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Comment Re:Thunderbird works (Score 1) 464

KMail was always my favorite but the axis of evil that is Akonadi, Nepomuk, and Strigi have ruined it. Not long ago indexing just shut down rendering twelve years of KMail archives about as searchable as the spiral notebooks on my shelf. And that was a good day. On a bad day some filter kicked in and removed the message body from all incoming emails.

No amount of Google searching, no amount of reloading and resetting, no amount question on the KDE boards helped. Indexing might start, but it always froze

Screw KDE. I switched to Thunderbird, finding a Python script that moved all my mail archives from maildir to mbox. I hated to give up maildir, but at least now my email is usable.

Comment Re:MySQL, PostgreSQL not the only options (Score 1) 287

I'll second the various recommendations for Firebird.

About 10 years ago our senior engineer asked me to look into open source database systems as a back end for our product. The idea was to target customers who didn't want or couldn't afford Oracle, Sybase, etc. MySQL was out since it can't be use commercially without fee. PostgreSQL (at that time) lacked a robust transaction management system. Firebird was in its infancy, still known as Borland's Interbase, but it was fully open source and had the transaction management chops I needed.

In just a few weeks I had ported over 13K lines of Oracle embedded SQL to Firebird|Interbase. It worked very well, and was easy to install. It's speed, simplicity, and reliability quickly made it our go-to database for inhouse use. When Macintosh went Intel and db vendors stopped supporting Mac, we began using Firebird commercially. It's a champ.

Science

Submission + - Declining Life Expectancy for Less Educated Whites (nytimes.com) 1

JThaddeus writes: "Citing mortality data, researchers assert that the life expectancy of less educated U.S. whites is declining. According to the New York Time article, "Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group...The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance." Could the Cracker problem be self-correcting?"

Comment The first computer I ever used (Score 1) 29

I fell into CS by accident. My first job out of the Army was to perform analysis and studies for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the Army Reserves misplaced my file and could not confirm my clearances. While I was being recleared, to keep me off overhead I was put on a project that was developing computer systems for tactical units. In November 1982 I was given one of the first GiRDs and told to "think of how you would use this if you were back in the infantry." Shortly after that I was learning SQL and Pascal. So long ago...
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - Tropical Storm KIRK (noaa.gov)

JThaddeus writes: Someone at the National Weather Service has a sense of humor. In reporting on the eleventh named storm of the Atlantic season, yesterday's NWS bulletin reads, "KIRK IS NOT EXPECTED TO LIVE LONG AND PROSPER."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - The Shatner Comma (latimes.com)

JThaddeus writes: "The Los Angeles Times reports on a Twitter kerfuffle "that made it seem like Oxford University Press was dropping the use of its eponymous comma." The report was erroneous. Of interest to Slashdot-ters is the L.A.Times writer's suggestion that style guides include "the Shatner comma." I, bet, you, can, guess, how, the, Shatner, comma, is, used."

Comment There is prior art that is decades old (Score 1) 125

There is nothing new about annotating electronic documents. This has been a part of document management systems for decades. I've been at this company (http://www.mindwrap.com/) for over 15 years. It's been part and parcel of our product since before I arrived. Before that, in 1993, I worked on a FileNet document management system installation. FileNet already had an annotation capability for Windows clients. I wrote a Macintosh implementation for the project.

Comment Re:GWT (Score 4, Informative) 575

I second this. I've been using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT, http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/) for about 5 years now with good results. Write in Java, compile to Javascript, and let GWT handle the browser differences. The source is all there if you want to see how their Javascript works, and you can insert you're own Javascript code when and where you want it. Finally, the user's group has been an excellent source of advice.

Comment Is this legally provable? (Score 1) 391

I'm wondering if this charge is legally provable. I would think the complainant would have to do some reverse engineering of Symantec's software and reverse engineering is most likely forbidden by Symantec's EULA. Without this, how can it be proven what Symantec did or did not find on the computer? Even then, does anyone think it can be made understandable to a judge or 12 jurors?

Comment Re:Sprint and T-Mo should merge (Score 1) 301

T-Mo has a good phone selection this year and Sprint is getting better as well but Apple killed them with the iphone

Agreed. I like my Android, but I have one in part because I'm a Linux user: I don't have a Mac or Windows PC at home to run iTunes (just managing an iPod is labor enough). We're all/mostly geeks here, but among the unwashed masses, the iPhone dominates. So long as a carrier can't offer an iPhone, that carrier is doomed to a distant 3rd place behind AT&T and Verizon.

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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