my little trick 'echo " " > 090727;date >> 090727; echo " " >> 090727'
worked. But all of the customization I did a couple a days ago seems
to have been lost. Cygwin doesn't manage the dot files as I expect. I
will have to go investigate what broke. I did check this out and it
appears that the system .xemacs for Singular overrides my local one,
since the icon starts that and an xterm. If I start xemacs from the
xterm, it picks up the customication. I just let the line I typed wrap
until I was done, and will try M-q to see if if wrapps. Which it
did.
The major mode for emacs is (fundemental) not text-fill, but the effect is better since it gets the advantage of block text entry with the untimate desire of wordwrap for an ordinary text file.
The only downside of the customization is that the emboldened text is a very crappy quality font. That is a Cygwin problem. Nice font does matter. I wish the Linux, X11 guys would pay more attention to that. There was a web editor I used on Mandriva with the most beautiful font, as well as the basic font that appeared on some Sun Workstation when you ran them as text terminals before starting X11.
At least I found that M-q does paragraph fill, or better current paragraph fill, so you can continue to append to a paragraph in which part of it has been filled and then do the command over to fill the remainder. Emacs always wrap long lines so you can see them fold without losing what you type. Editing long lines has the advantage that you can backspace to an error and fix it.
I got Thunderbird to read news because Microsoft Mail reads newsgroups but doesn't support many of the encodings being used for binaries, notably yEnc.
A mystery is that my password for euphon.org does not work, just as it failed on the mac when I had to type it in. The mail client on the mac does get it right. This suggests that there is a layer of encryption that got turned on that I don't know about. I am in a quandry about what to do with that mail. I am pissed off at register.com for their chinzy greedy policies that I'd like to take the domain away or give it up if I can't get a less-costly more quality of service hosting. I realize that I should keep it as many of the access keys I have are linked to that e-mail. It would be inconvieient ot have to give it it. I'd like to wrest it ways from register.com.
I only need about 10 MB for all of my webhosting, a web site for the domain I bought that the cheap bastards at register.com won't give that away for free or for a very small fee, or bundled in with the domain fee. Their business model is greedy and the margins have come way down, like disk is cheap. They could give away a quota of 50 MB for presonal websites and not lose their margins, but because they are in New York, where greed reins surpreme, they don't change. I hape that they go under and find out that they are crap, in the Wall Street model of business sleeze.
Since I don't know the answer to masquerade IP (NAT) using the Linksys router behind a private 192.168. network, I may try a hub with no address translation to get the Mac and maybe the mike box as well back up. I could use the mac to more automatically read news and for mail and concentrate on getting this box, the HP, to run a recent Linux. Even though Vista is an improvement over earlier Windows I am still very worried about security, which is far less a concern on Linux and software on Linux is open source. Mac OSx has a mixed shareware Open Source approach, but most of the interesting stuff for it is commercial. I want an OS where the profit motive drives it less.
The latest cycle of greed is hardly new, but it is getting more noticable as people have to begin to pinch their pennies. It is that the sale price is often much less than the real cost of a purchase because the business people have discovered that they can make huge profits by charging hidden fees, nickel and diming consumers once they are committed to their product. As I say alot of this is not new, which is the reason I refuse to buy an HP Inkjet printer, because HP almost gives away the printer so that they can make huge profits seeling ink-refills. So it a laser printer for me. I get 1000 or 1500 BW prints and it cost me about $50 as opposed to 100 prints on a inkjet that costs the same. It is also the idea behind support contracts and purchase rebates. Every time you buy something the sales people want to sell you some add on. That is pure unearned profit to them.
It is a well-known fact that people buy support contracts from their computer vendor to have the feeling they are getting help with their problem, or even to have someone to blow off steam at. They are just being charged for something they don't really get, which is real handy expertise. Computer companies do have experts, and they do help customers, but most of the time the "help" is only a little more expert than the customer who is really paying for an illusion, but that is what most sales and profits are really about, perception, illusion. If people really sought the value of services and not just convienence or impression, they would waste far less money. When I did technical support I found that if the customer took the time to at least know how to use the documentation and made the effort to train, that he wouldn't need to pay for a support contract. I knew people who would not buy support because they knew that they could solve problems themselves. The only support that makes sense is for hardware replacement.
The banks are the latest publisized example of this, only what they have done since banking dregulation has gotten worse. They have always had the ability of adding hidden fees and changing rates at will, but lately it has really gotten out of hand. This has had some political fallout as the same banks, Chase, BofA, Wells-Fargo, who accepted govt. bailouts have been screwing consumers at the same time. So members of Congress have been hearing about it, since the banks are in effect double dipping. The cynacism of the banks accepting taxpayer aid while still making risky investiments and ripping off consumers even more speaks either to pure unrepentant greed or, even we give investors any collective intelligence, which I doubt, to a concerted effort to steal wealth from Americans. Maybe Protectionism isn't such as bad idea alfter all or Socialism, either.