Netscape integration

[Ralph Cohen]

On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 17:26:18 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
>
>On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 20:12:04 -0400 (EDT), Ralph Cohen wrote:
>
>>proivde me with an editor that would fulfill 99.999% of my email needs.
>
>    Your email needs.  Here people are talking powerful yet will settle for
>crap in the editor.  I don't get it.
>

It's actually very simple, I use different editors for different jobs. 
I use one editor for most of my programming needs and another for my
web page work and still another for quick ascii or hex editing.  For my
email needs, I find the PMMail editor to be adequate for most of what I
need to do but there's nothing to stop me from composing in different
editor and pasting or importing into email.  

>
>    And with Ispell and Aspell I've barely needed to add anything to the
>personal dictionary, both are easily multi-lingual, they are faster, more
>accurate, and, in the case of aspell, can be linked into PMMail for free.
>

A large number of words in a spelling dictionary can be a two edged
sword.  On one hand it's nice to have all of your properly spelled
words recognized, but on the other hand, the greater the number of less
common words included in the base dictionary the greater the chance
that an accidental misspelling will be inappropriately recognized as a
correctly spelled but obscure word instead.  Also, in my business, we
use a lot of specialized scientific/medical terms and jargon, which I
doubt would be included in any generalized dictionary, so I expect to
have to add certain words to almost any dictionary I chose to use.

>    What was this again about "power"?  Settling for crap here, too.
>

Not crap at all.  There are options included with PMMail speller which
tailor it for use with email.  Further, I demand different things from
that speller than the one I use with my word processing software.

>
>    If they incorporated Aspell they WOULD HAVE THE CODE.  They could fix it.

Would it be easier or more efficient for Bob & Ike to fix someone
else's' code than it would be to fix their own?  Would this be a good
use of their limited time?

>
>    Who do you call/email?  Call bob/ike.  They can escelate it as needed.
>

Sorry, I have enough trouble getting timely responses from Bob/Ike for
PMMail problems without expecting them to be effective advocates on my
behalf to other developers.

>    I mean, com'on people, this isn't rocket science.  All of Linux was built
>on this premise and guess what, in less than a decade it is smaller, faster,
>more feature rich, more robust, more stable, more reliable and easier to use
>than Windows which is now going on 2 decades.  
>
>    You're panicing over NOTHING.
>

Nope,  I'm not panicking, but I don't see what the Linux efforts have
to do with PMMail.

>    If you want to see it in action, take a look at Debian Linux.  They built
>an entire distribution around other people's work.  When something breaks,
>you file a bug with them, they escalate it as needed.  The time they saved by
>not having to redo hundreds of thousands of man hours of programming more
>than makes up for the few hours they spend with the bug tracking system.
>

Once again, after seeing the quiet abandonment of the PMMail list by
SouthSoft, I don't have a tremendous amount of faith in their ability
to field an effective infrastructure for tracking bugs in PMMail as
well as third party components.

>
>In every major network attack that affected Windows, OS/2 and the 'nixes, it
>was the decentralized 'nixes which were patched first.  The commercial code
>took up to a week to get patch.  In fact, teardrop, which took down all
>three, was patched in Linux in hours.  Windows, OTOH, took 2 weeks.
>

Very impressive, but unlike you, my responsibilities do not include
maintaining a public server and further, this discussion concerns
applications and not operating systems.  Nevertheless, when I looked
around for a site on which to host my company's web site, I chose one
running Linux and Apache for exactly the reasons you stated above.<g>

>>The widespread problems with finger-pointing between
>>component software makers in years past had a tremendous amount to do
>>with the current success of integrated programs.
>
>    You call bug ridden, bloated, barely functional, useless feature laden
>programs a "success"?  
>

Your characterization, not mine.  PMMail is certainly superior in most
respects to the email software I was using before.  I find it to be a
very functional, relatively bug free piece of software with a number of
features that I use regularly and appreciate.  Each of us obviously has
a different set of requirements for our email programs and PMMail
happens to work reliably and efficiently for me.  I certainly don't
fault you for your efforts to shape PMMail into the type of email
software you'd like to be using, but I think you'll agree that your
requirements may not be the same as most other email users.

Ralph


rpcohen@neurotron.com