Obnoxious noises in Apple Mail - how to silence?

It's easily the best, and best supported, OS X user agent.
Plus, the guy was 100% clear about where the money is going.
Not to mention it was an already existing program people
could evaluate before tossing any money at it.

Where's the rip in that?

Can time-limited trials of the "full" version be offered? No.
You may blame Apple for that.

Billy Y..

 

Nope. Usenet will cost more. As you'd use it, a lot more. Example,
since you mentioned Youtube -

https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html

| Google Global Cache

| We aim to deliver Google content and services as close to users as
| possible in order to provide the best possible performance and lowest
| cost for network operators to serve traffic demanded by their subscribers.

| With GGC, network operators and Internet Service Providers deploy a
| small number of Google servers inside their network to serve popular
| Google content, including YouTube.

Billy Y..

 

1) Almost all developers make more from the MAS because they get more
exposure. The exception is companies that already have well established
products, and even there... Barebones dropped the price of BBEdit by
2/3 and seems to be quite happy offering MAS and non-MAS versions.

2) you can always make a demo available outside the MAS.

 

In message <lkei0r$21a$>

That's simply not true. Developers are free to have demo version if they
want. There's a whole big web out there and there is no exclusivity with
the MAS.

 

unless they can't, because their app won't work outside of the mac app
store, such as if it uses icloud.

regardless, requiring the user to go hunt down a demo version somewhere
else is ridiculous.

the lack of demo versions also exists for the ios app store and there
is no alternate method even if the developer wanted to.

 

Tin (and presumably any other newsreader) can show anything and
everything that exists on any particular news server. Oh - you
want photos, or video? Fire up a web browser, video player, etc.

Tin can also save this junk to a file, for those who can't live
without it. Then, there are probably some web hosts that decode
all this stuff and offer it - an old friend had one (News2Me.COM)
up for a while, but I see it's no longer there. Just a guess,
but I'd suspect it was croaked by the DMCA.

Why? When traffic is continually increasing, "slide into obscurity"
does not follow...

....even when it's unwanted, abusive crap. People _are_ using it.

You should find that informative -- the audience you're seeking to
serve prefers web sites. Not to mention I personally would greatly
prefer they use them.

Usenet is doing quite well where access restrictions effectively reduce
the crap to a tolerable level. The Panix hierarchy (local groups only
available to Panix customers) is an excellent example.

I think you're confusing & conflating the quality of the tools with the
quality of the users. A "better" newsreader is not going to suddenly
transform an idiot into a polite, well-spoken human being.

Well, pushing those costs onto third parties is not my idea of a
solution. If something fails, I think that's because it wasn't good
enough to carry its own weight. Usenet is not a charity...

Again, it's not the software, it's the content.

Why would we (maintainers of Usenet) pursue anything that's only going
going to pile yet more inappropiate load on a system that is not meant
to support any of it?

By the way... The Panix reader servers only carry (at this moment) 9550
text groups. There may be a few binary groups in these, but I doubt it.

Huh? I'm a very heavy user of email for commercial purposes. I pay
for it. How much do you think 15TB a day of email would cost?

Email is a mission-critical service, and is handled accordingly.
Usenet is not. Usenet is a best-effort service.

Anyone can generate income with a web site. Usenet is not a
commercial service. The charters of most groups forbid, or at
least discourage, commercial use.

Again, Usenet is not a commercial service. Further, I suspect
the massive load created by traffic Usenet was never intended to
support is a significant factor in many ISPs deciding to just
stop providing it, at all.

What exactly is wrong with using HTTP to serve HTTP content?

Is it that it costs too much...

....so it seems.

Well, I don't want to pay for it, either.

I don't see any mutual exclusivity here.

She should use a web browser.

Most can't build it, true, but it does compile fine on Mac OS. I
suppose I could build and offer the binaries to those who'd like to
use it. If someone hasn't already (I haven't looked). I could also
easily add a script to invoke the terminal emulator and run it.

Well, yea, of course not.

Here you want us to be charitable, but elsewhere you want us to buy
(or at least fund the development of) your "open source." Nobody is
paid anything for their work on tin, or slrn. Nothing. Not one cent.

And this will execute under how many different operating systems?

Tin builds and runs on plenty of them - http://www.tin.org/builds.html

Again, I must say, geez. Feel free to fire up your prefered search
and replace tool and regex your way to happiness.

You can't call it open source if you want to sell it.

Why not? It still works perfectly.

Well, after you've patched art, have a whack at bitmap.

Tin is not going to cater to how people _ABUSE_ Usenet. Not in 2014,
not ever. I seriously doubt slrn ever will, too.

I think you need some experience maintaining NNTP and NNRP servers.

I'm very happy with it as it is. I _don't want_ photos, video, et cetera.
Just say it with words, and perhaps a cite or two, and I'll be happy.

This is what HTTP does so well.

So, use a non-group-centric protocol.

Yes, it is. Does that justify your piling yet more load on a service
never intended to support (any of) it?

No - most servers expire stuff, and in particular, expire the material
you'd like to clog them with quite rapidly. There are some archives,
but for the the text groups.

No, the cost is essentially the same. Just because no one is forcing
you to pay for it does not mean no one at all has to cover the costs.

Somebody is absolutely, positively paying for it.

DejaNews. R.I.P.

There are some people who save things, ala olduse.net - but are they
going to want to archive massive amounts of your data? I think not.

Again, who is going to pay for all this?

We don't care. We're happy with what we have, and don't like freeloading
interlopers piling on the work, and expenses, of maintaining the system.

Huh? All it takes is a quick, and shallow, perusal of the sources.

Huh? You want to sell your own code, but you want us to write it for free?
Speaking of unprofessional.

I merely suggested you give it a look, and benefit from their decades of
experience creating a newsreader that works well in the real world.

How does the existence a transportable library relate to getting the
IETF, et al., to agree to support your intended uses of Usenet?

Again, you can avoid a lot of that by simply observing what others have
done to fix or work around them.

I don't see how you can say that - you don't know any of them, nor how
they work, nor what they want to accomplish. Speaking of disingenuous.

Billy Y..

 

Already answered. My corporate policy has always been software as a
service, and things get open sourced once development costs have been
covered. You, or anyone, is welcome to cover those costs individually
or collectively via crowd funding, or you can default to the model of
waiting until there is a product to buy.

But, wait, there is a line at the end of the tunnel! I'm far enough
along that I want to do MIME handling, and in searching around for that
I *finally* came across a library for NNTP that looks reasonably well
done. MailCore (libmailcore.com) is a Cocoa wrapper for LibEtPan
(etpan.org), which itself supports not only IMAP/POP/SMTP email, but
NNTP and RSS/Atom feeds. It's something I wish I would have found 2
months ago.

That said, I'm not sure I'm going to switch my NNTP framework to
wrapping it. It is at a lower level than is useful for a modern
newsreader (e.g., hardcoded things like XOVER rather than CAPABILITIES
detection, etc.), but it appears to be a great starting point for anyone
who wants/needs something C-based. Far, far better than having do dig
out something useful from the likes of tin or slrn.

 

Like I said, *of course* people have been pushing their proprietary CDNs
to do what Usenet could have been doing all along. If I were an ISP,
I'd rather have one generic CDN protocol on servers that I control
rather than having hundreds of content providers trying to co-locate
their own black box hardware inside my operation. Usenet can benefit
*everyone*, not just the big players like Google.

 

So it's just not that interesting. Pre-orders have been around for
ages. My ideal in crowdfunding is to offer people something they don't
usually get from a company. I mean, if all the costs are covered before
work even begins, it just doesn't seem right to *not* give away the
software for free, and possibly go the extra mile of open sourcing the
efforts. I mean, in any other contract work for hire that I do, I don't
get to keep the code, so I'd have to be a pretty big dick to treat
*people* worse than I treat *companies*.

It's a general problem with crowdfunding, not that particular project.
When the costs are covered ahead of time, there is no risk taken on by
the project. A decent person/company would offer something in return
for that, not just a $50 value for your $50 investment. Possibly,
maybe, that is, unless the project fails to deliver or was an outright
scam from the beginning.

Again, not true. Anyone who could bother to support switches for in-app
purchases and/or subscriptions can just as easily turn things on/off
based on time. There are *thousands* of games that ship with a
"freemium" model that starts off with all gauges on MAX and then slowly
degrade based on usage. All evidence is against your position.

 

Anyone can post to Youtube.

But, you're continually ignoring the fact that Usenet was not created
nor intended to do this.

Where do you get hundreds?

"My corporate policy has always been software as a service..."

Again, it all comes down to who's paying for it. In addition to some
Usenet admin experience, you'd benefit from a bit of ISP experience as
well.

_Something_ may benefit everyone. Usenet is not it. You're putting
the cart before the horse. It'd be best to first find a horse.

Billy Y..

 

In this respect, MailMate easily qualifies.

And you're offering ... what exactly?

You might want to read Apple's policy (requires registration to view) -

https://developer.apple.com/appstore/mac/resources/approval/guidelines.html

Billy Y..

 

The demo version are often called "Lite". They are fere, give you a
taste of the full version but have a number of features disabled.

 

sometimes they do that and sometimes they're time-limited, or with
games, level-limited.

apps that aren't in the app store can do the same thing.

 

Yep. Unforuntaely there's no real "standard" way for naming apps. Some
developers reverse that by using a normal name for the free / cheaper
version, and then tacking "Pro" on the end of the more expensive
version.

 

Ditto!
--
"The world flatters the elephant and tramples on the ant." --Indian
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://antfarm.ma.cx (Personal Web Site)
/ /\ /\ \ Ant's Quality Foraged Links: http://aqfl.net
| |o o| |
\ _ / If crediting, then use Ant nickname and AQFL URL/link.
( ) If e-mailing, then axe ANT from its address if needed.
Ant is currently not listening to any songs on this computer.

 

Again, it all comes down to who's paying for it. In addition to some

So -- would you rather have this...

http://preview.tinyurl.com/njxvlaq -or-
http://arstechnica.com/information-...opping-packets-every-day-over-money-disputes/

| Level 3 claims six ISPs dropping packets every day over money disputes
|
| Network provider doesn't name and shame ISPs guilty of "permanent
| congestion."
|
| by Jon Brodkin - May 5 2014, 10:25am MST
|
| Network operator Level 3, which has asked the FCC to protect it from
| "arbitrary access charges" that ISPs want in exchange for accepting
| Internet traffic, today claimed that six consumer broadband providers
| have allowed a state of "permanent congestion" by refusing to upgrade
| peering connections for the past year.
|
| Level 3 and Cogent, another network operator, have been involved in
| disputes with ISPs over whether they should pay for the right to send
| them traffic. ISPs have demanded payment in exchange for accepting
| streaming video and other data that is passed from the network providers
| to ISPs and eventually to consumers.
|
| When the interconnections aren't upgraded, it can lead to congestion and
| dropped packets, as we wrote previously regarding a dispute between
| Cogent and Verizon. In a blog post today, Level 3 VP Mark Taylor wrote:
|
| A port that is on average utilized at 90 percent will be saturated,
| dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports
| saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12
| have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer)
| in the process of making upgrades--this is business as usual and happens
| occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change
| providers.
|
| That leaves the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of
| the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has
| been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment
| capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to
| their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests
| their customers make for content.
|
| Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in
| Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large
| Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in
| their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have
| multiple Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers.
|
| [...]

....or a few CDNs co-locate their own servers at your ISP?

Billy Y..

 

Your argument is not consistent. If you call the bulk of traffic
"junk", you don't get to hold it up as a success story. The landscape
is much more complex than that, as we all know. Your flawed logic
aside, the fact remains that text discussions on Usenet peaked long ago.
The decline is so bad that, hell, I can't even find detailed statistics
anymore that could either support or refute me!

Right . . . using it for things that tin does *not* support very well.

I disagree. Those same masses have flocked to mobile apps as well.
What they want clearly is not web-centric, so the rational mind would
look to what features are offered by other services that are not
commonly offered by Usenet clients.

That's your straw man, not mine. My only desire is to increase the
*number* of people on Usenet. A better client *will also* go a long way
to attracting people who are discerning but don't have the technical
skills/desire to run command line tools. That includes a feature not
offered by most web sites: the ability to filter out the morons.

It's not "pushing" costs, it's simply more efficient allocation of
resources. It is *stupid* to have every leaf node individually go to a
central server to get the same content over and over. It's better for
everyone to pull from a local cache instead. Again, we could argue
about whether or not NNTP is the best way to build such a CDN, but
that's another discussion.

For most people, there is NO difference. Most people don't know HTTP
from NNTP from XMPP from RSS/XML from EIEIO. All they know is that they
want to *do* something, and some software makes it easy where other
software makes it hard.

Wrong perspective. You're in a *service* industry, so do your fucking
job and start better serving the needs of the people. If you don't,
then you should not be at all surprised when they flock away to services
that do. Nor should you be surprised when even *more* "inappropriate"
traffic takes over the network. It is *you* who is to blame for the
neighborhood going to hell.

Great, for those that are part of that special in-crowd. But there is a
large continuum between that and Penny Arcade's "Shitcock".

Reread your own post. You said "directly, at least". I don't know
about you, but *I* certainly don't have anyone sending me money directly
in email (or Usenet). They are a loss leader, lumped in with other
support and/or communication cost that are a part of doing business.

So the problem with Usenet binaries is not that there are 15TB daily,
but that there *may* be wasteful overhead on the distribution of that
content. That problem, if it exists, is something that could easily be
addressed if the "maintainers of Usenet" really cared to.

It's all very fluid. Some people now consider Twitter or Facebook to be
more mission-critical. Or web SEO. Hell, there are a ton of web sites
that would rather have to use a contact form than send them an email.
Again, once you stop cherry picking, the evidence is actually against
your position.

Then it's a shame that new groups can *never* be created . . .

Please. As I have noted and linked to, the changes are mainly due to
"questionable" content more than the bandwidth or disk space used. I
burn through more bandwidth these days streaming video
(Hulu/Netflix/YouTube/etc.) than I ever did (or ever will) with Usenet.

There is no such thing as HTTP content. Like NNTP, HTTP is merely a
protocol that can be used to *deliver* content. Now, you could
certainly argue that it does a better job for delivering binary content
than Usenet, but it's all debatable depending on the needs you have.
Given all the "cloud" BS that get thrown around, you'd think people
might take a closer look at how NNTP might better serve their needs.

Again, it's that it is limited to favor what it was designed to do,
which might not be what people *really* want to do. I don't *want* to
shove news into a big XML file that an RSS reader has to poll regularly
and download entirely over HTTP, and then jump through hoops to track
what is or isn't "new". But somehow that became preferable to just
making a post to Usenet, despite the obviously increased overhead and
costs.

Tough. Everybody pays, and the cost is usually *higher* when you can't
account how you're paying for something.

It's not, but the rational thing to do is follow best practices wherever
possible.

Point to me a good web-based Usenet client. Must support subscriptions
and filtering.

I hope you're being obtuse on purpose. It's not that it won't *build*
on a Mac, it's that a Mac user expects a Mac app to run in some place
other than Terminal. They want WIMP, and you know it.

No! Again, it's only "of course not" because the developers are stuck
with some crappy ol' code they can't be bothered to modernize. The fact
that tin is increasingly brittle is not something that should be
acceptable.

They are, just not in any way that's been accounted for. I mean, I
absolutely *could* release what I'm doing for free, too, but not without
having some way to otherwise pay my bills. I respect people enough to
present them with the reality of economics, not hide it behind a day job
or advertising or whatever other ways "free" things get paid for.

All the ones I'm being paid to get it running on.

Great for people who still use tin on fringe systems. You sound a lot
like the OpenSSL goons who couldn't bear to excise similar crap from
their code. Hell, I'm not even going to bother testing what I'm doing
on Macs prior to 10.9. Not unless somebody is going to cover supporting
older systems, of course.

Again, I point to it as a symptom of a project's underlying disease.
There are *scores* of ugliness that I'd have to undo to make the code
reasonable. And if *they* cared, they'd already have taken steps to
make it better. Since that's not the case, they have self-selected for
a poor developer community, and should not be surprised when I don't
want to be a part of that.

You're not lying to me.

Already done. Like I said previously, I based it on NSScanner and
NSIndexSet. Blazingly fast compared to MT-NW on a 2MB newsrc I tested
with; can't say how it'd compare to tin. The code is *way* more
readable, though. Perhaps you'll see it someday.

Look, we get it! Anything that makes tin still relevant is the True
Scotsman of Usenet usage, and anything that makes tin look bad is
horrible abuse. Bury that dead horse already.

I'd rather update the protocol to something more in line with how the
CDN is being used.

Good for you, old man. But the world has moved on, what with the kids
and their Twattering and FaceBorking. Again, it's all a question of
whether or not what you've built in the past can be built on in the
future. If not, say goodnight Gracie.

No, it doesn't. I'm not going to go too far down another protocol
branch in this thread, but it will be clear to anyone who has ever tried
to get structured content off of a website knows that there is *nothing*
it brings to game for standardizing contact information.

Yes. The proper perspective is to *fix* the service to support its
actual utility. Clearly you'd prefer to fossilize.

What "most" servers do is not the issue. As long as there is still a
market for *any* service with long retention times, you have a means to
that end.

Again, you've got the economics all wrong. A shared cost is not
necessarily a *higher* cost; it is more often just the opposite.

I am. And you are. As are thousands of others. Because we're all
pooling our resources, we exploit economies of scale and things are
cheaper for us. Compare that to the crappy double-dipping that
companies are screwing around with and it should be clear that you're
completely wrong on these issues.

You support my point. My file is on *Usenet*, not DejaNews.

They do. You can argue that maybe they shouldn't, or that they might
not in the future. But that *is* the state of things today for Usenet,
which is far more than can be said for all the newcomer cloud services.

We all are. It's not a problem, because it's a better way to do this
than the alternatives.

As someone who has bothered to go farther than that myself, you're full
of it. I already gave a simple example: I want to use tin as the basis
for nntp support in cURL. Show me the quick, shallow hooks that can
make it happen.

Straw man again. I never said you should be doing anything for free. I
merely said it is unprofessional to be a "brogrammer".

And I told you what I saw. Either you can take a step back and look at
it from a neutral perspective, or you can continue to bury your head in
the sand and think that everything is just perfect. It's all to clear
which choice you're making.

It doesn't. That was just another straw man *you* threw in there as a
distraction. My point was that tin and slrn probably *do* adhere to the
standards much better at their place in the SDLC than any new
implementation does, and that is why it is a shame that what has been
done by them cannot be reused.

Again, not if those fixes are buried deep in spaghetti code.

I know them by how they interact with other people, and how they
approach criticism. For example, one person who claimed to be a core
FreeBSD developer flat-out stated that they didn't care about anyone who
didn't submit code to the project. What a shitty way to be dismissive
of people who could otherwise help! That's a toxic environment, and I
will not be a part of a community that is like that.

 

How? It certainly doesn't let me.

I'm not ignoring it. It's irrelevant given the realities of what Usenet
*is*. The proper approach is to make it stronger for how it *is* used,
not moan and cry about how it's not being used right.

I use my brain to think about the future. Try it. It's pretty cool!

If someone wants to pay me to solve their problems, great. That's kinda
what I do. If they instead just want to complain about their problem
and expect free sympathy . . . get an intern, maybe?

The horse was there long before the cart, but the ISPs killed it. As
you well know, even without them, the traffic keeps going up . . .

 

Perhaps you'd like to explicitly state what your problem there is?

As I've said, you'll need to take this up with the IETF. Example -

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-usefor-useage-01

And a bit of helpful guidance -

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcfaq.html

If you don't resolve this first, propagation of your desired content will
suck, big time. Arts can, among other parameters, be rejected by size, and
each server can be set to a specific limit independently.

And, even if you do succeed in revising the protocol, that's no guarantee
anyone will impliment it. "Make it stronger" involves a significant amount
of money - the 14TB+ of daily crap isn't going away, and you want to pile
yet more - who will be paying for that? The same people paying for the
current load, you say? Nope - a good number of them are already ignoring
it.

Thus, there's the very real possibility your content will wind up on a mere
handful of hosts, like Altopia. If it can get there in the first place.

Since you appear not enamored with Google (centralized control of data),
this cold, hard fact should give you pause...

You and your brain should take a good, hard look at all the consolidation
in vendors, including CDNs, going on right now. Speaking of (not) cool.

http://www.bizety.com/2014/04/07/tough-road-ahead-limelight-networks/

Nobody's going to pay you to create yet more problems.

And - hard as it is to believe - I'm talking about who pays for the
additional resources you want to eat. How could you possibly ignore
that, to say nothing of confusing it with what you might get paid?

I did a bit of looking around trying to answer my own question, and
found, for example, this illuminating bit of info -

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/26555

| Subject: [ruby-talk:26555] Re: Selector Namespaces: A Standard Feature
| for Smalltalk?
| From: "David Simmons" <david.simmons smallscript.net>
| Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 06:06:56 +0900
|
| Doc O'Leary,
|
| I've read your post/response and I don't know how to respond. You seem to
| think that "versioning" is the solution to all the ills when I've pointed
| out issues that versioning simply doesn't address. And my posts were merely
| augmenting/clarifying items relating the JavaScript 2.0 references cited in
| the original post on selector-namespaces.
|
| I've also made it abundantly clear that versioning is already a supported
| language option and that the PRAGMATIC issue is that in REAL situations of
| just-in-time deployment it NOT always an option. Why are you ignoring the
| realities of software deployment and telling me what I already know about
| the ideals of versioning.
|
| You also prattle on about namespaces with non-specific "dogma", yet you
| could not have had experience with "selector namespaces" which ARE NOT just
| "namespaces" as we see in other systems. They are a NEW Unifying Feature for
| Dynamic Languages that provide a more general solution to what SOME static
| languages have provided in the form of "public", "private", "protected".
|
| They are not meant to be a SUBSTITUTE or REPLACEMENT for versioning [rather
| they augment it], they are designed to address REAL issues [which one can
| demonstrate "versioning" does not adequately address; as per one (or more)
| of my posts] in the area of effective/reliable deployment in 3rd party late
| integration scenarios.
|
| -- Dave S. [www.smallscript.org]

Gosh. At this point I'm feeling quite like Mr Simmons did 13+ years ago.

The fact that the amount of abuse has grown to be in the vicinity of the
load you'd like to dump on Usenet does not in any way whatsoever justify
it, nor does it render it anything other the abuse it actually is, period.

To be 100% clear, "it" immediately above includes your intended traffic.

If you don't want to be an abuser, you must first get the protocol
revised to include your intended use of it.

Why should they devote any of their time, money, and resources to
handling daily terabyte loads of abusive, inappropiate content?

Yea, some of them filter out most of the junk, but others, lacking
the modest expertise required to even do that, just throw out the
baby with the bath water.

And this justifies nothing, at all.

Billy Y..

 

I'm not sure how. You can either pay them directly for a $50 license or
go through crowdfunding to pay $50 for a license. What am I missing?

Nothing. I'm not running a crowdfunding campaign. But, if someone
wanted to run one for me, I would do just as I've said: consider it a
work for hire, put out the app for free to everyone, and make the source
code available.

I've read it many times. You might want to state exactly where you
think thousands of approved games have gone wrong.