21 Feb
2018
21 Feb
'18
2:50 p.m.
From: Grant Taylor
I'm on a list where it seems as if a frequent
contributer uses an MUA
that does not send In-Reply-To or References headers at all. It doesn't
even send a User-Agent header. *sigh*
That's me, I expect.
I used to use a TOPS-20 email reader called MM, and when I moved my email to a
Unix machine, there was a version of MM I used there, then something happened
(I forget what) and I couldn't use that any more.
I do have access to a more modern email reader (Eudora), but don't like it; I
just stick with old, simple stuff I know how to use. I don't have the spare
brain cells / energy to switch.
After going through I've-forgotten-how-many editors (starting with TECO, then
'ed'), text formatting systems, operating systems, email readers, etc, etc I
have a _very_ simple rule about switching software: is the old stuff I'm using
utterly, irretrievably unusable? If not, ignore the new stuff. Eventually
it'll be obsolete too. And in the meantime, I'll have saved countless cycles
by not going through the hassle of switching to it. Life's too short.
Noel
21 Feb
21 Feb
3 p.m.
On 02/21/2018 03:50 PM, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote:
That's me, I expect.
I'm not naming any names.
I have sent an email to the person directly with a polite inquiry. I
see no point in pointing fingers.
I used to use a TOPS-20 email reader called MM, and
when I moved my
email to a Unix machine, there was a version of MM I used there, then
something happened (I forget what) and I couldn't use that any more.
Intriguing.
I find it amazing the number of things that I can learn by reading TUHS
and CCTalk.
Granted, I do miss some things when threads I'm ignoring fork without
actually starting threads. Oops!
I do have access to a more modern email reader
(Eudora), but don't like
it; I just stick with old, simple stuff I know how to use. I don't have
the spare brain cells / energy to switch.
I think that everybody should have the option to choose what ever
software / hardware they want to use. If you want to flip switches on
the front of an Altair to ""type an email, after reading 5-bit punched
paper tape, then by all means, more power to you.
Read: I know how I would react if someone told me how I should do
something, so far be it for me to try to tell someone else how they
should do something.
That being said, I may inquire how / why someone is doing something,
along with what prompted me to ask the question. - My intention is to
(hopefully) alleviate my ignorance of a situation and to make the other
party aware of something. - What said other party does with said
information is /their/ prerogative.
After going through I've-forgotten-how-many
editors (starting with TECO,
then 'ed'), text formatting systems, operating systems, email readers,
etc, etc I have a very simple rule about switching software: is the old
stuff I'm using utterly, irretrievably unusable? If not, ignore the new
stuff. Eventually it'll be obsolete too. And in the meantime, I'll have
saved countless cycles by not going through the hassle of switching to
it. Life's too short.
I see the logic in what you're saying.
If it works for you?. Far be it for me?.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
22 Feb
22 Feb
6:35 a.m.
On 21 February 2018 at 23:50, Noel Chiappa via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
After going through I've-forgotten-how-many editors (starting with TECO, then
'ed'), text formatting systems, operating systems, email readers, etc, etc I
have a _very_ simple rule about switching software: is the old stuff I'm using
utterly, irretrievably unusable? If not, ignore the new stuff. Eventually
it'll be obsolete too. And in the meantime, I'll have saved countless cycles
by not going through the hassle of switching to it. Life's too short.
Interesting.
I have had a comparable journey, starting in the early 1980s on home
micros. I have learned so many different editors, with all their
strengths and weaknesses, I can't remember how many to the nearest
dozen.
But at the end of the 1980s/start of the 1990s, something changed.
CUA came along. IBM's answer to Apple's MacOS HIG.
A set of rules for how apps should look.
Quickly, lots complied. DR-DOS 5 came with a slightly clunky but CUA
full-screen text-editor.
MS-DOS 5 followed. From the horrors of edlin, we got the DOS 5 editor,
basically QBASIC in a special mode. But QBASIC was the QuickBASIC 4
IDE with an interpreter bolted in place of the compiler, and it was a
decent IDE and a decent editor.
DR-DOS 6 upped its game a bit.
Windows Notepad is basically the same and compatible. So were the
later classic MacOS editors. So are the editors in KDE, GNOME 2, Mat?,
LXDE, Xfce, whatever. So are all the Mac OS X ones.
There's one look and feel for a text editor now. Menu bar at the top,
starting File, Edit, blah. Save is Ctrl+S. Open is Ctrl-O.
Cut/copy/paste -- well there the CUA ones gave in to Mac ones: Ctrl-X,
C, V.
I won't use any editor or editing app that doesn't follow that
pattern. I've happily, joyfully, with a song in my heart, forgotten
all the others.
I don't care _how_ powerful anyone's editor is. Scripting, macros,
add-ons, modules, whatever. Not interested. Strictly CUA or GTFO.
It has made life much simpler.
And in the great Vi-versus-Emacs war, it leaves both sides staring
blankly at me with nothing to offer.
Both weakly point out that their X version does most of that, but
neither does it on the console, so I'm not interested.
It rules out most of the console/shell level Unix/Linux/*nix world and
that's fine with me. Saves me a ton of decision-making.
Your app. Don't care what it does. Is it CUA compliant? No? OK, thank
you for your time, goodbye. *Ting* Next please.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven ? Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
12:57 p.m.
On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 03:35:14PM +0100, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
[...]
I don't care _how_ powerful anyone's editor is. Scripting, macros,
add-ons, modules, whatever. Not interested. Strictly CUA or GTFO.
Liam, I wanted to say this few months ago already (back in Nov, the
"Editor" thread - BTW, thanks for the links to editors wiki and other
interesting pointers). So, what I wanted to say is, this posture is
going to backfire, I am afraid. The new crowd is coming, who newer had
any chance to use anything resembling a terminal (including
terminal-like experience as wobbly as given by MS Windows). They
(crowd) too will be saying things like GTFO - for now, they just top
post awfully long replies (perhaps because their phone/web-based MUAs
cannot offer them easy way to cut the crap?) and refuse to see any
wrong in it. They also happen to break threads like they were paid to
do it and since I am subscribed to way too many lists where this
occurs, I have already gave up manual linking of threads with mutt -
righting wrongs of the crowd is a job for a program, not for single
human. I only have to devise it during free time, when I have some.
Given that they are soon (if not already) going to be a "dictatoring"
majority, I am not so sure the "GTFO" is the right kind of message to
send out. Even though I have no idea what a constructive message could
look like.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
26 Feb
26 Feb
6:11 a.m.
On 22 February 2018 at 21:57, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
Liam, I wanted to say this few months ago already
(back in Nov, the
"Editor" thread - BTW, thanks for the links to editors wiki and other
interesting pointers).
Glad it was appreciated.
So, what I wanted to say is, this posture is
going to backfire, I am afraid. The new crowd is coming, who newer had
any chance to use anything resembling a terminal (including
terminal-like experience as wobbly as given by MS Windows).
I used to think this myself, but of late, I've had 2 jobs with FOSS
companies (Red Hat and SUSE) and they're both full of 20-somethings
who use and love Vim & other shell-only tools. People working in
tiling or ultra-minimal window managers, with a bunch of terminals and
nothing else.
Unix isn't just an OS. It's a whole culture now, and newcomers earn
credit by embracing the tools and the old ways and demonstrate their
worthiness by their skill with (to them) ancient languages, editors
and so on.
Alas, now, it's _the_ culture. Everything else is ancient history,
mostly unknown. Today, there are 2 OSes, broadly: Windows, and its
fans see no interest in anything else; and Unix, which increasingly
means macOS and Linux.
[Aside: Greybeards are into "ancient" platforms from the 1980s like
Amiga OS, Atari TOS/GEM, Acorn RISC OS, and a few into BeOS/Haiku.
The stuff from before that is mostly forgotten about now. MS-DOS and
the most popular 8-bit home micros are now solely the domain of retro
gamers.
]
But they're still millennials, so email is a slightly clunky old tool
for notifications and account verification, stuff like that. They use
chat systems more -- IRC, and an increasing presence of things like
Slack, RocketChat, Telegram, Signal and the like. There are work-only
web-based social networks where they can interact in broadly familiar
ways, such as Yammer or Red Hat's Mojo.
So at RH, for instance, there were people who primarily used Mojo and
others who primarily used the internal mailing lists.
They
(crowd) too will be saying things like GTFO - for now, they just top
post awfully long replies (perhaps because their phone/web-based MUAs
cannot offer them easy way to cut the crap?) and refuse to see any
wrong in it. They also happen to break threads like they were paid to
do it and since I am subscribed to way too many lists where this
occurs, I have already gave up manual linking of threads with mutt -
righting wrongs of the crowd is a job for a program, not for single
human. I only have to devise it during free time, when I have some.
Yes, true. There's a ton of received wisdom on how to use email
effectively, but it's not disseminated. This means key providers of
email tools -- notably Microsoft -- didn't incorporate these.
So now there are 2 cultures of email: the old-style, text-only, 4-line
sig, bottom-posting way, and "business style": rich formatting, top
posting, epic sigs with graphics, legal notices etc. Given a tool
focused on that, it's hard to even do the other way at all.
We allowed it to fragment and in the long term that might be its downfall.
Given that they are soon (if not already) going to be
a "dictatoring"
majority, I am not so sure the "GTFO" is the right kind of message to
send out. Even though I have no idea what a constructive message could
look like.
Good question.
An idea I threw out on a panel discussion a few years ago is that we
might end up with 2 "internets".
One will be the old-fashioned one, standards-based, old-fashioned
practices and tools, wild and unregulated and chaotic, with a layer of
disconnected web-based islands on top. Part of this will extend into
the "darknet", the encrypted, tunnelled, anonymised quarter for
semi-illicit stuff.
And another layer, a corporate-run tool, with signing, verified IDs,
some degree of crypto so that its users feel they are safe, but it's
all backdoored and snooped and logged. That's the layer you'll be
forced to use if you want to do public trade, where there will be
federated reputation tracking and so on.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven ? Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
22 Feb
22 Feb
12:26 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 05:50:56PM -0500, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote:
[...]
From: Grant
Taylor
I'm on a list where it seems as if a frequent
contributer uses an MUA
that does not send In-Reply-To or References headers at all. It doesn't
even send a User-Agent header. *sigh*
That's me, I expect.
I used to use a TOPS-20 email reader called MM, and when I moved my
I do have access to a more modern email reader (Eudora), but don't
[...]
After going through I've-forgotten-how-many editors (starting with
TECO, then 'ed'), text formatting systems, operating systems, email
readers, etc, etc I have a _very_ simple rule about switching
software: is the old stuff I'm using utterly, irretrievably
unusable? If not, ignore the new stuff. Eventually it'll be obsolete
too. And in the meantime, I'll have saved countless cycles by not
going through the hassle of switching to it. Life's too short.
Noel, I respect your attitude, even replicate it a bit, but
nevertheless I shyly suggest that you try mutt for email (especially
if you process your emails via terminal). It is quite versatile (as
far as I can tell, and I am of course quite subjective) and works on
variety of terminals - I have configured it to work in 256 colors
(because I fancy colors) but it also works on vt100 (i.e. in
monochrome, or rather, it works on terminal emulator with TERM=vt100,
and some keys work differently in this mode then in 256-color
mode). There are some key shortcuts that have to be learned, but not
so many. Configuration is done by editing a file, which means I can
put in snippets from the web to try. If you have your preferred editor
and it works on term, then it probably can be used by mutt (emacs
works for me).
Before that, I have been using pine (nowadays named alpine), which had
configuration edited via builtin options editor and before that, elm,
never configured by me (AFAIR - about 20yago). So, with this
perspective, I can say mutt is not bad and I intend sticking to it for
a while.
Last but not least, it looks like mutt adheres to the standards and at
least does the right thing with headers.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
12:36 p.m.
It's gone meta: people threadjacking a thread about threadjacking. Now
it's some posters trying to show others who is smartest about arcane
details of obsolete email software.
26 Feb
26 Feb
12:18 p.m.
On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 03:36:08PM -0500, Evan Koblentz via cctalk wrote:
It's gone meta: people threadjacking a thread
about threadjacking.
Now it's some posters trying to show others who is smartest about
arcane details of obsolete email software.
Hey, I hope you do not mean that I am showing others who is smartest
or even attacking them. My language might happen to be (perceived by
others as) harsh, because I have barbaric worldview and eat raw meat,
but I am very far from attacking or showing that I am oh so
smart. Well, you will have to take my word on it, because I am not
going to let you open my head :-) .
Otherwise, yes, meta-thread-jacking is interesting - it shows that
people really like to jack everything and there is no escape from
it. This is why I have given up on regulating aspects of the net (say,
breaking threads), at least as long as it depends on other people's
behaviour (of course, they/some will misbehave, no escape) - but, as
soon as the mails come to my hard drive, I can regulate however I
please. So, provided I can program my way around my small bubble, the
problem of threads is a small one (but quite interesting from
algorithm side). Thus I usually do not make much fuss about the issue
(anymore), with exception of breaking threads - they break my own
reading experience _and_ they stay broken in the archive (AFAIK).
Searching the archive, public or personal, which seems to be partly
the motivation behind starting this very subthread - I think it needs
to be done by whole body lookup anyway, so even if some offtopic
discussion starts under "Pictures", the damage is (probably) minimal,
because Subject lines are, to me at least, merely a kind of fuzzy
tags, loosely connected to message bodies. And I think it is ok to
change the Subject of subthread if the message body is too far from
original thread, but keeping it as part of original thread has some
merits, because it shows logical flow of discussion. But, again, this
flow can be recreated with some (yet nonexistent but possible) tools,
so I do not feel the need to have very strong opinion about what other
people should do.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
12:34 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tomasz Rola via cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at
classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2018 3:18 PM
Subject: Re: Why don't you respect the mail threads?!
... I do not feel the need to have very strong opinion
about what other people should do.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--------
Get with the program! That's what the internet/social media is all about!
m
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cctalk＠gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net -
cctalk＠snarc.net -
jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu -
lproven＠gmail.com -
mhs.stein＠gmail.com -
rtomek＠ceti.pl