[Coco] Forums versus email was: Re: I think I hit a nerve with my CoCoList Survey on email.

[bkheath at gmail.com]

Perfect!

A place where I can announce my return, explain my absence as being
related to the subject of the OP purpose for starting this thread, be
relevant to where the thread has drifted, test my new outgoing email set-up
(also relevant to the current topic of the thread), and respond to a topic
that is still active just as I finished reading through the backlog caused
by my absence.

On top of that I get to answer an old fully on-topic question that the
poster I'm responding to never got an answer to that I saw.


By my count that's a double hat-trick!

Last item first.

John,
    you where asking about a copy of Compac for the coco?
One of the last projects completed before going back to the f83 port was
digitizing all my old cassettes, including COMPAC. I'm certain I have a .cas
file that loads and runs on Jeff Vavasours CC2 emu, probably have the .wav
file it was generated from, and may even have the 24-bit 96kHz file I
captured using Audacity. ISTR someone said it was not encumbered and this
was captured directly from the original cassette bought way-back-when, just
give me an archive or email to send it to, a prefered format, and a few days to 
find-it/organize-some-other-stuff and it's yours.


Thread relevant stuff interspersed below.


Up-front let me state that I personally have a strong commmand-line bias, part of this
is age (56, first computer a COSMAC Elf that tried to get hacked together
from old Proto Boards and a minimal chipset but never ran, first working
computer a Z-80 development kit, quickly upgraded with fig-forth in proms on
the wire-wrap area, then finished of the S-100 interface to add a 64K Ram and a
Morrow Designs controller with two Tandon half height 1.2M drives. First
CoCo a 16k that got immediately upgraded to 64K, took about an hour to
figure out how). The more valid reason is what installing Windows and 5-6
Math/Education packages on 30+ machines in a Lab did to my shoulder. Still
use a mouse left handed and it's been over 10 years.




On Thu, 23 Apr 2009, John W. Linville wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 09:12:50AM -0600, William Astle wrote:
>
>> That said, this has, predictably, degenerated into an argument about
>> whether web based forums or email is better. The actual answer is "it
>> depends".
>
> Yes, exactly.

Very much agree. My last permanent ISP was at my last job. Telnet (SSH) to
the campus server was the way to go, even when they started pushing everyone
to migrate to web-mail. With a slow dial-up at home it was _much_ quicker to
scan messages via a terminal then download what was worth saving (text being
both faster to read and faster to download) than navigate a web-page.

When that ended gmail was the way to go. The advantages of centralized
access from any connection (home or mobile) and free archiving more than
outweighed my dislike of GUI's for stuff like this.

Then my generous neighbor who let me piggyback wireless moved away and it
was very inconvenient to get to the nearest free wireless access point with
my laptop. This was mid-December 2008.

Gmail was a life-saver, kept my messages with no worries about space until
earlier this week when (right after finally breaking down and lugging the
laptop over to update Gentoo) there's partial wireless connectivity at home
again and a 3500 message backlog on gmail.

Sorting through that many messages in a browser makes my shoulder ache just
thinking about it (even with keyboard shortcuts). Thread drift being what it
is (not unique to this group BTW) you can't really judge content by scanning
subject lines, so setting up a text based IMAP/POP client was a high
priority. Setting up pine to open the gmail remotely worked but with that
many messages to go through and a not entirely reliable connection it's
better to download the whole list and work offline.

Now that fetchmail an pine are set up I have options. As long as
connectivity is good it's feasible to use Konqueror and browse gmail, use
pine and browse it in text mode, or run fetchmail (on-demand or as a cron
job).

If things get flakey again I can still take the laptop mobile and grab
everything in a "burst" then peruse it at my leisure and send responses the
next time.

The point of this admittedly long rant is that a seemingly small change in
circumstances can radically alter priorities. Now that I'm caught up I might
well go back to using gmail directly rather than through IMAP with the
option of going off-line if things look to be getting flakey.

Bottom line is -- It Depends.

At the moment I qualify as someone who's email access is more
reliable/usable than their web access, it could change at the drop of a hat
but for now I'm back.

If I get a response to this message I'll post an f83 update and maybe some
background on f83 (like someone asked for back in January :(

But first gotta get back to that Gentoo update (It takes a _long_ time to
recompile every package that's been changed over the last 4 months ;)

Brett K. Heath



>
>> With email, all the messages for the discussion come to me whenever I
>> open my email, which I do at least daily. Leaving aside configurations
>> using IMAP and other fancy protocols, that means I download absolutely
>> everything from the discussion.
>
> * chuckle *
>
> Is IMAP really a "fancy protocol"?  I've been using it for at least
> the last decade... :-)  I suppose I could host an email account for
> anyone on the list who just can't get IMAP from their current ISP.
>
>> Many people are screaming at me saying "how hard is it to remember to go
>> to a web site to keep up on something?".
>
> Don't forget the people screaming "how hard is it to filter your
> email?" :-)
>
>> I'll leave with one final note. If we had such a system as I just
>> outlined, it would solve any problems for Steve's hypothetical user that
>> has email access but no web access.
>
> I find it curious that I know of no such system.  Such integration
> would seem obvious.  Perhaps web developers just don't grok email
> standards?
>
> John
> -- 
> John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
> linville at tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.
>
> --
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>