Subj : scott mcnealy talking out his arse again
To   : Dirk Cap
From : Scott Little
Date : Sat Oct 14 2000 10:59 am

 [ 12 Oct 00 09:14, Dirk Cap wrote to Scott Little ]

 DC>  There is always a header who stores information about this mail.
 DC>  In outlook (and many other mailsoftware) you can look at the core
 DC>  text who was retrieved from the mailservers.

I can also look at the raw files in the mail server spool. Exactly the same 
thing though.

 SL>> be much closer to 1000 bits for a properly formatted HTML
 SL>> document, PLUS the HTTP overhead "to transmit the word 'attack'
 SL>> to an army"
 DC>  What do you want ???

for Scott McNealy and his whole "the network is the computer" nonsense to just 
roll over and die :)

 DC>  A "hidden" header so it "feels" there are only this bytes
 DC> retrieved...

i'm just pointing out that an email is more than the text you see - mail 
readers hide the header/control data (as do most word processors) so it's easy 
for losers to think what they see on screen is all there is.

 DC>  StarOffice is a increadable good piece of "free" software.

quite

 DC>  I don't think you can write it better.

if I could do better i wouldn't need commercial software

 DC>  There is always header
 DC>  "inside" the document. Even the good old WordPerfect has his
 DC>  formatting bytes inside the document.

anything without a predetermined format needs control structures. ASCII is 
predefined, so all you need is the characters. Word documents can have 
formatting anywhere in the text, so those controls have to be embedded in the 
file where required, and interpreted by a special viewer.

 DC>  You could watch it with
 DC>  some sort of debug mode. Very interesting in these days.

a lot of professional writers keep control codes (carriage returns, etc) 
visible so they know exactly what is going on.

 DC>  correct modules, is also "good". Did you know MSWord is a COM
 DC>  object which is runnable hidden, initialized from some other
 DC>  application.

i didn't think about it until i saw excel spreadsheets embedded in a word 
document... i then discovered word documents are compound files, different 
parts of a DOC file are interpreted by different components, which is why it's 
so hard to emulate MS Word - it's not just simple text formatting, there are 
dozens, of programs that read the various data streams in a DOC file.

clicking a PDF from within Internet explorer will also show plainly that the 
program which you're using isn't necessarily the program interpreting the data, 
only displaying it.

 DC>  I don't think this is possible with StarOffice (not for sure)
 DC>  but I tell you it is also "good". (especially with the K environment)

it's good enough. it's not what you would call the Killer App {tm} that Office 
is.

-- Scott Little, 3:712/848@fidonet | slittle@slittle.com

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