Mailing list from news?

[Dave Laird]

Good morning, everyone...

James, if you're listening in, perhaps you might be interested in this...
8-)

Would anyone be interested in reading The Used Kharma Lot newsgroups via
e-mail. I ask this question every few years, and until recently there hasn't
been an overwhelming groundswell of interest. However, I recently acquired
the source to the latest version of news2mail, a little program that takes
messages from any given newsgroup and posts them to a mailing list.

Any input? Any comments? Anyone?

Dave
--
Dave Laird (***@kharma.net)
The Used Kharma Lot / The Phoenix Project
Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 10/12/2003
Usenet News server: news.kharma.net
Musicians Calendar and Database access: http://www.kharma.net/calendar.html

An automatic & random thought For the Minute:
On a clear disk you can seek forever.
-- P. Denning

[James Vahn]

Post by Dave Laird
Good morning, everyone...
James, if you're listening in, perhaps you might be interested in this...
8-)

Actually I prefer the other direction-- mail2news converting mailing
lists to news. Still using an old pine and if it does threads I sure
don't know about it. Tin to read, pine for replies. It's a disgusting
habit.


--

[Dave Laird]

Good evening, James...

Post by James Vahn
Actually I prefer the other direction-- mail2news converting mailing
lists to news. Still using an old pine and if it does threads I sure
don't know about it. Tin to read, pine for replies. It's a disgusting
habit.

Oh, I see what you mean!!! <CHORTLE!> That's not a disgusting habit. That's
just good style. Of course, I also meant to say that this would serve as a
two-way gate, news to mail and mail back to news. I'll have to build a
server for it, however, so that it prevents unwanted spammers from gaining
access. I may come back here with other ideas. I've been peering at mailman
again, and although the overhead is pretty steep, that might work,
depending. It's still out for consideration, but I think you're closer than
you might think. ;-)

Dave

[James Vahn]

I'll have to build a server for it, however, so that it prevents

Speaking of which... You've been silent about Red Hat..


--

[Dave Laird]

Good afternoon, James...

Post by James Vahn
Speaking of which... You've been silent about Red Hat..

Oh, you mean the premature end-of-life for RedHat 8.0 in December of this
year and the end-of-life for RedHat 9.0 in 2004? I've been thinking about
this issue for several months. I've considered all kinds of improbable
things, from FreeBSD to Debian, and I haven't really come to any conclusions
yet. I've even looked a bit into the quasi-replacement for RedHat and am
feeling very insecure about it.

If I want the same level of security, the same capabilities, it sounds as if
I am going to have to pay for a licensed copy of the RedHat Enterprise
Edition, and pay an annual fee, and then I get only what I have now, perhaps
with some modest improvements in longevity.

I have even considered Mandrake, since I have seen several servers running
Mandrake that appear to be *very* suspiciously similar to RedHat, both in
the directory tree and the application packages, that also happen to be
pretty securely maintainable. I've also seen Mandrake getting shaky
financially, which means about the time I switch over to their platform, if
they close the doors forever, what have I accomplished?

Right now I'm leaning somewhat toward FreeBSD or Debian, and since I have a
pair of boxes with considerable memory, I may pounce on either idea. I
recently encountered FreeBSD in the wild, and it is so close to being AT&T
Unix and AIX I might even consider it. However, I'll have to take some time
to learn the differences between it and Linux, and having road-tested it,
there are quite a few differences. However, on the plus side, it is rated as
being one of the most secure *nixes in the world, and with the longest shelf
cycle of any version of Linux, to date.

Then there's the Mikrotik firewall/routers that disguise themselves as PC's.
8-)

I guess I've got a year to decide, because shortly here, perhaps over the
holidaze, I will be upgrading Kharma-I to 9.0, Camilla-I to 9.0, the Samba
server to 9.0 and setting up the BETA machines, probably FreeBSD and Debian
are my best guesses at this point in time. I may fiddle around with Mandrake
some more, depending upon what their reaction is to the RedHat ploy.

What are your thoughts?

Dave
--
Dave Laird (***@kharma.net)
The Used Kharma Lot / The Phoenix Project
Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 10/12/2003
Usenet News server: news.kharma.net
Musicians Calendar and Database access: http://www.kharma.net/calendar.html

An automatic & random thought For the Minute:
Keep your mouth shut and people will think you stupid;
Open it and you remove all doubt.

[James Vahn]

Post by Dave Laird
What are your thoughts?

Novell. Btw, their ex-CEO, Ray Noorda, is involved in SCO. And TrollTech
of Qt library fame- the one that KDE is based on. Ray is 79 and thought
to be retiring and cashing out (his hand is in about 20 companies-
http://canopy.com). These may become interesting times.

Novell has been dabbling with Linux since the get-go. Just a few months
ago they let out the news of a Linux distribution. They did this in the
face of the SCO lawsuit. Now with their purchase of SuSE, I think
they're on a roll.


--

[Dave Laird]

Good evening, James...

Post by James Vahn

Post by Dave Laird
What are your thoughts?

Novell. Btw, their ex-CEO, Ray Noorda, is involved in SCO. And TrollTech
of Qt library fame- the one that KDE is based on. Ray is 79 and thought
to be retiring and cashing out (his hand is in about 20 companies-
http://canopy.com). These may become interesting times.

I was aware that Noorda might be considering retirement sometime soon, but I
thought he would still more or less retain control of TrollTech. Then the
other day I saw an article on their website that seemed to suggest that
there changes in the wind. If they are going to change the Qt libraries, my
only hope is that it will be a change for the better. (Better support of
streaming media, MPG's, and a diverse cross-section of other sound and video
types. The new kernel certainly supports it, but right now it takes about
half a dozen different libs to make things work. If Trolltech suddenly were
to come with a workable solution, they would be "king for a day", wouldn't
they? 8-)

Post by James Vahn
Novell has been dabbling with Linux since the get-go. Just a few months
ago they let out the news of a Linux distribution. They did this in the
face of the SCO lawsuit. Now with their purchase of SuSE, I think
they're on a roll.

I know, I've been watching Novell really closely to see what they might do
with Suse. You watch, I cannot help but wonder if they are planning to come
up with a desktop all their own, perhaps with something directly competing
against Sun's OpenOffice and StarOffice. It's rapidly getting to a point, in
my honorable opinion, that something is happening that I never dreamed
feasible-- that we will soon have more high-quality software available under
the Gnu public license than was *ever* written for the Microsoft interface.

There was a *tremendous* amount of software written for Windows of various
flavors, using a variety of compilers and code-builders ranging from
FoxBase, dBase and various other fragrances of the dBase standard. I just
began using a Clipper-compatible compiler the other day that looks, feels,
and even runs a lot like the original Clipper compiler. Incredibly the
completed executables make calls to the Qt libraries, MySQL, runs really
*fast* on a standard KDE desktop (512M of memory) and is quite extensible,
in that you can call the printer daemon and dump the reports directly to the
print spool. I cannot help but wonder if we'll see a resurgence in the
Clipper code format, but maybe not.

I agree with you. Novell bears watching. It doesn't hurt to have them
competing with Sun for market share, not as far as I can tell. 8-)

Dave
--
Dave Laird (***@kharma.net)
The Used Kharma Lot / The Phoenix Project
Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 10/12/2003
Usenet News server: news.kharma.net
Musicians Calendar and Database access: http://www.kharma.net/calendar.html

An automatic & random thought For the Minute:
The reason they're called wisdom teeth is that the experience makes you
wise.

[James Vahn]

Post by Dave Laird
I was aware that Noorda might be considering retirement sometime
soon, but I thought he would still more or less retain control of
TrollTech.

And now we have news about IBM buying Novell... Wham, full circle.
Red Hat becomes insignificant and Gates is outa here...