[Klug-general] top-posting - and other nonsense

[Karl Lattimer]

Ooooooh top posting!

What about reply-to munging... Thats a whole different thread ;P

In all serious this is the most anally retentive thread I've ever  
perused, I must admit I didn't read all the posts, but some of them  
were pretty horrendously anal.

As far as I'm concerned top posting isn't bad, however, replying in a  
context with no reference is. if that reference is below the text or  
intermingled within the text it doesn't matter... When people  
intermingle and they don't trim irrelevant crap extending the email  
with multiple levels of > to extra-ordinary proportions (which some  
have been guilty of on this topic), they should probably be referred  
to neticate elocution lessons, another peev is when people break down  
an email too much, replying to every sentence in turn.

However, I just don't care ;)

I see this topic is finally coming to an end, after spamming my  
mailbox for 2 days (was it more than that?).

Other than the above topic, I was really quite interested in some of  
the topics posted here recently, one of which was the KLUG day out to  
bletchley park. I'd love to join that troop especially if we can rent  
an old VW van with the Free Software Machine sprayed on the side in  
some gaudy colours. George is nominated to dye his hair blonde and  
wear a neckerchief in the style of scooby doo, I'll be shaggy, and  
erm, Dan can be scooby (on account of the hair) ;P Other nominations  
for characters should be made in writing.

With regard to the recent stuff about vista, I tried it, I thought it  
was vastly inferior in gui effects with what is possible using AIGLX  
and a reasonably stable composite manager (scratch beryl, until  
verson 45521231.1), bitlocker is dumb, and has a serious back door in  
it (which microsoft have denied, but is required by US law according  
to the NSA and certain terms of the export encryption ban), security  
in vista is like having a plate glass window in your shop front at  
night that calls the shopkeeper to ask them if they want to let  
anyone/everyone who passes in, it sort of looks secure to honest  
people, but ram raiders know how brittle it is. Dual booting with  
bitlocker shouldn't be a problem, as it doesn't encrypt the whole  
disc, or the master boot record, which is where the important stuff  
happens, also microsoft are only allowed to use certain bits of  
hardware to calculate the host hardware key for the 'trusted' (not  
the user, just trust microsoft ;P) computing platform now after WGA  
went tits three or four times. I believe the hardware key is down to  
motherboard chipset and microprocessor only as graphics cards set off  
WGA piracy warnings, and memory/hard disc are ordinary upgrades. I  
remember a day when microsoft made their software incredibly easy to  
duplicate in order to flood the market and get windows onto more  
computers than OS/2 and simply made money on OEM distribution...  
Maybe they'll return to this philosophy when people get so peeved  
with vista they /switch to apple/linux/bsd/solaris/<insert your unix  
here>.

I'd love to get down to one of the kent computer fairs however I've  
heard they aren't as, erm shady as the ones up north... We used to be  
able to get PS2s chipped while you wait, and buy a whole host of  
pirate software, movies, games... and cool hardware stuff like cable  
cubes, PIC controlled satellite validation cards (they were seriously  
cool!!), macrovision removers, I even saw a blue box on sale once,  
now that takes me back... The rule of thumb with a computer fair in  
newcastle was to get there before 3pm because thats generally when  
the police arrived.

Ahhh nostalgia isn't what it used to be

K,