I’m typing this on a Mac, but as my primary machines are now both Linux boxes I feel no problem laughing my guts out to The Simpsons parodying Apple. I’d love to continue to be an Apple customer, but they’ve fucked me over too many times for me to give them any more money. If we want an Apple that listens to their customers, we need to starve the beast for a while so they can see that the customer is always right, rather than Steve Jobs’ insane visions. It should be so simple: build beautiful boxes that work, put a sexy version of UNIX on them and sell ‘em for 10% over market rate.
Google Groups long-standing failure now fixed!
There’s been a long-standing problem with Google Groups and Gmail: you couldn’t subscribe to a mailing list using your Gmail account with anything other than your Gmail address, even if you used Gmail’s built-in ability to change the From header. This has pissed me off tremendously: there’s an absolute ton of returned e-mail from mailing lists which I have never resent (because I’m lazy) - rejected because one Google service couldn’t talk to another.
This seems to have been resolved at last - although not automatically. The way you solve it is easy - you can now add multiple addresses in Edit My Account. You have to confirm them, but it now seems to work. You can’t send to Groups from any account, but you can now set for each mailing list which of your set e-mail addresses it should subscribe with.
There is still one major problem with Google Groups: that is the big pile of shitty spam and lamers that comes flooding out of it’s NNTP server on to the rest of the Internet. See The Usenet Improvement Project for details. It’s the first thing you have to do in order to be able to actually read USENET: filter posts with Message-ID’s from Google Groups. Google Groups is a double-edged sword: it’s archived the best of USENET and it’s now in the process of destroying it - which is a shame, as all the Web 2.0 geniuses, despite all their fancy Ajax and JSON have yet to come up with something as efficient and usable as slrn.
Improbulus says she is only buying laptops that are 1kg or less. My Acer is 1.26kg, and I love it.
