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I am using Vista Ultimate (man roar) on a moderately beefish machine. I gets my fancytastic effects and everything. The irony is I find myself thinking, fuck, where is all the software? I thought Macs had no software. I suppose if I wanted to be zapping aliens and masturbating furiously I'd be fine. However, I'd like a decent mail client, a decent irc, aim, and jabber client, and web browser. At the moment, I'm using:

* shredder - nightly builds of thunderbird
* shiretoko - nightly builds of firefox
* (I also use IE8, which is really quite nice)
* nothing - this is where ichat goes

I've got enough ram to run Leopard Server in a virtual environment, but come on, that's pathetic.

For the rest of it, I've got Office 211221122 with SP5 and it's swanky. But really, my life is empty without jabber. I was thinking, just like we have firefox and thunderbird that somebody had ripped chatzilla out of mozilla and named it something funny. However, I can't seem to find it. And, frankly, Mozilla sucks.

Also, tabs.

halp?

avriette wrote:I suppose if I wanted to be zapping aliens and masturbating furiously I'd be fine

I have nothing useful contribute, except to immortalize this statement.

Well what software are ya looking for?

You say you already have Outlook MMVII and Thunderbird for mail. That's about as goods as it gets.

For a chat client I know Pidgin and Trillian work on Vista. They're not so good for irc though. I use mIRC or KVirc for that.

For a browser, you said you already have IE8 and Firefox. The only other alternative I would suggest is Opera.

you like IE8?


and you claim to be a nerd. for SHAME!

What protocols do you need to support on chat?

chicken n waffles wrote:you like IE8?


and you claim to be a nerd. for SHAME!

You can criticize them when you've worked there, and seen what goes into the code. And, if you can't acknowledge that IE8 is a major leap over IE7 and IE6 and IE5, and so on down the line, you're being a bigot. And you like Vista, which is a marked improvement over XP, which didn't even have a kernel worth using, and was a pile of parts left over from NT4 which itself became Windows 2000, which was also an aborted fetus of an operating system. And those decrepit parts, I probably don't need to remind anyone, came from DEC engineers who bequeathed to us the most hated and disgusting (but, granted, rock fucking stable) operating system, VMS. And, then there's CP/M and DOS and Interix, so don't friggin get me started.

IE8 is good software. It's bad users that fuck up the world. Software requires fingers to break.

I could launch into your average rant about the quality of open source software, but I am sure everyone's heard enough software ranting today. And I'm not even sure whether you were being sarcastic. Besides which, I don't think I've ever referred to myself as a nerd. Asshole, arrogant, fascist, obstinate, pedantic, misanthropic, sure. But nerd has such negative connotations.

Have you gotten your BOFH on today?

ElZorro wrote:What protocols do you need to support on chat?

i use aim and jabber (and zeroconf/rendezvous/bonjour, less), irc fairly frequently. I've become a paranoiac of late, so I don't actually use any plaintext instant messaging protocol. So, I use ssl'd irc servers, ssl'd aim, ssl'd jabber. I use pidgin on Linux, but it entirely lacks the features I want, it's buggy, and ugly. I use Konversation for IRC, which works perfectly.

On the Mac I generally build myself a copy of Irssi because Apple can't sully iChat with IRC (or maybe telnet is too hard a protocol to master), and that works well because it supports irc+ssl, and iChat is pretty and pleasant with ssl and jabber/aim/zeroconf.

Browser wise, on windows, I'm set. Mail, yep. Irc, well, I can't have Irssi, mIrc is monstrous, Trillian is okay, but nagware and doesn't "do everything."

Am I really saying that I'm on a PC and I don't have adequate software? Isn't that the whole point? I'd have the software if I ran Linux on it, but this robs me of Outlook and IE and things like Visio and Project. Incidentally, I'd do this that way, run Linux on the machine, and then run Vista in a guest – it's safer that way anyways – but I'm irritated by not having any hardware acceleration in the virtual environment, when the interface is so perty in Vista.

It just seems to lack software except for the two abovementioned activities. And I don't gotta work on my arms.

"nerd" is a badge of honor 'round these parts these days. haven't you heard? geeky is the new "chic"... or something.

anyway, ie8 is indeed better than 7, 6, 5, and so on. just like the hyundai elantra is better than whatever partial birth abortion of a car hyundai offered 10 years ago (still the elantra?) doesn't mean i'll drive one . i find it slow to load and render certain sites (slower than firefox, at least), horribly designed from an aesthetic standpoint, and it crashes 10 times as frequently.

i liked win2000 and xp for what they were; generally rock-solid operating systems that didn't require lots of HP to run. i have had no problems with vista so far because unlike johnny numbnuts, i didn't throw vista on a 5-year-old box with a pentium 4 and 512 mb of ram and expect it to run super spiffy smoothly.

avriette wrote:

ElZorro wrote:What protocols do you need to support on chat?

i use aim and jabber (and zeroconf/rendezvous/bonjour, less), irc fairly frequently.

Depending on your trust in the Google Cloud, I'd consider Google Talk and/or Gmail Chat. Simple, updated fairly often, and should have what you want. Work has seen as fit to block the site, so I can't verify the existence of a Mac download, but I'm 90% sure there is.

avriette wrote:

ElZorro wrote:What protocols do you need to support on chat?

i use aim and jabber (and zeroconf/rendezvous/bonjour, less), irc fairly frequently. I've become a paranoiac of late, so I don't actually use any plaintext instant messaging protocol. So, I use ssl'd irc servers, ssl'd aim, ssl'd jabber. I use pidgin on Linux, but it entirely lacks the features I want, it's buggy, and ugly. I use Konversation for IRC, which works perfectly.

On the Mac I generally build myself a copy of Irssi because Apple can't sully iChat with IRC (or maybe telnet is too hard a protocol to master), and that works well because it supports irc+ssl, and iChat is pretty and pleasant with ssl and jabber/aim/zeroconf.

Browser wise, on windows, I'm set. Mail, yep. Irc, well, I can't have Irssi, mIrc is monstrous, Trillian is okay, but nagware and doesn't "do everything."

Am I really saying that I'm on a PC and I don't have adequate software? Isn't that the whole point? I'd have the software if I ran Linux on it, but this robs me of Outlook and IE and things like Visio and Project. Incidentally, I'd do this that way, run Linux on the machine, and then run Vista in a guest – it's safer that way anyways – but I'm irritated by not having any hardware acceleration in the virtual environment, when the interface is so perty in Vista.

It just seems to lack software except for the two abovementioned activities. And I don't gotta work on my arms.

Hmm... I don't think there's so of a lack of software as there is a lack of software that does exactly what YOU want it to do. It seems like you're kind of particular. Which is fine, but it's kinda hard to change gears that way.

Like I said for chat (minus IRC) my choice is Pidgin, hands down. It supports:
* AIM
* Bonjour
* Gadu-Gadu
* Google Talk
* Groupwise
* ICQ
* IRC
* MSN
* MySpaceIM
* QQ
* SILC
* SIMPLE
* Sametime
* XMPP (jabber)
* Yahoo!
* Zephyr

For IRC KVirc is a great tool. Not as overbearing a mIRC but still gives you the freedom to fiddle around with it's innards.

chicken n waffles wrote: anyway, ie8 is indeed better than 7, 6, 5, and so on. ... i find it slow to load and render certain sites (slower than firefox, at least), horribly designed from an aesthetic standpoint, and it crashes 10 times as frequently.

Really? I find it renders faster than the nightlies of firefox, which render faster than the current firefox. I wonder what the difference is. Maybe different content – I kinda stay away from "rich" pages, and it seems to work pretty swell for simpler pages.

i liked win2000 and xp for what they were; generally rock-solid operating systems that didn't require lots of HP to run.

My problems were very much from a design and implementation standpoint. I really, really didn't like the kernel and ip stack. I also didn't like the way the UI was hammered into the OS. This has substantially changed.

i have had no problems with vista so far because unlike johnny numbnuts, i didn't throw vista on a 5-year-old box with a pentium 4 and 512 mb of ram and expect it to run super spiffy smoothly.

Vista runs on Origami. I have run it just fine on a 3.2ghz P4 with 2gb of ram (I realize that's not 512mb, but it's still half – or less – as much as you and I are using) and it was pretty neat. Faster, even, than OpenSolaris or Kubuntu/KDE4.1. I think that says a lot. On the other hand, Vista is a lot better at offloading the load to the GPU, and the machine in question had a QuadroFX 1500. It was 5 years old, though.

Libra Monkee wrote: Hmm... I don't think there's so of a lack of software as there is a lack of software that does exactly what YOU want it to do. It seems like you're kind of particular. Which is fine, but it's kinda hard to change gears that way.

Ding! Sorry, that's exactly the problem and I didn't realize it. I just realized. The problem is I'm coming from a Mac and expecting things to be like a Mac. And really, the Mac Way is to do everything as retardedly stupid as possible. This means One True App and Nothing Else. I guess this is where we get into analogies like PC's being hot-rods and Macs being econoboxes and the like.

My fault. On Unix, somebody should have pointed out that I'm happy to use any number of programs – but on Unix the diversity is just so diverse (and if you don't like it, you can change it!) – that you can really get the exact functionality you want. It's the immutability of the existing set of applications for Windows that I have issue with.

I'll be using Pidgin. Ho hum. Thanks for the smack upside the head, Mr. Schloben.

For IRC KVirc is a great tool. Not as overbearing a mIRC but still gives you the freedom to fiddle around with it's innards.

I'm going to be a dick and say securecrt + screen + irssi.