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***** IMPORTANT INFORMATION/DISCLAIMER *****
This document should be read only by those persons to whom it is addressed. If you have received this message it was obviously addressed to you and therefore you can read it, even it we didnt mean to send it to you. However, if the contents of this email make no sense whatsoever then you probably were not the intended recipient, or, you are a mindless cretin; either way, you should immediately delete yourself & destroy your computer! Once you have taken this action please contact us.. no you idiot, you cant use your computer, you just destroyed it, and by the way, you are also deleted, but we digress......

The Originator of this email is not liable for the transmission of the information contained in this communication, unless they are the originator in which case they probably are liable and rightly so considering the content of the aforementioned communication.

In the event that the originator did not send this email to you, then please return it to us and attach a scanned-in picture of your mothers brothers wife wearing nothing but cami-knickers, and we will immediately refund you exactly half of what you paid for the can of Pal Meaty-Bites you bought when you went to Woolies yesterday.

We take no responsibility for non-receipt of this email because we are running Windows NT & everyone knows how glitchy that can be. In the event that you do get this message then please note that we take no responsibility for that either. Nor will we accept any liability, tacit or implied, for any damage you may or may not incur as a result of receiving, or not, as the case may be, from time to time, notwithstanding all liabilities implied or otherwise, ummm,shit, where was I..umm, no matter what happens, IT's NOT, and NEVER WILL BE, OUR FAULT!

The comments & opinions expressed herein are my own and NOT those of my employer, who, if he knew I was sending emails and surfing porno sites,would cut off my gonads and feed them to me for afternoon tea.

-- http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/s...

And finding old revisions could be as simple as scrubbing back through a history bar like watching a video.

It appears you're talking about permanent storage of arbitrarily detailed revision history of every document. However, this may create a bit of confusion as to the nature of "the document". If you e-mail "a document" to someone else, are you e-mailing a specific revision or the entire revision history? If you copy "a document" to an external drive, are you copying a specific revision or the entire revision history? If both operations are available, how do you communicate the difference between these to the user through the GUI? I seem to remember international news stories about information being leaked through Word documents that come with some of their revision history.

http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/webstats/
Browser Cache
Local site cache
Local regional cache
Large regional cache

ummm.. by the way, you /could/ use mediawiki as a quick-and-dirty source code versioning system as long as there's only a few members in the team and/or the code is small - maybe a few ten thousand lines of code totally.

Wonderful history and diff built-in, web-access fit in documents wherever you want. Effective in certain situations.

Not very-- especially if the email disclaimer makes unilateral demands and you have no prior relationship with the sender. On the other hand, if you previously agree to have a confidential discussion, and then break that agreement, the disclaimer might be enforcable. There's a site here:

http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ ...with more detailed analysis of this.

In earlier versions of this document, I listed RTF (Rich Text Format) as a more standards based way of exchanging word-processor documents. I have been corrected on that point innumerable times. RTF is little better than MS-Word format itself. It is a little better, but it shares all of the problems as MS-Word. Although RTF was advertised as a document exchange format, it never lived up to that. It appears to have varying features, and the various version of RTF that Microsoft products create have elements which only Microsoft Products can read. Note that this is not because MS-Word is a better product, but because Microsoft keeps elements of what it considers to be RTF secret.

Web statistics (and I use that word loosely) that companies like OneStat sell are highly dubious, for all kinds of different reasons. I'd explain exactly what they do wrong, but their technical specs are a bit lacking, wouldn't you say? If you don't believe they are full of it, try reading this:

The OneStat.com solutions provide executives, marketers and webmasters with answers to critical e-business questions such as:

• Who is visiting my website?

Yeah, really convincing and doesn't sound like snake-oil peddlers at all.

If only there was some kind of extensible document format that let people have it be both printable and viewable on a monitor! We'd have to let the style sheets cascade, but then we could even support things like text-to-speech from the same document meant for printing and viewing! Hey, why stop there, why not make it a markup language so that we can add other neat features, like hyper links!

Wow, though, that's a lot of standards work. We might need a standards body to oversee it. Maybe someday, people will start to encode information in this format so that we can view it comfortable on our monitors without fucking around with stupid documents.

  -=-

Sarcasm aside, it's totally not a technology issue -- it's a people issue. PDF has its place in forms you want printed off, because it currently has momentum. I have no idea why people resist using the alternate solutions which have added benefits beyond the PDF momentum.
    Bug the people who put up PDFs for use. People using PDFs where they should be using XML is lot like people using Shockwave flash where they should be using XML.

Stupid email disclaimers have no legal weight.

I would have thought that a large enough sample would provide useful information

Useful information on what? Examining your own logs to determine how best to tune your web servers is useful. Thinking you can determine who is using what software is not.

Clearly we can't draw conclusions about precise market share, but surely trends might be identified?

Not really. All it takes is a large ISP like AOL to tweak their caching parameters, or for Microsoft to push out a service pack, and you can see a gigantic change in traffic with zero difference in market share.

For example, current surveys hint at a trend away from Internet Explorer; should we disregard this as a statistical hiccup?

If you can back up those surveys with evidence, no. But httpd logs are very flimsy evidence. Traffic analysis alone is not enough; there are two separate aspects - the design of HTTP, which can't support analysis on this level; and the assumption that traffic corresponds to market share.

Firstly, the design of HTTP. Unless you switch off caching of your HTML, you aren't going to get anywhere near the right figures. If you switch it off, if you have a website that has enough traffic to count for anything in these statistics, it will cost you real money and will slow down your website. Chances are, if somebody does that, it's because they are clueless rather than they value the stats more than the cash - and if they are clueless can you expect them to gather statistics reliably?

But probably more importantly, these analysts are equating traffic with market share which is a mistake. The best example I can think of to illustrate this is Google. Given identical market share, a browser that has a Google search field built in will send, on average, about half as much traffic to Google as a browser that doesn't have it built in (assuming the user prefers Google, of course). Simply because the toolbar users won't be loading the Google front page first. Identical market share, half the traffic. The same sort of thing can happen across a wide range of websites, problems with some browsers not caching things when they should artifically inflates the numbers for those browsers, for instance.

NB. I'm not trolling, or even particularly disagreeing, but I would like more evidence/citations to support your viewpoint.

Well half of it's just common sense, but I really wish people would ask these analysts how they have accounted for these things, because the surveys I've seen in the past simply ignored the issues, and the popular web statistics packages that everyone likes to quote from are all pretty flawed, e.g. the commercial ones assume cookies are always present, always written to, etc.

If you want second opinions, the person who wrote the most popular logfile analyser in the world agrees with me, and even links to a study done at Xerox. Another decent introduction to the issues is Why web usage statistics are (worse than) meaningless.

'That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project.'

The problem with airport books is that they are exceedinly selective in the research that they draw upon, and it is never fairly evaluated. Also conclusions are jumped to with great alacrity.

If you really want a good decision making book, my first recommendation is Jonathan Baron's "Thinking and Deciding". It is an undergraduate textbook, which I think is very geek friendly. Indeed, it is a bit too geek friendly for my wife's students, so she uses more basic text books.

I don't know what the reviewed book contains. I do know how management people use what they call the "2 by 2 matrix". If that is the only tool discussed in the book, then one should probably give it a miss. Any decision making book that doesn't discuss Bayesian reasoning is not something I would recommend to any geek. Baron's book I would. (And I have no connection with Baron).

No, which is one of the main problems with counting your sheeple.
Here's some info on that subject.

The fun really starts when you try to deal with large accelerator-cache farms that AOL and I guess most other large ISPs are using.
As I've learned just recently a visitor coming via AOL can actually change her IP address *in the middle of a session* because any individual request may be forwarded by any of their n proxy servers to your site.

So the trace an invididual visitor can leave in your logs may be:
- 0 IP addresses (content cached remotely)
- 0.1415926532 IP addresses (behind a shared proxy/NAT)
- 1 IP address
- n IP addresses (proxy farm or disconnect/reconnect at any time)

The bottom line is that there is no relation between the number of hits to your webserver and the actual number of visitors.

Personally I was always wondering whether those "iANAL, but..." disclaimers on Slashdot were legally binding. I consider it highly doubtful. But going back to email diclaimers, I always cannot help but laugh furiously when I read this on Perl 6 mailing lists:

"The information contained in this e-mail message is privileged and/or confidential and is intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the employee or agent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify us by telephone (330-668-5000), and destroy the original message. Thank you."

I think some day I will call them indeed... Oops! I have just copied the above "communication" which is strictly prohibited! But that is not a problem, since I hereby inform that by reading this paragraph you agree that prosecuting me on the grounds of copying the strictly prohibited communication is even strictlier prohibited!

Also, here's quite an Interesting link: Stupid Email Disclaimers by Jeffrey Goldberg. It's very Informative. In fact, it might be even better than the linked article.

Whether or not such disclaimers make sense is immaterial. If a court finds them binding, they are binding.

But I doubt that these would hold up in court, and have even argued that they may make you more vulnerable legally.

IMPORTANT: This email is intended for the use of the individual addressee(s) named above and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, distribution or copying of this email is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word absquatulation has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the transmission of this email, although the yorkshire terrier next door is living on borrowed time, let me tell you. Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards, so just ignore that Alert Notice from Microsoft: However, by pouring a complete circle of salt around yourself and your computer you can ensure that no harm befalls you and your pets. If you have received this email in error, please add some nutmeg and egg whites and place it in a warm oven for 40 minutes. Whisk briefly and let it stand for 2 hours before icing.
(Lifted from http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/)

about this here. And it also has a collection of stupid disclaimers ..

No, you've completely misunderstood. If your website has a large degree of technical users, you can't use that as the basis for making inferences about the browser usage of normal people.

Not that web statistics can give accurate information about browsers anyway.

My signature on all outgoing mails is my name, e-mail address, some info from uname, and a link to Jeff Goldberg's "MS-Word is Not a document exchange format." I don't know how many people actually read it, but at least it's something.

And as a shameless plug, I will refer to my rant about how MS-Word is not a document exchange format

Since autumn 2002, I've been calling for people to Boycott MCI for exactly this reason. Note that UUNet is still part of the MCI group.

This is one reason why MS-Word is not a document exchange format even if both parties are using some flavor of MS-Word.

Apologies in advance for the yucky HTML that LaTeX2HTML produced in those days. If I can find the original source, I'll see if I can generate a usable PDF.

(And let me fix a few of the broken links in that before I hit the submit button).

If you are using a Microsoft document format to transfer confidential information, you have problems DRM cannot solve.

MS is, in my view, breaking new ground with this;

I'm sure attempting to use an umbrella as a submarine would be equally revolutionary. That doesn't make it a good idea.

Could you say a little more about this? [...] As far as I understand it, chaos theory says small fluctuations in the input result in huge effects on the output. So you can't predict anything... oh, well.

That is one of the (several) popular misconceptions. Technically true, but still misunderstood. A large number of people (particularly in the social sciences) took Chaos as saying "prediction is impossible." While in fact, chaos did exactly the opposite. It says that some appearently random phenomena might have simple underlying models. An enhanced ability to analyze such systems means that more things can be modeled by simple deterministic equations, not fewer.

Another related point about prediction is the observation that the Sun, Moon and Earth form a chaotic system. But we can still predict moonrise and eclipses very well.

I've actually got a rant/published paper on the misunderstanding/abuse of chaos/complexity in one social science: Complex Rhetoric and Simple Games [300K, sorry]. It goes over some of the popular rhetoric about this stuff in one of the worst of social sciences where chaos/complexity was latched onto by anti-scientific people.

One nice footnote quotes the John Maynard Smith (developer of evolutionary game theory) calling some of the slogans behind complexity as "Absolute fscking crap. But crap with good PR". Now we here all know that chaos and complexity are two very different things, but they have become intertwined in popular lore. So the paper deals with both.

OK, a copy is now here, But I pay for excessive outgoing traffic, so if it gets hit to hard I will have to take it down.

So would other people please also mirror it, so that we can distribute the load!

The spam I got was from spammers uu.net wouldn't terminate. However forcing their sales morons to deal with the volume of spam I was getting got me off the spam lists.

If I simply didn't want to see the spam, I could arrange list-washing on my own and use a combination of filters. But that, of course, just makes life easier for the spammers. Instead, I wish to have spammers actually pay a fair price for their advertising instead of shifting the cost onto the recipient systems.

What about the big providers that knowingly and willings host spam gangs? Surely the next target of a suit should be UU.Net. See my Boycott MCI rant for why we should go after UUNet.

if your name is Nissan and you get the domain name, and then you decide to start selling cars, or car accessories to profit off of the name that is usually associated with another company, that should not be allowed. If on the other hand your name is Nissan and you have a site that shows pictures of your wife, kids, and your dog, then that should be perfectly legal

I am not the New Yorker journalist. There is another Jeffrey Goldberg who is a staff writer for the New Yorker. He and I are separate people. His writing is extremely well researched, informed and executed. My political musings are nothing more than musings. I do not wish to exploit or diminish his credibility through a possible confusion due to our common name. Also, I do not have a contact address for him

Something similar has been posted here before: Longest email disclaimer awards. The longest disclaimer was apparently 7K large and the unlucky "winner" was UBS Warburg.

Also, an analysis of stupid e-mail disclaimers.

In Autumn 2000, I wrote a rant about this, in which I defend the general scheme of the electoral college (winner take all per state, small states with extra weight), but call for Condorcet voting within the states.

OK. I'll bite on your trolling attempt.

Lets see, that was a 200 page document with several figures at 1.44Mb. I'd be curious to know what how big an MS-Word file it would be.

Anyway, I've got a rant about MS-Word for document exchange.

Since I've already been slammed for being OT (though I meant to be a cross between insightful and funny, since their site is based on numbers anyway), I'll spare any explanation.

Instead, I'll direct you to this rant/explanation.

Basically, I can hit refresh all day and it records every one of those "hits"..

I stopped reading when I hit this:

Word produces probably the worst output

and advocate Latex (for gods sake, Latex over Word - are you kidding?)

Furthermore that mention of LaTeX is not advocacy of it, but illustrating the fact that one can use a document preperation system which is used by a small minority, but still distribute documents to all (via PDF).

The only section which really recommands against using MS-Word for document preparation explicitly says

The focus of this document has been on the misuse of Word for document exchange. It is geared toward MS-Word users to encourage them to send documents in other formats, even if they continue to use Word for document production.

The arguments I've presented stand even if MS-Word were a good tool for document preparation. However, I'd also like to point to some documents which argue (correctly in my view) why MS-Word is a bad choice of document preparation system and not just a bad choice of document exchange format

Had I blurred my argument for why MS-Word is not for document exchange with a rant about why MS-Word is a bad choice for document preparation, you would have a valid point. But I didn't blur that.

If you've got some substantive criticism of my document, please mail me or post it. But criticism of something you only imagine the document to be is something I, for one, can do without.

I stopped reading when I hit this:

Word produces probably the worst output

and advocate Latex (for gods sake, Latex over Word - are you kidding?)

Furthermore that mention of LaTeX is not advocacy of it, but illustrating the fact that one can use a document preperation system which is used by a small minority, but still distribute documents to all (via PDF).

The only section which really recommands against using MS-Word for document preparation explicitly says

The focus of this document has been on the misuse of Word for document exchange. It is geared toward MS-Word users to encourage them to send documents in other formats, even if they continue to use Word for document production.

The arguments I've presented stand even if MS-Word were a good tool for document preparation. However, I'd also like to point to some documents which argue (correctly in my view) why MS-Word is a bad choice of document preparation system and not just a bad choice of document exchange format

Had I blurred my argument for why MS-Word is not for document exchange with a rant about why MS-Word is a bad choice for document preparation, you would have a valid point. But I didn't blur that.

If you've got some substantive criticism of my document, please mail me or post it. But criticism of something you only imagine the document to be is something I, for one, can do without.

Yet another reason why MS Word is not a document exchange format. That rant is also avaible in other formats

Yet another reason why MS Word is not a document exchange format. That rant is also avaible in other formats

From what I see, this is what the book's author meant by "obsolete" and I agree. Most websites, if locked down and not changed for 3 years, would no longer render in the browsers that are new in 3 years.

This works in most cases, but not all. Netscape 4.* treatement of CSS is so awful, and degrades so poorly, that I simply had to make a choice knowing that my stuff would be ugly for NS4 users. But for the most part, Conservative and Standard works.

I guess that this makes my site (shameless plug) one of the 0.1% of sites with old content that isn't "obsolete" (well, the content may be).

• It's vhosted, and there is something interesting I share that IP address with.
• For a while, I reported all spam involving unresponsive Chinese network operators to the Chinese embassy in the US, telling them that this was a image problem for China.
• After never having a response to those either, I started including in my LARTs to China text like "thank you for your support of a Free and Independent Tibet", hoping that that might get someone to pay attention.

Instant run-off voting is a step in the right direction

Approval voting has some nice properties, but doesn't take into account something voters can easily express, the ranking of their preferences. Thus approval voting loses very useful information.

The best option for many kinds of elections is Condorcet voting. It's used by the uk.* Usenet hierarchy and, I've been told, by debian, but I've seen no confirmation of that.

I have my own rant about voting systems. (It's a bit rambling, but does anticipate and respond to some objections to Condorcet voting).

You're right, I still don't see the connection. Maybe timothy is trying for a fax slashdotting.

You're right, I still don't see the connection. Maybe timothy is trying for a fax slashdotting.

WebTrends annoys me greatly, because it is poorly documented, has a sucky interface, and misleads naive users into thinking they are getting reports on "visitors" and "sessions" when in fact they are simply getting stats on a window of visits from an IP number.

Read this document Why web usage statistics are worse than meaningless and memorise it.

Also, remind your marketing folks that quantitative data from your logfiles can only be interpreted with qualitative data from interviews/focus groups/usability studies. If people stay for less time in your site tan before, is it because your design sucks, or because they found what they wanted and left quickly? Only qualitative research can tell you.

Whenever marketing people spot trend variations, they will ask you why. You will need to know the above in order to respond properly.

As for autoresponders, they shouldn't be in the client unless that client (a) has access to envelope information, and (b) can send things as error messages (null envelope from). I also have rant about broken autoresponders.

And for anyone who thinks that email is a "solved" problem, should read my rant about broken autoresponders. (which is not about loops, but does cover how "solved" things can be broken).

When someone sends me an MS-Word file, I respond with this DVI file, soon to be followed up with
the PDF version. It is a good text (and I don't say that about everything I write), and it has some links to information about the danger of using binary formats.

When someone sends me an MS-Word file, I respond with this DVI file, soon to be followed up with
the PDF version. It is a good text (and I don't say that about everything I write), and it has some links to information about the danger of using binary formats.

• Don't use MS-Word as a document exchange format (Goldberg, Jeffrey )
  ( http://www.goldmar k.org/netrants/no-word/ )
• plaintext - In praise of practical e-mail hygiene (Vermeer, Martin )
  ( http://www.netby.dk/Oest/Europa-Alle/vermeer/plain .html )

• Don't use MS-Word as a document exchange format (Goldberg, Jeffrey )
  ( http://www.goldmar k.org/netrants/no-word/ )
• plaintext - In praise of practical e-mail hygiene (Vermeer, Martin )
  ( http://www.netby.dk/Oest/Europa-Alle/vermeer/plain .html )

I like responding to Word documents by picking another esoteric file format.

I have a canned response in as DVI which I regularly send. I follow it up with a PDF version about 20 minutes later.

If I may be so conceited, it is good rant worth reading. you can get it in many formats starting here.