HN user

6c696e7578

338 karma
Posts1
Comments191
View on HN

Yep for the web they worked better. I don't remember midi files getting as close to popular music as mods did. Then mp3 happened and you could download an MP3 in about quarter of an hour in that era. You could hear a midi though in the browser, but mod wasn't as convenient.

30 Years of ReactOS 6 months ago

Aix

This is more a limitation on the architecture - virtually nobody has power arch hanging around to play on.

I used per-account email with alias services and password managers.

20-something-ish years ago I setup qmail in my VPS and a .qmail-default file captures all my me-sitename@vps emails. If they send me junk I echo '#' > .qmail-sitename and that's the end of it.

Other things that get a mixture like someone annoying who harvested my ebay/paypal addresses or something, I'll sift out the good (stuff I need) via maildrop and everything else gets junked.

Honestly one of the best, but annoying, things I've done, well worth the time invested as I have a nice clean mailbox.

Helium Browser 10 months ago

They do, whilst they have a minor user base. If they become the majority they'll lose funding.

So from Mozilla's point of view, they must be continually worse alternative. They'd shoot themselves in the foot if they looked like the better alternative.

No one uses IRC anymore, certainly not teenagers.

Really? People of any age will use whatever the group is using to talk with, because that's where the talk is happening. Most teenagers don't use Slack either, but will if the group notes say use this. There might be some "no one uses" argument because usage has dropped off almost everything since web searching got a lot better. There are fewer lingering people because most answers are readily available. Remember TLDP days? Search is so much better now.

We're not on about general IRC though, just for semi-private use where Slack would have been an IM tool.

And I'm sure you're smart enough to see obvious differences between email and a real time chat platform.

How is email not a real time chat platform? I see plenty of chat happening on mail lists, and I certainly can't out-type email delivery. Sure, mail sometimes needs a DNS lookup, sometimes has anti-virus/spam filtering too. Maybe that's better for public chat systems anyway.

Thinking more about it, I'd rather have maillists than a web/electron client.

I'm not on about using email for all IM (but it could be), I'm on about more useful messages that you'd want searched later. "Hey, I'm doing X on Y day, here's what you need to know", most of the time this sort of thing gets missed in a IM flood channel.

I don't see much difference between Slack/Teams etc and IRC or maillists, just the tools that existed before are much lighter and have so many more clients you can use the one you know already most of the time.

Large organisations have less excuse, not more. I've worked across the industry, at various levels. The bigger the org, the more layers of compliance that have to be adhered to. A competent and compliant sales team would not be pulling figures at random to extort with. The sales team is normally bonus motivated, normally that type of reward system ensures they're not just chair warming.

Maybe. Not deliberately playing the contrarian, but consider perhaps one of the largest, and longest running software projects, the Linux Kernel, which has existed for a long time now using mail lists and IRC. Most mail clients can filter mail quite well, and everything is in one place, easily searched etc and has open protocols.

Using something browser bases puts you into a position where you have to choose between one or two browser engines and suffer however they manage the CPU and RAM.

Teams hogged the RAM and CPU when I used it in the browser, for what wasn't much more than IRC, and a terrible message archive. Mattermost isn't much better at searching either, and it's mostly glorified IRC channels. The only niche is perhaps mobile users, who, could arguably also use an IRC client or browser based one at that.

What an unnecessarily hostile take.

I like to defend as much as the next person, but the defence from Slack ignores the approach.

"It was a mistake" isn't enough to gloss over the trouble, as a service provider, they caused. What a rug pull, and to then perhaps blame it on a sales person isn't right. They saw a lot of users and tried to extort, no negotiation.

Honestly though, what can slack do that can't be accomplished by a good old-fashioned mail list or IRC?

Moving your mailbox to something else doesn't stop gmail reading your mail every time you respond to someone who has their mail stored on Google. You'd have to ask for gmail's MX to be blocked perhaps.

Sadly I don't see a way around it unless you use PGP and the secret key is kept client side.

I think that's the wrong direction, the cell providers will bargain for ways to put their junk into it.

XMPP installed on the handset by default should be fine.

Thanks! It always bugged me that Windows didn't have a sshd, since it's so popular outside of Windows. I thought the reason for it not being added would be admitting a failure somewhere - RDP not winning or something. Seemed odd to prevent a way into Windows Server.