I go to Johns Hopkins University and they have a pretty effective way of dealing with the whole spam situation. Firstly, users can opt-in to the spam filtering system, which means that each user knows if they should expect emails to randomly disappear. Now, if they do opt-in, all "spam" is sent to an isolated quarantine inbox (as one might expect) by analyzing TO:, FROM:, Subject:, etc fields. The interesting part (which I think would solve your problem), is that if a user's spam inbox contains any messages, the spam daemon will send the user a digest email, containing a brief description about how it caught __ number of emails, etc. and will provide the subject headings for each email, along with a link to see the entire message. The user can then specify how often he/she wants these digests, which essentially guarantees that in a given period, the user will only have to consider spam emails once. Finally, the spam daemon automatically kills any emails left in the box after a certain amount of time.
This also has an added security benefit: emails classified as spam are never sent to the user (unless they explicitly request it), which means that if the message were to contain malicious attachments, unwanted images, etc, they are not at risk.
Anyway, just might be something you want to think about.
Conventional logic would say that OpenOffice should indeed be able to supplant Microsoft Office as an office productivity suite. After all, it has most of the same features, sports a similar graphical user interface, and can open/save proprietary Word.doc files (ensuring that you are not cut off from the rest of the world's data).
When my mother (who has no understanding of computers whatsoever) recently had a hard drive failure, I decided to take a walk on the wild side and install OpenOffice.org 2.1 instead of Microsoft Office. To me it made sense--we wouldn't need to pay tribute to the "evil empire" and I could (hopefully) wean most of my family off proprietary software and onto F/LOSS applications. Unfortunately, the user (in this case, my mom) absolutely refused to use it. She tried it for a few days, but found its distinctive lack of "Word-ness" too confusing. Eventually, she settled on Wordpad (ugh) for her word processing, so in the end I had to revert back to Office.
This raises an interesting question: how many people are so used to a very specific user interface that they will refuse to understand anything else? In my experience these small prejudices (especially in the eyes of non-technical people) can be huge factors when it comes to adoption. My mother is an interesting case, as she has refused to use SUSE Linux (I set it up to be as user-friendly as possible, but alas it didn't look like XP apparently), Mozilla Thunderbird (it wasn't similar enough to AOL's inbox format), and OpenOffice.
Just because it looks good from a tech point of view does not necessarily mean that it will fare well "down in the trenches", so to speak.
This is definitely not new. I have been using a PayPal virtual debit card to pay for my server costs for about 3 years. Recently it seems they took it off-line (so I went out and got a real debit card from them) possibly to create hype for something they have always offered...
Well Vista took $7.5 Billion to make. Windows XP made over $10 Billion last year ALONE. I can assure you that if Vista sells anywhere near the number of units that XP sold then Microsoft will still be rolling in cash. Everyone needs an OS, and if they supply it people will buy it.
Lode Runner.
What could be better than running away from deranged monks, looking for loot, and making your own maps all while doing it on a Mac OS 7 computer that is over 10 years old?
Nothing!
Slashdot Mirror
I go to Johns Hopkins University and they have a pretty effective way of dealing with the whole spam situation. Firstly, users can opt-in to the spam filtering system, which means that each user knows if they should expect emails to randomly disappear. Now, if they do opt-in, all "spam" is sent to an isolated quarantine inbox (as one might expect) by analyzing TO:, FROM:, Subject:, etc fields. The interesting part (which I think would solve your problem), is that if a user's spam inbox contains any messages, the spam daemon will send the user a digest email, containing a brief description about how it caught __ number of emails, etc. and will provide the subject headings for each email, along with a link to see the entire message. The user can then specify how often he/she wants these digests, which essentially guarantees that in a given period, the user will only have to consider spam emails once. Finally, the spam daemon automatically kills any emails left in the box after a certain amount of time. This also has an added security benefit: emails classified as spam are never sent to the user (unless they explicitly request it), which means that if the message were to contain malicious attachments, unwanted images, etc, they are not at risk. Anyway, just might be something you want to think about.
Conventional logic would say that OpenOffice should indeed be able to supplant Microsoft Office as an office productivity suite. After all, it has most of the same features, sports a similar graphical user interface, and can open/save proprietary Word .doc files (ensuring that you are not cut off from the rest of the world's data).
When my mother (who has no understanding of computers whatsoever) recently had a hard drive failure, I decided to take a walk on the wild side and install OpenOffice.org 2.1 instead of Microsoft Office. To me it made sense--we wouldn't need to pay tribute to the "evil empire" and I could (hopefully) wean most of my family off proprietary software and onto F/LOSS applications. Unfortunately, the user (in this case, my mom) absolutely refused to use it. She tried it for a few days, but found its distinctive lack of "Word-ness" too confusing. Eventually, she settled on Wordpad (ugh) for her word processing, so in the end I had to revert back to Office.
This raises an interesting question: how many people are so used to a very specific user interface that they will refuse to understand anything else? In my experience these small prejudices (especially in the eyes of non-technical people) can be huge factors when it comes to adoption. My mother is an interesting case, as she has refused to use SUSE Linux (I set it up to be as user-friendly as possible, but alas it didn't look like XP apparently), Mozilla Thunderbird (it wasn't similar enough to AOL's inbox format), and OpenOffice.
Just because it looks good from a tech point of view does not necessarily mean that it will fare well "down in the trenches", so to speak.
Isn't this kinda like DDR, but not?
No, VPN == Pipe. There's a big difference, you know
You're an asshole and should die
This is definitely not new. I have been using a PayPal virtual debit card to pay for my server costs for about 3 years. Recently it seems they took it off-line (so I went out and got a real debit card from them) possibly to create hype for something they have always offered...
Well Vista took $7.5 Billion to make. Windows XP made over $10 Billion last year ALONE. I can assure you that if Vista sells anywhere near the number of units that XP sold then Microsoft will still be rolling in cash. Everyone needs an OS, and if they supply it people will buy it.
In Civilization terms you're trying to say that the police have evolved from Warriors to Archers
...like Minority Report
Knoppix & Ubuntu
Lode Runner. What could be better than running away from deranged monks, looking for loot, and making your own maps all while doing it on a Mac OS 7 computer that is over 10 years old? Nothing!