Actually I find this less of an issue. Check out grepmail and mboxgrep. I use these pretty regularly and they're very useful for doing e.g. grepmail 'foo.*bar[a-z]' ~/Mail/mbox.gz >/tmp/messages; mutt -f /tmp/messages

As others have said, the headache you will have if you do want to come back (potentially years later) to that one email you know you had only to find your attachment-stripping program has foobar'd the whole archive up (or that you need the attachment after all) probably isn't worth the hassle for saving 500MB per year this year (even taking into account reasonable growth rates - I'd note that bandwidth per $, which will be the factor limiting your email size, has been growing rather more slowly than storage capacity per $ over the past decade and things are likely to continue that way).

If the problem is that you have significant duplication between emails (e.g. the same attachment being emailed several times), gzip and bzip2 may well miss the opportunity to de-dupe this because the distance between duplicated sections is large. One solution to consider if this is an issue may be to use something which is better at compressing over long distances. I would suggest trying something like lrzip to compress tarballs of the annual sets of mbox files before archiving those.

Of course, if you just have lots of attachments which *aren't* duplicated (which is probably more likely), that won't really help much.

Request:Policy for Firefox. Don't know if there's something similar for Chrome.

Yes. You probably distrusted the Comodo CA a while ago, which signs the EFF's certificate.

But the same argument applies to most of what is taught at school beyond the age of about 7 or 8 - for example, algebra, latin, literature, history, chemistry, and so on. This is not (or at least, shouldn't be) the point of education.

To me this seems like a hugely positive step - IF schools can manage to recruit and retain decent teachers, which is probably the bigger problem. Even if the only thing children take from school IT lessons is a recognition of the types of problems for which other tools might be more suited than Excel they will benefit hugely. The number of times I've seen people do things in Excel that really would have worked 100 times better if done in a database or using a little bit of macro programming is amazing.

And if you have large files which change often, it's worth considering rdiff-backup rather than rsnapshot since that will store deltas instead of a new copy of the file each time it changes.

I have to disagree there. The (very large) organisation I work for moved from Lotus Notes to Outlook recently which is arguably a much worse transition for users and involves significant backend work - probably not more than moving to something OSS would have done. Plenty of large organisations use OSS in the back-office extensively.

The real issue is that OSS is just not good enough in many instances to replace the proprietary stuff. In particular, Excel and Outlook are very far ahead of the OSS alternatives.

For other apps, it's much closer (and particularly where organisations have now moved to fully web-based solutions for e.g. expenses submission etc it should be easy if there are no lingering IE6 dependencies). But the issue with Word and Powerpoint is that format compatibility is not quite 100% so all your old documents won't print properly any more. The functionality is just as good but if you can't open something produced in Powerpoint and have it look *exactly* the same then that's enough to stop people bothering to put the effort in to port their custom macro packages for their own branding etc.

That's for the Facebook "Like" button but this technique is also commonly used by Ad networks - I suspect you only noticed it here because HTTPS-everywhere will force the facebook connection to SSL (and AdBlock Plus won't block the Facebook "like" button normally). Certificate Patrol will then alert you to the certificate changes.

Look into using something like the RequestPolicy extension if you want more control over which off-site content gets loaded - it lets you implement a deny-by-default type policy in a similar way to NoScript; however you quickly find that a lot of sites put CSS and/or images on different domains which can be annotying - so it's worth checking out Ghostery instead (or as well as a more permissive default policy) if that bugs you.

I've been using Certificate Patrol for a while alongside Perspectives and it's pretty useful. However, it has also brought to my attention the frequency with which Google/Gmail's certificates seem to change which the links given above also highlight in the graphs.

I'm still puzzled as to why this is (and why e.g. the Gmail IMAPS certs don't seem to change anything like as frequently - more like annually) but if the certs changes frequently it diminishes the usefulness of e.g. Perspectives quite a bit. Which is unfortunate for a site like Gmail which would seem to be highly likely to be targeted for MITM.

No, it's a crap toolbar replacement too: (i) they removed all ability to customise it and (ii) you can't show things from more than one "category" at once, meaning that a lot of things that used to be 1 click away are now 2 clicks away. Seriously, what POSSIBLE reason is there to stop people from customizing the toolbars/menus to make them work the way THEY want them to?

Add on top of that the changes it implies to keyboard shortcuts (and just to really mess with the users, they decided to make it so that *some* of the old shortcuts still work but with no predictable way of telling which ones... and of course for the shortcuts which were based on the old menus you now lose the visual cues that you used to have).

And that's just the issues with Ribbon as a concept. The implementation is awful too... many things just not in anything like the "logical" place (I've resorted to just googling what I want to do immediately if the old keyboard shortcut doesn't work now, it's quicker). My workplace switched to 2007 over 12 months ago and people are *STILL* struggling every day to find things which used to be easy.

Actually, since the end of the cold war (and with the development of aircraft which can do VERY long non-stops like the A340) several commercial passenger flights operate every day which directly cross the North Pole. Particularly these are the very long East Coast US to Asia routes, eg EWR-HKG, JFK-HKG, JFK-PEK, ORD-PEK etc. In the opposite direction it's not usually done as it's more efficient to use the jet stream over the North Pacific.

It's not "charity" if it's someone else's money you're giving (through taxes) or if you do it because someone else tells you that if you don't then you're a "bad person" (or going to hell or whatever).