it's thread sorting goes to hell, yes I filed a bug report but no response).
Obviously it's not worth even trying to use their once good servers. It's a real shame...
(oh, and if the former Telocity/directvinternet news admin reads this - thanks for the good work and I wish you didn't have idiots as bosses, you were the only who seemed to have a clue, I hope you found a great job with an ISP who cares)
1. Teranews.com - 50mb/day for free but you have to enter a credit card number (they hope people will upgrade their accounts plus probably cuts down on abuse). They don't bill your credit card number nor automatically push you up into the next paying category so you don't have anything to worry about. I've been using them with the free account for a couple months and in general they are decent...
2. news.cis.dfn.de - only text groups, was faster for me than teranews but I haven't used them for a while (forgot account info), have to wait to be approved but it doesn't take too long. So far I'd have to say this is the best deal all around...
Subthreads like these are where the +/- 0 Meta-Comment would come in handy! Anyone else sick of reading Meta-Comments? I don't have a problem with them but it navel gazing gets old after a year or two. Being able to skip such threads would be awesome.
Of course moderation seems to be hard enough as it is so maybe I shouldn't advocate a change.
My/. Meta-Comment for the day (opinions on whether it should be metacomment, Metacomment, MetaComment, Meta-Comment, meta-comment, welcomed)!
Doh... Just realized what people consider Meta-Comments will be ultra-subjective. Oh well... Thought that counts and all that I guess.
I see your problem. The good news is that Minolta says they are partnering with SuSE in order to support their printers under linux. I can't tell if they have drivers for your printer or not... Perhaps a non-matching driver will work but not provide all functionality. I found these interesting links:
MinoltaEurope.com (interestingly MinoltaEurope.com is running Apache!) - search for "linux" on that page and you can find their announcement about the partnership (no date specified though, could be way out of date).
ESP Print Pro is based on CUPS but it is a commercial product with more drivers. I found a couple drivers for QMS products with their printer search choice on their page there. Most of the drivers looked to be postscript so you might be able to simply use a standard postscript driver and not have to deal with product specific drivers.
Searching around on usenet at groups.google.com with "linux qms 1100l" found some interesting stuff... Does the printer do PCL? Some tips there.
CUPS. It rocks. I got debian unstable printing to my Epson 780 in full photo quality color very quickly. Administration is simple. It truely is a beauty in the world of printing. I would be surprised if SuSE doesn't already have packages for it too.
SDB: Printing with CUPS looks good... I also had to upgrade the gimp-print plugin to have it work with CUPS. Good luck.
Wow.. I didn't know they did blacklisting. In all truth it doesn't seem like you're missing much these days with what/. is now. I can understand how it would be annoying to be unjustly blacklisted.
I like it, I like it a lot! Much more powerful now. I hope you don't get chopped down by the editors. I think you'll be ok but what the f* do I know:).
Man, trust me, is far easier to use the woody source packages. Building debs is not trivial.
I trust you but I'll have to look at it myself. At least I can read over the package sources for earlier versions. For some things we can't live with an older version of PHP/Apache/DB. Hard choices...
Sure, sometimes I need a newer version of some package (say, openldap). For those I usually pull the woody source package and build potato binaries. Check this article [debianplanet.org], it explains the basics on doing this trick.
Now that does sound sweet. Thanks for pointing it out.
You've made some interesting points. I'm going to drop anything inflamatory just to drop it and get on with things. No flame intended... I do care what people think on the inside and after some thought I'd have to take back the "insular" comment as it is obvious a lot of work goes on via mailing lists.
Many maintainers became too busy to maintain their packages (perfectly ok) but left themselves as the official maintainer in the package system (not ok!) This meant that many packages became buggy and went unattended to for far too long before anyone noticed. In fact, this is still a problem, although measures (technical and social) have been and are still being put in place to combat it..
I think what led to that insular comment was the general feeling of having the "one maintainer, one package" thing and the problems that result. It sounds like that is being fixed and seeing people say "fix it or I'm going to fix it myself" in terms of abandoned packages is very refreshing...
Oh, and if you want my personal opinion: there have been a lot of technical measures taken to streamline Debian releases in the past year or two. Many people have suggested that woody's long cycle implies that these measures are failures. I personally suspect, although I'm not yet sure I believe, that these measures are responsible for the fact that woody is being *released at all*.
Well as I said in my other post it will be interesting watching the next couple years. Change takes time...
You point out a lot of holes in some arguements that come up fairly regularly here and (it sounds like from your posts) on the debian mailing lists. Definately gives me something to think about. Thanks for posting for what that's worth...
You make some interesting points and I definately agree that the "Debian is dying" crap is just that - crap. I hadn't realized that such discussions come up so regularly on debian-devel. I'll have to start reading some of the mailing lists. The least that can be said is that the next couple of years will continue to be interesting.
I think for me the best thing to do would be to learn the packaging process and do my own packages for things I can't live without. That would be far more beneficial to myself than whining about crap on/.:).
Well I don't know... what exactly is that you need from the mainstream package that is missing in the one in potato? I mean, you could build a potato package from the woody sources (apt-get source apache, with woody as deb-src in sources.list), but... why?
Because as a sysadmin running mainstream packages is more beneficial to prepackaged things. The combination of Apache+PHP+PostgreSQL/MySQL is far better managed outside of the Debian process. If you can live with PHP 4.0.1 for a couple years than go for it.
The easy solution there is to simply build my own.debs and that is what I'll probably do in the future when I have more time to read the packages guide.
Funny. The only Linux I allow in my servers is Debian stable.
The fact remains that if you only read/. headlines, you will have only a narrow and sensationalized view of matters.
So you're saying that the Debian doesn't have a slow release problem? That is only a/. sensationalized view of Debian? I think not.
The fact remains that sometimes experience matters, and uninformed opinions are uninformed. "I don't know a thing about aeronautics, engineering, or fluid dynamics, but I've flown on lots of planes, and I have this great idea about how you can make your 747s go faster.."
Maybe that is because people are getting so frustrated at a lack of progress in the change that they'll suggest anything... It's easy to shoot people down but I don't really see you coming back with any response besides "this isn't an issue and you aren't fit to question/make suggestions" and ignoring things that are an issue.
Everyone has seen the accusation that "all those crufty packages" are holding up the release, it's been discussed dozens of times on the mailing lists, and not one person has yet produced a specific and concrete example of a way in which so-called "package bloat" is holding up the release. Hand-waving arguments, personal attacks, and oblique references to Fred Brooks are easier, I guess. *shrug*
Maybe part of that is because these people are partly right. FreeBSD has a nice steady release process and the ports system works well. Obviously Debian isn't FreeBSD but it doesn't hurt to look at other ways of doing things.
Anyway, I'm done... I don't think that my critizing is going to help anything. Helping would be much more beneficial. It's just that reality is so frustrating sometimes:).
Ok, ok, ok... I admit in a fit of boredom a bit of trolling was hard to pass up. But in all honesty the central issues I was trolling about are real issues and are causing problems. Of course it is better to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem but sometimes discussion of issues is enlightening. Debian people most likely do not want to discuss people leaving their project, the problems with their project, the release schedule ("it'll be released when it's done"), etc.
Obviously Debian is a not a commercial product but if people who did this out of the good of their heart get so sick of the slow release schedule that they are leaving it seems obvious that there are a number of problems. Of course you can say "slashdot troll" and so can I but all criticism of Debian is pretty much ignored. The Debian project is a very insular project that isn't very open to criticism or change.
Those things are pretty obvious from the outside. I don't know what people think of these issues on the inside and frankly I don't really care. All I care about is progress.
The funny part of this whole thread is that I'm replying on a machine running unstable. But the fact is I don't think I'd use Debian on a server. As a sysadmin the core release makes sense but the fact that other non-essential packages like Apache are never upgraded in a release does not. I'd rather run the mainstream release of a package with perhaps only a few modifications for install location than the Debianized patched to hell version.
So I currently run FreeBSD and RedHat (sigh) on my servers. I'd love to run Debian but it simply doesn't make any sense.
Ok, now you can reply with six million reasons why I'm wrong, how this university runs Debian stable on 3,000 boxes, yadda yadda.
Thanks but no thanks. But I'm getting close. I simply wonder why you would want 6 kazillion packages in the distrib when it could simply be the base system.
You can continue to come back to my stupid posts with "show me your dick" or whatever but the fact remains that people are leaving debian, debian is lagging behind, the release process is very slow, etc.
Just because I don't work on another distrib doesn't mean my dick is too small to comment on the problems.
Some things are pretty obvious. If you would rather see the dick than the light just look in your pants.
I thought that having a release with six kajillion packages "doesn't slow down the release." Yeah, right. I wish I could get out a gattling gun and mow down all the extra cruft that goes in each Debian release. Split the base system from the extra crap. Get Debian complete base install down to a couple hundred mb and make what is on that cd the base system. Screw the other crap.
Oh well. Won't happen. We must use something version.007 for three years while waiting for the next release. Sure we can patch something.007 forever but NO we CAN'T UPGRADE IT! Yeah, OK. So you would rather use something version.007 patch level 2342304234 then upgrade to something version.now and give feedback to the developers of something? Navel gazing in extreeeeeme!
I pay $50/month US to DirecTvInternet (yeah, you try captilozing that POS name) formerly Telocity. A friend of mine has the same package but at a faull 1 mb instead of 784 kb.
Best part? Non-commercial servers are ok, NAT is ok, etc. News is spotty but otherwise I'm happy in my 2+ years. Of course I'm grandfathered in on a WorldCom formerly Rhythms SDSL circuit. New subscribers get sucky ADSL via Northpoint.
Yes please! I would love such a book. Of course the author would have to interview the developers for more background on why they did this or that or why the architecture ended up as it did. There are almost always some nagging details in implementations that are usually interesting to examine.
Plus going from nothing to finished app is also interesting. Not sure what could be covered in that area but I'm sure something could be dreamed up...
It's a huge annual gathering of ornamental landscapers who are investigating the strength of various strains of grass. To simulate the natural conditions out in the real world they have large heavy guys run around on the grass for hours on end. When it all began back in the day the large heavy guys quickly tired of just running around so they started kicking around the bloated carcass of a baby pig left over from the landscapers late night Hiwaiian style Lua.
Unexpectedly the joy of watching grown men play with pig bits took off and now some people come just for the that. But never forget that the real reason for "superbowl" is the annual grass endurance competition. The truth is out there.
But PCI is more than enough for regular work like document editing and even graphics editing. Sure AGP rocks for games but a lot of people don't need it...
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly are they going to store on the OpenLDAP server? Shares? Permissions? Application settings? Where can I learn more about the integration of OpenLDAP and Windows 2000/XP?
I'm interested because we do some work with clients that have 2000/XP on the desktop. We use Samba right now but we want to move from the simple sharing to domains. I know Samba can be a PDC and we are working on that but I'm wondering where OpenLDAP fits into all of it.
Another resource is alt.free.newsservers...
Well... I dunno... I use TeraNews.com for rec.photo.digital, some other rec.photo groups, and local groups. So far it has been much more reliable than my provider (who really stinks - DirecTvInternet, formerly Telocity, worst news server ever!). So far I've found completion to be pretty good... I haven't roamed into the binaries there so I can't comment on that.
I agree that news.cis.dfn.de is really the best deal as no credit card, etc.. TeraNews.com was installing some new nntp software and I was locked out for a couple days.
This reminds me to go signup again as I've definately lost my account details.
[extended rant on my DSL providers nntp service]
Actually DirecTvInternet doesn't have the worst ever news server(s) - it's just that they fired the one admin that:
a. knew what the hell he was doing
b. actually posted to the directv.* support groups
For some reason DirecTvInternet has a corporate mandate against communicating with the customer. He was fired for communicated with us! Can you believe that? From posts in the directv.* groups I also know they have clueless tech support people (least at level 1 and getting higher is a pain). I've never dealt with them but I believe it...
Why would such a company fire the people who communicate and keep the people who suck? It makes no sense from the customers viewpoint... Of course after the news admin left they tried to keep the one overloaded server still going by limiting the kb/sec to the server to near 56k modem speeds! Then they lowered the number of connections, throttled it after a coupe megs, tinkered some more, wiped the entire disks every couple weeks (really fucks up mozilla's newsreader), and put on a 250mb/day limit.
Finally they seperated the text and binary groups but they still don't know how to properly expire the text groups as every couple of weeks they do a wipe and yet again mozilla shits bricks (it's thread sorting goes to hell, yes I filed a bug report but no response).
Obviously it's not worth even trying to use their once good servers. It's a real shame...
(oh, and if the former Telocity/directvinternet news admin reads this - thanks for the good work and I wish you didn't have idiots as bosses, you were the only who seemed to have a clue, I hope you found a great job with an ISP who cares)
1. Teranews.com - 50mb/day for free but you have to enter a credit card number (they hope people will upgrade their accounts plus probably cuts down on abuse). They don't bill your credit card number nor automatically push you up into the next paying category so you don't have anything to worry about. I've been using them with the free account for a couple months and in general they are decent...
2. news.cis.dfn.de - only text groups, was faster for me than teranews but I haven't used them for a while (forgot account info), have to wait to be approved but it doesn't take too long. So far I'd have to say this is the best deal all around...
Subthreads like these are where the +/- 0 Meta-Comment would come in handy! Anyone else sick of reading Meta-Comments? I don't have a problem with them but it navel gazing gets old after a year or two. Being able to skip such threads would be awesome.
/. Meta-Comment for the day (opinions on whether it should be metacomment, Metacomment, MetaComment, Meta-Comment, meta-comment, welcomed)!
Of course moderation seems to be hard enough as it is so maybe I shouldn't advocate a change.
My
Doh... Just realized what people consider Meta-Comments will be ultra-subjective. Oh well... Thought that counts and all that I guess.
I see your problem. The good news is that Minolta says they are partnering with SuSE in order to support their printers under linux. I can't tell if they have drivers for your printer or not... Perhaps a non-matching driver will work but not provide all functionality. I found these interesting links:
Linux filter page for Minolta printers
I found that link here:
MinoltaEurope.com (interestingly MinoltaEurope.com is running Apache!) - search for "linux" on that page and you can find their announcement about the partnership (no date specified though, could be way out of date).
ESP Print Pro is based on CUPS but it is a commercial product with more drivers. I found a couple drivers for QMS products with their printer search choice on their page there. Most of the drivers looked to be postscript so you might be able to simply use a standard postscript driver and not have to deal with product specific drivers.
Searching around on usenet at groups.google.com with "linux qms 1100l" found some interesting stuff... Does the printer do PCL? Some tips there.
Good luck and hope you get it working.
CUPS. It rocks. I got debian unstable printing to my Epson 780 in full photo quality color very quickly. Administration is simple. It truely is a beauty in the world of printing. I would be surprised if SuSE doesn't already have packages for it too.
SDB: Printing with CUPS looks good... I also had to upgrade the gimp-print plugin to have it work with CUPS. Good luck.
Wow.. I didn't know they did blacklisting. In all truth it doesn't seem like you're missing much these days with what /. is now. I can understand how it would be annoying to be unjustly blacklisted.
I like it, I like it a lot! Much more powerful now. I hope you don't get chopped down by the editors. I think you'll be ok but what the f* do I know :).
You should use that second sentence as your sig. Much better than your current sig :).
Man, trust me, is far easier to use the woody source packages. Building debs is not trivial.
I trust you but I'll have to look at it myself. At least I can read over the package sources for earlier versions. For some things we can't live with an older version of PHP/Apache/DB. Hard choices...
Sure, sometimes I need a newer version of some package (say, openldap). For those I usually pull the woody source package and build potato binaries. Check this article [debianplanet.org], it explains the basics on doing this trick.
Now that does sound sweet. Thanks for pointing it out.
You've made some interesting points. I'm going to drop anything inflamatory just to drop it and get on with things. No flame intended... I do care what people think on the inside and after some thought I'd have to take back the "insular" comment as it is obvious a lot of work goes on via mailing lists.
Many maintainers became too busy to maintain their packages (perfectly ok) but left themselves as the official maintainer in the package system (not ok!) This meant that many packages became buggy and went unattended to for far too long before anyone noticed. In fact, this is still a problem, although measures (technical and social) have been and are still being put in place to combat it..
I think what led to that insular comment was the general feeling of having the "one maintainer, one package" thing and the problems that result. It sounds like that is being fixed and seeing people say "fix it or I'm going to fix it myself" in terms of abandoned packages is very refreshing...
Oh, and if you want my personal opinion: there have been a lot of technical measures taken to streamline Debian releases in the past year or two. Many people have suggested that woody's long cycle implies that these measures are failures. I personally suspect, although I'm not yet sure I believe, that these measures are responsible for the fact that woody is being *released at all*.
Well as I said in my other post it will be interesting watching the next couple years. Change takes time...
You point out a lot of holes in some arguements that come up fairly regularly here and (it sounds like from your posts) on the debian mailing lists. Definately gives me something to think about. Thanks for posting for what that's worth...
You make some interesting points and I definately agree that the "Debian is dying" crap is just that - crap. I hadn't realized that such discussions come up so regularly on debian-devel. I'll have to start reading some of the mailing lists. The least that can be said is that the next couple of years will continue to be interesting.
/. :).
I think for me the best thing to do would be to learn the packaging process and do my own packages for things I can't live without. That would be far more beneficial to myself than whining about crap on
Well I don't know... what exactly is that you need from the mainstream package that is missing in the one in potato? I mean, you could build a potato package from the woody sources (apt-get source apache, with woody as deb-src in sources.list), but... why?
.debs and that is what I'll probably do in the future when I have more time to read the packages guide.
Because as a sysadmin running mainstream packages is more beneficial to prepackaged things. The combination of Apache+PHP+PostgreSQL/MySQL is far better managed outside of the Debian process. If you can live with PHP 4.0.1 for a couple years than go for it.
The easy solution there is to simply build my own
Funny. The only Linux I allow in my servers is Debian stable.
RedHat wasn't and isn't my choice.
The fact remains that if you only read /. headlines, you will have only a narrow and sensationalized view of matters.
/. sensationalized view of Debian? I think not.
:).
So you're saying that the Debian doesn't have a slow release problem? That is only a
The fact remains that sometimes experience matters, and uninformed opinions are uninformed. "I don't know a thing about aeronautics, engineering, or fluid dynamics, but I've flown on lots of planes, and I have this great idea about how you can make your 747s go faster.."
Maybe that is because people are getting so frustrated at a lack of progress in the change that they'll suggest anything... It's easy to shoot people down but I don't really see you coming back with any response besides "this isn't an issue and you aren't fit to question/make suggestions" and ignoring things that are an issue.
Everyone has seen the accusation that "all those crufty packages" are holding up the release, it's been discussed dozens of times on the mailing lists, and not one person has yet produced a specific and concrete example of a way in which so-called "package bloat" is holding up the release. Hand-waving arguments, personal attacks, and oblique references to Fred Brooks are easier, I guess. *shrug*
Maybe part of that is because these people are partly right. FreeBSD has a nice steady release process and the ports system works well. Obviously Debian isn't FreeBSD but it doesn't hurt to look at other ways of doing things.
Anyway, I'm done... I don't think that my critizing is going to help anything. Helping would be much more beneficial. It's just that reality is so frustrating sometimes
Ok, ok, ok... I admit in a fit of boredom a bit of trolling was hard to pass up. But in all honesty the central issues I was trolling about are real issues and are causing problems. Of course it is better to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem but sometimes discussion of issues is enlightening. Debian people most likely do not want to discuss people leaving their project, the problems with their project, the release schedule ("it'll be released when it's done"), etc.
Obviously Debian is a not a commercial product but if people who did this out of the good of their heart get so sick of the slow release schedule that they are leaving it seems obvious that there are a number of problems. Of course you can say "slashdot troll" and so can I but all criticism of Debian is pretty much ignored. The Debian project is a very insular project that isn't very open to criticism or change.
Those things are pretty obvious from the outside. I don't know what people think of these issues on the inside and frankly I don't really care. All I care about is progress.
The funny part of this whole thread is that I'm replying on a machine running unstable. But the fact is I don't think I'd use Debian on a server. As a sysadmin the core release makes sense but the fact that other non-essential packages like Apache are never upgraded in a release does not. I'd rather run the mainstream release of a package with perhaps only a few modifications for install location than the Debianized patched to hell version.
So I currently run FreeBSD and RedHat (sigh) on my servers. I'd love to run Debian but it simply doesn't make any sense.
Ok, now you can reply with six million reasons why I'm wrong, how this university runs Debian stable on 3,000 boxes, yadda yadda.
Thanks but no thanks. But I'm getting close. I simply wonder why you would want 6 kazillion packages in the distrib when it could simply be the base system.
You can continue to come back to my stupid posts with "show me your dick" or whatever but the fact remains that people are leaving debian, debian is lagging behind, the release process is very slow, etc.
Just because I don't work on another distrib doesn't mean my dick is too small to comment on the problems.
Some things are pretty obvious. If you would rather see the dick than the light just look in your pants.
I thought that having a release with six kajillion packages "doesn't slow down the release." Yeah, right. I wish I could get out a gattling gun and mow down all the extra cruft that goes in each Debian release. Split the base system from the extra crap. Get Debian complete base install down to a couple hundred mb and make what is on that cd the base system. Screw the other crap.
.007 for three years while waiting for the next release. Sure we can patch something .007 forever but NO we CAN'T UPGRADE IT! Yeah, OK. So you would rather use something version .007 patch level 2342304234 then upgrade to something version .now and give feedback to the developers of something? Navel gazing in extreeeeeme!
Oh well. Won't happen. We must use something version
This is stupid.
I pay $50/month US to DirecTvInternet (yeah, you try captilozing that POS name) formerly Telocity. A friend of mine has the same package but at a faull 1 mb instead of 784 kb.
Best part? Non-commercial servers are ok, NAT is ok, etc. News is spotty but otherwise I'm happy in my 2+ years. Of course I'm grandfathered in on a WorldCom formerly Rhythms SDSL circuit. New subscribers get sucky ADSL via Northpoint.
Architectures of Popular Linux Apps
Yes please! I would love such a book. Of course the author would have to interview the developers for more background on why they did this or that or why the architecture ended up as it did. There are almost always some nagging details in implementations that are usually interesting to examine.
Plus going from nothing to finished app is also interesting. Not sure what could be covered in that area but I'm sure something could be dreamed up...
CTRL-left-click will open a new window as well.
:).
Doh! Forgot about that. Thanks
Except middle click sucks on a laptop with 2 mouse buttons. It's really hard to push both down at the same time to emulate the third button.
It's a huge annual gathering of ornamental landscapers who are investigating the strength of various strains of grass. To simulate the natural conditions out in the real world they have large heavy guys run around on the grass for hours on end. When it all began back in the day the large heavy guys quickly tired of just running around so they started kicking around the bloated carcass of a baby pig left over from the landscapers late night Hiwaiian style Lua.
Unexpectedly the joy of watching grown men play with pig bits took off and now some people come just for the that. But never forget that the real reason for "superbowl" is the annual grass endurance competition. The truth is out there.
I agree with you too - graphical IMAP clients that are actually useable are few and far between. I've gone to using Mozilla's all the time.
But PCI is more than enough for regular work like document editing and even graphics editing. Sure AGP rocks for games but a lot of people don't need it...