On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 2:26 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: Or when the project management consultants ask to see your requirements document and you send it to them in troff and they write back, "I can't open this in Word." Sigh. One of my pet peeves when I got my first job outside of a university environment was that I was expected to drop all of the tools I'd been accustomed to using and start using "the standard", which basically meant something Microsoft based. Even though I was running FreeBSD on my workstation, and not Windows NT. It was somewhat maddening; whenever I tried to use Windows I felt like I was typing in jello because it was so unfamiliar. I finally gave up MH for email (and acme Mail under Plan 9) when I realized this whole "web" thing was here to stay and that GMail had acquired a somewhat reasonable user interface, that email attachments were now the norm even within a single organization, and that I wasn't going to get away from any of it. The world moves, even if not always forward. But I still somewhat resent the idea that the "cloud" is forcing me into a specific model of working that requires I learn a mandated toolset that I don't really care for: I'd rather be able to pick and choose the tools that best suit the problem at hand and my style of working and combine them in ways that are useful to me, but that weren't anticipated by the original authors. I think that's sort of the essence of the Unix tool philosophy, but something that's fallen by the wayside, even under Unix, and I think that's a real shame. - Dan C.

On Sun, 12 Mar 2017, Larry McVoy wrote: [...] A former boss of mine used to get quotes in Word all the time (we were a Unix house); he used to run "strings" against the document, and challenge the supplier with the fact that they were giving a competitor a better deal. To this day, "strings" is still my best Word decoder... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

i wrote: Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen(a)sdaoden.eu> wrote: |Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: ||And it's an annoying chore when companies I actually want ||to deal with send receipts and the like in (godawful) HTML only. .. |And market power is actively misused by major players, but which .. |Turning off the HTML text part takes a button click (or took once |i looked last) ... and it turns out to be too much work. Even |that. I actually realized that this sounded snappish and overly offensive, and i want to apologize for that. It was definitely and absolutely meant as a general statement, like, why walking to the TV and turning it off, if standby is so easy. Something more like this.. --steffen

Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: |>|Turning off the HTML text part takes a button click (or took once ||i looked last) | |No offense taken, but there's no way to turn off the HTML part |when that's the only part--and that is often the case. It is the decision of the sending party what type of message is produced, this i hope is still possible even for purely web-based mail clients. This sender-side decision i was referring to in the post quoted above. Unfortunately your observation is correct, but luckily on this list, and also on most lists that i read! But it seems many administrator tools only ever generate HTML or other rich text log files and statistics, and so on request generating mails to send these as the main body my MUA will support in the future (even though very primitive yet, disallowing additional signature injection, for example). The world turns, and integration progresses, and if you don't move you will be left behind: this is not necessarily something bad. E.g., on FreeBSD many tools in the base system now use a XO (i think) library for generating output, so that the output can be plain text, as normal, but also JSON or XML, and maybe even binary CBOR at some future time, and if there is a correct MIME type then why should Mail not be a valid transport for this, that then can be correctly decoded on the receiver side according to the MIME content type. I for one very much prefer plain text in human interaction. --steffen

On Sun, 12 Mar 2017, Paul Winalski wrote: Giggle... Back when "packet radio" was popular in the Amateur ("ham") radio world, we used to send each other ASCII bombs. Just program say F1 (the "help" key under Messy-Dog) to do a "FORMAT /Y C:" and wait... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."