461–470 of 483 posts
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Thanks for letting us know it was dead. I haven't realised it for the part few years of daily usage.
Mozilla has terminated development IIRC. This is probably what was meant.
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>Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress. Not everything; cars today are a big improvement over cars 10 years ago, and especially cars 20 years ago. Just in the last 10 years, cars have made huge improvements in fuel economy alone. Cars have gotten really good for the most part. Some article I recently read on an auto blog, about the "10 worst" cars, even complained tha…
I like my car's automatic seatbelts (91 Saturn) I can't find a replacement "modern" car.
The whole problem with them is that they're dangerous as hell, and offer zero benefit, and only drawbacks.
They're dangerous because they encourage people, by supposedly being "automatic", to not buckle up. They're not effective if you don't buckle the lap belt, but during that time lots of people didn't, because they thought it wasn't necessary. After all, what's the point of an "automatic seatbelt" if you still have to manually buckle part of it?
So, if you're going to go to the trouble of buckling the lap belt to get full effectiveness, what exactly is the benefit over having a normal 3-point belt? There is none.
Finally, the belts were a total hindrance if you got in your car with anything in your hands, such as a briefcase or purse or bag. Anyone driving alone (as most of the population does most of the time) and carrying something frequently just jumps in the front seat holding the bag, and puts it in the passenger seat or floor. With the mousebelt in the way, this became a good way to get tangled up.
If you're still driving that piece of shit, do yourself a favor and get a newer car. That thing has no airbags and has terrible crashworthiness compared to anything newer than 25 years old. You're very likely to die in a crash in that car, which in a new car you would walk away from.
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I used Thunderbird daily for the better part of a decade until about 3 months ago. It's nothing personal against the project, which is currently the best serious desktop mail client available afaik. It's simply that Mozilla doesn't care about it anymore since everyone uses webmail now. Thunderbird is doing feature releases about once a year now [0], and Mozilla has pulled most (all?) of its full-time developers [1].…
Call me a dinosaur, but I'll keep using it as long as it is available. Web email clients SUCK . And there's about 10 million users that evidently have a reason to keep using it: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/12/thunderbird-act...
So I completely agree. I cringe every time I am forced to use webmail for some reason.
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>Asynchronous messaging depends on a server to hold your messages for delivery when you go offline. You can get 90% of the benefit by having other clients in the chat act as relays for that chat. No centralization required. You'd only need a bouncer for specific situations, like mobile mobile chat with all desktop clients shut off. >Would you be upset if I said "IRC does that" if you asked for messaging? If I asked f…
I don't actually have any idea about how group chats are implemented in Tox, but I don't see why you can't send messages to the people in the group to redistribute when people get back. It sounds like it might have history consistency issues, but maybe they already do that. I assumed you were talking about one-on-one message relaying, which is probably what most people would care about. That can't really be solved, s…
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What makes an email client so difficult to write? I don't mean this to sound insulting, I just really don't understand where the complexity is. It seems like you should be able to get to a point where it is feature complete and all development efforts shift to maintenance mode. Or maybe I don't understand what's been going on with Thunderbird and perhaps it's been "done" for years now.
It is basically done. There could be UI refinements and updates to the occasional protocol/security change, but yeah, there's not been much innovation in email standards for a while.
Just an example: try to create (and use) an IDN-based email address with non-ASCII characters in the local part. You will be amazed how incompatible on so many layers this actually is. I can hardly imagine there weren't dozens of similarly tricky situations where the developers of this, or any other email client for that matter, were forced to make quite serious design choices because of either ambiguity in standards, or widespread lack of support thereof.
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At least on that OS it can be installed in a straightforward way. If one really wants to install skype on a 64 bits debian, they need to apply loads of tricks (and risk to bork their system in the process). Last time I attempted that, the package installer prompted me to first uninstall X - the window system - (amongst a whole lot of other crucial software) as incompatible dependencies...
That seems to be a Debian packaging issue, since all you need to run skype are the 32-bit libs it uses. I run it on Arch with no problem.
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You read my mind, while we are 99% an open source organisation we have a couple of managers that are strangely MS centric, if it has their stamp on it - it has to be 'enterprise grade' and there for the only serious option for them.
But Skype is a consumer offering. The "enterprise-grade" product is Skype for Business (formerly Lync), which is a completely different product and codebase (and thus, presumably, with completely different bugs and annoyances).
It also freezes, a LOT. We finally forced our manager to let us use Slack and we love it.
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For gaming I use https://discordapp.com/
It's a shame discord brands itself so thoroughly as a gaming communication solution. I've had friends (not business contacts!) decline to switch to it because it's not a general chat program but a chat program for gamers .
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> maintaining anything proprietary under linux is a chore, with the ABI changing every year for no reason Is Skype a special snowflake to the extent that it's an impossible task? Skype-on-Linux's problem are caused by interface changes with the server API, not the ABI. Recompiling isn't rocket science.
recompiling isn't. packaging for every distribution, edge and not and building autoconf for all of them and ifdef all over the code? not rocket science either, but that stuff does carry an increased cost
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I guess "Internet telephone" is still an unsolved problem silly smile I've setup asterisk as a personal SIP/voip server and it works pretty good. You can even hook it up to a provider that lets you out on the telephone network. And SIP is built into many hardware phones already.
Every few years I make an attempt to get into SIP/voip, but so far my experience has always been the same: Wall-of-text like documentation that makes no sense, huge cryptic config files, tutorials that assume you already know everything or that just don't work, software that only works with such-and-such kernel, conflicting information scattered across the globe. It feels like trying to set up Slackware in the early…