We should create a group to recruit wanna-be actors, directors, script writers, etc to help create open content movies and television. Nothing about movies or television is THAT hard to reproduce. We need a financial backer to get the ball rolling but I'd expect many high-quality artists that have little chance to make it big in Hollywood would be willing to work at a more reasonable rate.
I propose that the open content community define our own standard for DVD content. Use standard DVD discs with either VOB, mpeg, or DivX;-) files in a normal ISO filesystem. No CSS, no DRM, no region-codes. Use an XML based format for defining menus and such. Use Java for providing interactive content. DVD music discs could contain raw audio or ogg files or a combination thereof.
I have been experimenting for a while with creating some opensource edutainment titles that should work on at least Linux and Windows (and probably other OSs). I want to create high quality educational titles that are free and cross-platform.
The furthest I've gotten is on my coloring book which should be a nice program for teaching kids basic mousing skills as well as whatever they can learn from the pictures' subject matter.
I've also been working on an Oregon Trail type of program and a couple word/number blaster type games which I hope to release to the public eventually. I'm always looking for other game ideas too. I'd like to make a free version of all major commercial edutainment titles.
I really could use help with artwork. I was going to pay someone to help but I lost my job and haven't had the money to do so since.
I guess my main question is how he wants to declare who is an expert. If it's something like karma where the community can vote to increase or decrease the so-called experts power then it'd be fine. I wouldn't want to be forced to accept some self-declared experts point of view just because they have a Harvard degree or something such as that though.
So let users give karma to other users and let them decide to filter out edits done by users under a given karma level unless those edits are approved by a higher-level user. I'd never keep someone from editing, since the system keeps revisions anyway, (excepting spam-bots, etc) but I'd allow users to control what they saw.
Linux has experts but they are experts that come out of the community. Nobody goes out and hires experts to take over a responsibility - they just join, contribute, and as they earn trust they work their way up the chain.
Community trust should be all that defines who is an expert and who is not. If people want to show some creditials to boost that trust then that is fine but I wouldn't assign users a trust rating based soley on their creditials.
Mostly he seems to be whining. There is no reason more experts couldn't contribute if enough felt like bothering. With enough experts making the effort they could hold much more power to keep the few nuts in check. The door is open but nobody can make people join the community. I don't think there is really anything wrong with Wikipedia that won't eventually be ironed out. I've read articles just as biased or incorrect as some on Wikipedia in establishment encyclopedias so it's not a problem due only to the format.
I do think the wiki software could use some forced evolution. If you've actually looked at the software it's not very cleanly coded and it doesn't have a very good structure for adding in more control mechanisms. Some thought into what kind of control mechanisms they need followed by a good rewrite would do wonders. A fork seems a bad idea. Why not just rewrite the code and contribute it back to the community? Let the community decide which control features they want to make use of.
A lot of thought has already been made into controlling similar projects. Everything from Linux to dmoz to Slashdot is a community-driven project that manages some sort of control over low-quality input. It could be useful to just incorporate some of these lessons into Wiki. I'd say multi-level ownership of pages and groups of pages would be a useful start. Let people tune out new changes that haven't been approved by the level of expert they want. This would be similar to Linux or dmoz. A moderation and meta-moderation system like Slashdot could help. Storing the articles in a format that abstracts them from the interface software would be a great idea too. Let competing interfaces access the same database but let them choose different schemes for controlling which articles to trust, allow edits to, etc. Let the interfaces fork without forking the article database itself.
Women are frustrating.;) I think you'd do better if you made an effort instead of waiting for God though. Females seem to like guys that show some driving ambition and confidence.
Besides, I think God was joking when he invented Geeks. We're obviously a breed he thought evolution would quickly dispatch of. At least that's todays theory on why geeks have so much trouble mating.
I've played around in the past with making a lawn mower that could run off grass clippings digested in a similar way to this. I still think it'd be an awesome product if a company ever brought it to market.
I never thought to give my lawnmower much of a brain - just following an automated route and schedule for mowing - but I suppose it'd be possible. Why have bee sized overlords when you can have a tractor with whirling razor sharp steel blades as your overlord. Bwahahahaha!
That shouldn't stop you. I've known blind guys and a guy with no legs use the Internet for finding women to date and eventually marry. If you can communicate and you're a nice guy then some woman will be interested in you. It might take a little extra effort on your part but I hope you haven't given up. Just dazzle them with how smart and sweet you are and they'll get over the disabilities.
Isn't there any kind of dating forum for people with disabilities? You could probably find someone that way. A girl with a disability maybe or a girl that is a friend or family member of someone disabled. I've also noticed that some women like having a guy that really needs them so you might appeal to that type too.
My sister has cerebal palsy and I've been to some outtings with her and her friends and a lot of them end up dating or getting married. Maybe you could see if there is some sort of local group like that where you live?
Damn, didn't you ever figure out how to use chatrooms or dating websites or something? What's stopping you? I'm sure lots of women would like to go out with you.
I suggest everyone read the book The Postman. The movie was loosely based on the book but leaves out the more interesting parts about human enhancements for military use and such. It's really quite a good book regardless to if you liked the movie or not.
The Internet gets geeks laid. Shy geek boy goes online. She geek girl goes online. They meet in the emotionally safe area of a chat room, instant messenger, online game, or whatever. They find out they like each other and can trust each other enough not to be shy. Woot geek mating happens.
Girlfriends that know what Thinkgeek is before you give them your Christmas wishlist - priceless!;)
I wouldn't say that watching tv is totally lacking of socializing but I'd say that it often is. I usually watch tv with my girlfriend, in which case we chat & snuggle, or with friends in which case we sort of do the hanging out thing (sharing snacks, chatting, grabbing each other beers, etc). So it isn't non-social for me but I think most people do watch tv alone or all sitting there slackjawed and blank faced. There is the socialness of the shared experience too. Reading a book can be social if your friends read the same book and you use that as a connection or a topic of conversation. TV can work that way.
One show I suggest watching with friends is Showtime's weekly series Dead Like Me. That show is so wrong that it inspires a lot of back and forth conversation. Spike TV's Most Extreme Elimination is pretty good too. I think most shows don't inspire the watchers to converse in that same way. Sports might but I've noticed that many geeks are not huge sports fans.
I think talking on the Internet is very social but we all need to remember to spend some time with friends and family in real life now and then. I know a lot of people who'd rather talk to someone they only know online rather than long time real life friends and family. Online friends are great and I've turned many online friends into real life friends but you don't want to ignore the people who really care about you.
Not to mention that it's easy to message somebody at 4am where as you might not want to call them at that time. Frequently they might be up but as you can't know before hand when using pre-Internet methods it'd mean you'd just not socialize at all. For me at least the Internet has greatly extended the hours in which I can socialize.
I love being able to message from my phone too. I can send text mssages back and forth while sitting at a friends house watching tv with them and still chat with my girlfriend who is stuck in traffic without being rude and talking over the tv.
It makes it much easier to look up things like movies that are playing. I can spend a minute finding the movie I want to go to with my friends rather than spending 15 minutes calling around or digging through the paper. I can get driving directions to the new place we want to have dinner or party much quicker than I could have found it without the Internet. Definately a boon for last minute planning of social outtings.
This concept seems a little clueless. The idea seems to be to go outside of the major metro areas and build a new jumbo-sized road/train/pipeline from Mexico to Oklahoma. The first thing I think of is that this will merely cause a shifting of population centers away from their current location to the location of this new roadway as people move to where they'll have easier access to the major travel artery. Businesses will want to profit off this road, that'll create jobs in the area around the roads, people will move into the area with jobs, and so forth until the road is again in the middle of the populated area.
They'd be better off creating an improved train system. One set of tracks for commercial use between Mexico, major Texas cities, and into other states. This should include a major express backbone that avoids routing through populated zones. A second set of tracks should be created to connect major Texan cities, Mexico, and connecting states for passenger use. Create, or improve, local train systems that can use automated touting and on-demand cars and have it cross the state-wide train system such that it's easy to move from the local loop and the interstate system.
I think there needs to be a distinction between harassing other players and finding more effective ways to play. Just bashing newbies for no purpose is mean. Tricking them into helping you become a better player is fair game IMO. If the game designers don't want this kind of thing to happen then design the system such that it can't happen.
I for one find most video games boring because when you play against the machine it has no intelligence and is therefore more repetition than stimulation. Multiplayer games should fix that but most don't. Players are afraid of any real competition so the game is rigged to pander to people who want a game where they can never face any real challenges.
They're complaining that players aren't playing nice but I think they're missing out on a large market for fierce player vrs player gaming where everything is fair. You should be able to battle other players either one on one or in groups. You should be able to earn experience and harvest equipment from these battles. Death should be a permanent condition for your player. Make a MMOG with some real competition and where real strategy can be employed. Make it dark and a bit demented. Make it hard to play but make the victory worthwhile. Make players into real villians and heroes. Use what the players are doing on their own accord to put a plot back into these games. Don't fight them, make what they're doing part of the game. If group A is attacking newbies when they logon then make it a quest for other groups to defeat group A and protect the newbies.
For God's sake stop being such pansies.;) It's a game. Play to win. As kids my little sister always started crying and then quit when she didn't do well in games. What'd she learn because nobody ever made her keep playing? She quits at everything now. No backbone at all.
Why should you have to? You shouldn't have to archieve information periodically so that the programs you use to manage that information can keep from crapping out. That is the whole point of having programs to manage things. Let them archieve stuff for you automatically.
Either way there is no reason that a mail client should use up multiple gigs of memory just to run There should be a little memory use for the UI, some for the network, and some for whatever messages are open. Unless you're searching or some such function that is all the memory that should be used. For email that should almost never go more than a few megs - certainly there is no excuse for using up hundreds or thousands of megs of memory.
Also, while I'm bitching, it shouldn't block downloading of messages while prompting to compress old mail. Shouldn't it queue these tasks? Keep running while waiting for the user's input. When you get their input then wait until the currently running task is finished and then do the next task. How hard is that?
Actually I have my own database system for storing and searching my old mail because it's so impossible to manage from any know email client. It's a shame that I have to crunch all my mail myself because my mail client should be doing it for me.
Thunderbird is my favorite email client and it still SUCKS. Is there no such thing as a decent mail client? IMO the main reason mail clients suck is because they are stuck in the conceptual stoneage. Mail files are typically kept in flatfile db's or some proprietary nightmare system. SMTP, POP, and IMAP are all rather rickety systems not really designed for security or scalability. Email still has no sepperate transport for binary files. Email has no contacts.
Why is Thunderbird still folder based? Evolution and even Outlook have decent virtual folders whereas Thunderbird's suck. Gmail is more the direction to go though I think. Store the mail in a db and just use queries to define virtual folders.
I have more than a decade of email, several dozen gigs worth, stored and there is no mail client that can handle it without a very fast CPU and several gigs of RAM. This is just so wrong. I have apps I've written than deal with much more information and they can run on a P300Mhz with 64MB of RAM easily.
Before you start trying to clone Outlook why not take the time to make Thunderbird a really rocksolid mail client first? Stability, security, speed, and a small footprint are what'll sell. Get those working and THEN add in whatever extra features people desire.
No, that isn't it. The idea is that the concept of a username and password is replaced by unique hash keys that can only be generated between the user and the website in question.
The website would store the users unique hash, rather than a username and password, and would authenticate against that.
The hash keys would be based on a user id, a user pass phrase, and a site id. The site id would be sent from the site being accessed and would most likely be tied to the domain name so that phishing would be difficult.
The user would enter their id and pass phrase once per session, when prompted, or their browser could save it for them if it was a trusted machine. The id and passphrase could be any string they wanted so long as they could remember it.
Everything needed to generate each site's hash key comes from those three unique bits of information. If you walk to a different machine and enter your information again it could generate your hash keys for you just as easily as the original machine.
In affect it'd be standardizing a protocol for sending a password to the server and a protocol for the browser generating the passwords for you on demand. The point is to be seamless, secure, and not require the user try to remember more than one pass phrase.
You'd probably want some sort of wallet system by which your trusted computer could remember sites you'd logged into so that when you changed your passphrase it could notify them of the change for you. Otherwise you might be prompted to update your information manually when you tried to use the site.
For example for kavlon.org a user with the name Mike and the passphrase "The duck walks backwards." might make the browser feed "kavlon.org~Mike~The duck walks backwards." through a md5 generator to get a unique hash of "1e3a5b2f5ea0ec2bbe9877f0cf0f4b5f". For Slashdot the same username and passphrase would feed "slashdot.org~Mike~The duck walks backwards." through md5 to get a unique hash of "2172948c34a23d52a2b0ae9fa0454f7c". Obviously it'd be very difficult to guess one of these hashes or to reverse engineer the passphrase. At the same time it's very easy for the user. Colissions are extremely rare so you probably wouldn't even need to publish your user id.
Money as data is probably the most effecient form of capitalism. Likewise, trust as data is the most effective form of a gift economy. There should be some alternate form of currency, kept in a database somewhere, that essentially allows people to rate how much they trust each other.
It'd be similar to Slashdot's karma system but made to resist cheating. For instance you could rank you trust in someone anywhere from 0-9 and you could adjust that at any time but you could only assign your value once. I think the trust system should tie into the tax system. Those with high trust ratings would get a tax break. For those who paid taxes that'd mean they'd pay less taxes. For those who didn't pay taxes that'd mean they'd get a reverse-tax and actually get money back. That way everyone could benefit from having a high trust level in the society. I'd also probably hand out social services based on people's trust rating. Crack whores and pimps would probably have a low trust rating so they'd get the bare minimum of support. Starving artists, opensource coders, and war vets might have higher trust ratings and would get more support. It'd be a way for people to support those who were working for the benefit of society without actually having to give money they may or not be able to afford.
Which is why I hitched my wagon to a management guy I know with experience in finance, sales, and marketing. He has connections to financial people and knows how to make more. He gets someone that can produce a product he can sale and I get someone trying to sale the products I produce. Hopefully it works out. I need to get a good investor so that I can hire some of my fellow geeks.:)
Any economic model taken to it's most extreme version will eat itself. Socialism and communism have proben to do this. Capitalism is close to proving it'll do the same. A gift economy is no different. An ideal situation is to use some intelligence to manage the economy and to use more than one system in parallel. There is no reason at all that capitalism and a gift economy can't work together. Capitalism has proven very good at distributing rare resources. Gift economies have proven very good at distributing abundant resources. These two are a perfect pairing. Capitalism has always been paired with a gift economy. Businesses would cease to operate without some sort of gift economy as that economy is what makes up a lot of our social networking. Our social networking plays a vital part in business. We just need to recognize that the gift economy is just as vital as the capitalist economy.
I'd like to find some people that wanted to handle producing the client. I don't really care about how the final game looks as long as the protocols defining the gameplay are flexible that the clients can range from text-based to fullout 3D Everquest 2 style interfaces.
I'd like to develop the server end of things and design much of the logic of the game. Mostly I just want to work out a MMO where the characters are spirits that can enslave the bodies of NPC's to play with. I think it'd be great to be able to take over any creature in the game that was weakly enough willed to be conquered and then use that creature to fight other creatures and other players. You could have characters die but their spirit could just go grab a new body and keep much of their stats. Also I'd like to experiment with the performance and stability of the servers. It always seems odd to me that there are frequently times that MMO servers are down so that the game isn't playable. Also it seems odd that they break the game up onto multiple servers rather than having everyone participate in a single world. Why not just run a single game image across as many servers as needed and use load balancing to keep everything running smoothly. I think that MMO companies could learn something from studying Google.
I don't know if volunteers would work out. I think an actual budget would be needed and I can't afford to fund it myself.
Slashdot Mirror
We should create a group to recruit wanna-be actors, directors, script writers, etc to help create open content movies and television. Nothing about movies or television is THAT hard to reproduce. We need a financial backer to get the ball rolling but I'd expect many high-quality artists that have little chance to make it big in Hollywood would be willing to work at a more reasonable rate.
I propose that the open content community define our own standard for DVD content. Use standard DVD discs with either VOB, mpeg, or DivX;-) files in a normal ISO filesystem. No CSS, no DRM, no region-codes. Use an XML based format for defining menus and such. Use Java for providing interactive content. DVD music discs could contain raw audio or ogg files or a combination thereof.
AbiWord is my favorite word publishing program. It is so lightweight that I can run it without any bog.
I have been experimenting for a while with creating some opensource edutainment titles that should work on at least Linux and Windows (and probably other OSs). I want to create high quality educational titles that are free and cross-platform.
The furthest I've gotten is on my coloring book which should be a nice program for teaching kids basic mousing skills as well as whatever they can learn from the pictures' subject matter.
I've also been working on an Oregon Trail type of program and a couple word/number blaster type games which I hope to release to the public eventually. I'm always looking for other game ideas too. I'd like to make a free version of all major commercial edutainment titles.
I really could use help with artwork. I was going to pay someone to help but I lost my job and haven't had the money to do so since.
I guess my main question is how he wants to declare who is an expert. If it's something like karma where the community can vote to increase or decrease the so-called experts power then it'd be fine. I wouldn't want to be forced to accept some self-declared experts point of view just because they have a Harvard degree or something such as that though.
So let users give karma to other users and let them decide to filter out edits done by users under a given karma level unless those edits are approved by a higher-level user. I'd never keep someone from editing, since the system keeps revisions anyway, (excepting spam-bots, etc) but I'd allow users to control what they saw.
Linux has experts but they are experts that come out of the community. Nobody goes out and hires experts to take over a responsibility - they just join, contribute, and as they earn trust they work their way up the chain.
Community trust should be all that defines who is an expert and who is not. If people want to show some creditials to boost that trust then that is fine but I wouldn't assign users a trust rating based soley on their creditials.
Mostly he seems to be whining. There is no reason more experts couldn't contribute if enough felt like bothering. With enough experts making the effort they could hold much more power to keep the few nuts in check. The door is open but nobody can make people join the community. I don't think there is really anything wrong with Wikipedia that won't eventually be ironed out. I've read articles just as biased or incorrect as some on Wikipedia in establishment encyclopedias so it's not a problem due only to the format.
I do think the wiki software could use some forced evolution. If you've actually looked at the software it's not very cleanly coded and it doesn't have a very good structure for adding in more control mechanisms. Some thought into what kind of control mechanisms they need followed by a good rewrite would do wonders. A fork seems a bad idea. Why not just rewrite the code and contribute it back to the community? Let the community decide which control features they want to make use of.
A lot of thought has already been made into controlling similar projects. Everything from Linux to dmoz to Slashdot is a community-driven project that manages some sort of control over low-quality input. It could be useful to just incorporate some of these lessons into Wiki. I'd say multi-level ownership of pages and groups of pages would be a useful start. Let people tune out new changes that haven't been approved by the level of expert they want. This would be similar to Linux or dmoz. A moderation and meta-moderation system like Slashdot could help. Storing the articles in a format that abstracts them from the interface software would be a great idea too. Let competing interfaces access the same database but let them choose different schemes for controlling which articles to trust, allow edits to, etc. Let the interfaces fork without forking the article database itself.
Women are frustrating. ;) I think you'd do better if you made an effort instead of waiting for God though. Females seem to like guys that show some driving ambition and confidence.
Besides, I think God was joking when he invented Geeks. We're obviously a breed he thought evolution would quickly dispatch of. At least that's todays theory on why geeks have so much trouble mating.
I've played around in the past with making a lawn mower that could run off grass clippings digested in a similar way to this. I still think it'd be an awesome product if a company ever brought it to market.
I never thought to give my lawnmower much of a brain - just following an automated route and schedule for mowing - but I suppose it'd be possible. Why have bee sized overlords when you can have a tractor with whirling razor sharp steel blades as your overlord. Bwahahahaha!
That shouldn't stop you. I've known blind guys and a guy with no legs use the Internet for finding women to date and eventually marry. If you can communicate and you're a nice guy then some woman will be interested in you. It might take a little extra effort on your part but I hope you haven't given up. Just dazzle them with how smart and sweet you are and they'll get over the disabilities.
Isn't there any kind of dating forum for people with disabilities? You could probably find someone that way. A girl with a disability maybe or a girl that is a friend or family member of someone disabled. I've also noticed that some women like having a guy that really needs them so you might appeal to that type too.
My sister has cerebal palsy and I've been to some outtings with her and her friends and a lot of them end up dating or getting married. Maybe you could see if there is some sort of local group like that where you live?
Damn, didn't you ever figure out how to use chatrooms or dating websites or something? What's stopping you? I'm sure lots of women would like to go out with you.
I suggest everyone read the book The Postman. The movie was loosely based on the book but leaves out the more interesting parts about human enhancements for military use and such. It's really quite a good book regardless to if you liked the movie or not.
The Internet gets geeks laid. Shy geek boy goes online. She geek girl goes online. They meet in the emotionally safe area of a chat room, instant messenger, online game, or whatever. They find out they like each other and can trust each other enough not to be shy. Woot geek mating happens.
;)
Girlfriends that know what Thinkgeek is before you give them your Christmas wishlist - priceless!
I wouldn't say that watching tv is totally lacking of socializing but I'd say that it often is. I usually watch tv with my girlfriend, in which case we chat & snuggle, or with friends in which case we sort of do the hanging out thing (sharing snacks, chatting, grabbing each other beers, etc). So it isn't non-social for me but I think most people do watch tv alone or all sitting there slackjawed and blank faced. There is the socialness of the shared experience too. Reading a book can be social if your friends read the same book and you use that as a connection or a topic of conversation. TV can work that way.
One show I suggest watching with friends is Showtime's weekly series Dead Like Me. That show is so wrong that it inspires a lot of back and forth conversation. Spike TV's Most Extreme Elimination is pretty good too. I think most shows don't inspire the watchers to converse in that same way. Sports might but I've noticed that many geeks are not huge sports fans.
I think talking on the Internet is very social but we all need to remember to spend some time with friends and family in real life now and then. I know a lot of people who'd rather talk to someone they only know online rather than long time real life friends and family. Online friends are great and I've turned many online friends into real life friends but you don't want to ignore the people who really care about you.
Not to mention that it's easy to message somebody at 4am where as you might not want to call them at that time. Frequently they might be up but as you can't know before hand when using pre-Internet methods it'd mean you'd just not socialize at all. For me at least the Internet has greatly extended the hours in which I can socialize.
I love being able to message from my phone too. I can send text mssages back and forth while sitting at a friends house watching tv with them and still chat with my girlfriend who is stuck in traffic without being rude and talking over the tv.
It makes it much easier to look up things like movies that are playing. I can spend a minute finding the movie I want to go to with my friends rather than spending 15 minutes calling around or digging through the paper. I can get driving directions to the new place we want to have dinner or party much quicker than I could have found it without the Internet. Definately a boon for last minute planning of social outtings.
This concept seems a little clueless. The idea seems to be to go outside of the major metro areas and build a new jumbo-sized road/train/pipeline from Mexico to Oklahoma. The first thing I think of is that this will merely cause a shifting of population centers away from their current location to the location of this new roadway as people move to where they'll have easier access to the major travel artery. Businesses will want to profit off this road, that'll create jobs in the area around the roads, people will move into the area with jobs, and so forth until the road is again in the middle of the populated area.
They'd be better off creating an improved train system. One set of tracks for commercial use between Mexico, major Texas cities, and into other states. This should include a major express backbone that avoids routing through populated zones. A second set of tracks should be created to connect major Texan cities, Mexico, and connecting states for passenger use. Create, or improve, local train systems that can use automated touting and on-demand cars and have it cross the state-wide train system such that it's easy to move from the local loop and the interstate system.
I think there needs to be a distinction between harassing other players and finding more effective ways to play. Just bashing newbies for no purpose is mean. Tricking them into helping you become a better player is fair game IMO. If the game designers don't want this kind of thing to happen then design the system such that it can't happen.
;) It's a game. Play to win. As kids my little sister always started crying and then quit when she didn't do well in games. What'd she learn because nobody ever made her keep playing? She quits at everything now. No backbone at all.
I for one find most video games boring because when you play against the machine it has no intelligence and is therefore more repetition than stimulation. Multiplayer games should fix that but most don't. Players are afraid of any real competition so the game is rigged to pander to people who want a game where they can never face any real challenges.
They're complaining that players aren't playing nice but I think they're missing out on a large market for fierce player vrs player gaming where everything is fair. You should be able to battle other players either one on one or in groups. You should be able to earn experience and harvest equipment from these battles. Death should be a permanent condition for your player. Make a MMOG with some real competition and where real strategy can be employed. Make it dark and a bit demented. Make it hard to play but make the victory worthwhile. Make players into real villians and heroes. Use what the players are doing on their own accord to put a plot back into these games. Don't fight them, make what they're doing part of the game. If group A is attacking newbies when they logon then make it a quest for other groups to defeat group A and protect the newbies.
For God's sake stop being such pansies.
Why should you have to? You shouldn't have to archieve information periodically so that the programs you use to manage that information can keep from crapping out. That is the whole point of having programs to manage things. Let them archieve stuff for you automatically.
Either way there is no reason that a mail client should use up multiple gigs of memory just to run There should be a little memory use for the UI, some for the network, and some for whatever messages are open. Unless you're searching or some such function that is all the memory that should be used. For email that should almost never go more than a few megs - certainly there is no excuse for using up hundreds or thousands of megs of memory.
Also, while I'm bitching, it shouldn't block downloading of messages while prompting to compress old mail. Shouldn't it queue these tasks? Keep running while waiting for the user's input. When you get their input then wait until the currently running task is finished and then do the next task. How hard is that?
Actually I have my own database system for storing and searching my old mail because it's so impossible to manage from any know email client. It's a shame that I have to crunch all my mail myself because my mail client should be doing it for me.
Thunderbird is my favorite email client and it still SUCKS. Is there no such thing as a decent mail client? IMO the main reason mail clients suck is because they are stuck in the conceptual stoneage. Mail files are typically kept in flatfile db's or some proprietary nightmare system. SMTP, POP, and IMAP are all rather rickety systems not really designed for security or scalability. Email still has no sepperate transport for binary files. Email has no contacts.
Why is Thunderbird still folder based? Evolution and even Outlook have decent virtual folders whereas Thunderbird's suck. Gmail is more the direction to go though I think. Store the mail in a db and just use queries to define virtual folders.
I have more than a decade of email, several dozen gigs worth, stored and there is no mail client that can handle it without a very fast CPU and several gigs of RAM. This is just so wrong. I have apps I've written than deal with much more information and they can run on a P300Mhz with 64MB of RAM easily.
Before you start trying to clone Outlook why not take the time to make Thunderbird a really rocksolid mail client first? Stability, security, speed, and a small footprint are what'll sell. Get those working and THEN add in whatever extra features people desire.
I have many different projects. Some are educational and others are not. I tend to leave the death and violence until kids are teenagers at least. ;)
No, that isn't it. The idea is that the concept of a username and password is replaced by unique hash keys that can only be generated between the user and the website in question.
The website would store the users unique hash, rather than a username and password, and would authenticate against that.
The hash keys would be based on a user id, a user pass phrase, and a site id. The site id would be sent from the site being accessed and would most likely be tied to the domain name so that phishing would be difficult.
The user would enter their id and pass phrase once per session, when prompted, or their browser could save it for them if it was a trusted machine. The id and passphrase could be any string they wanted so long as they could remember it.
Everything needed to generate each site's hash key comes from those three unique bits of information. If you walk to a different machine and enter your information again it could generate your hash keys for you just as easily as the original machine.
In affect it'd be standardizing a protocol for sending a password to the server and a protocol for the browser generating the passwords for you on demand. The point is to be seamless, secure, and not require the user try to remember more than one pass phrase.
You'd probably want some sort of wallet system by which your trusted computer could remember sites you'd logged into so that when you changed your passphrase it could notify them of the change for you. Otherwise you might be prompted to update your information manually when you tried to use the site.
For example for kavlon.org a user with the name Mike and the passphrase "The duck walks backwards." might make the browser feed "kavlon.org~Mike~The duck walks backwards." through a md5 generator to get a unique hash of "1e3a5b2f5ea0ec2bbe9877f0cf0f4b5f". For Slashdot the same username and passphrase would feed "slashdot.org~Mike~The duck walks backwards." through md5 to get a unique hash of "2172948c34a23d52a2b0ae9fa0454f7c". Obviously it'd be very difficult to guess one of these hashes or to reverse engineer the passphrase. At the same time it's very easy for the user. Colissions are extremely rare so you probably wouldn't even need to publish your user id.
Money as data is probably the most effecient form of capitalism. Likewise, trust as data is the most effective form of a gift economy. There should be some alternate form of currency, kept in a database somewhere, that essentially allows people to rate how much they trust each other.
It'd be similar to Slashdot's karma system but made to resist cheating. For instance you could rank you trust in someone anywhere from 0-9 and you could adjust that at any time but you could only assign your value once. I think the trust system should tie into the tax system. Those with high trust ratings would get a tax break. For those who paid taxes that'd mean they'd pay less taxes. For those who didn't pay taxes that'd mean they'd get a reverse-tax and actually get money back. That way everyone could benefit from having a high trust level in the society. I'd also probably hand out social services based on people's trust rating. Crack whores and pimps would probably have a low trust rating so they'd get the bare minimum of support. Starving artists, opensource coders, and war vets might have higher trust ratings and would get more support. It'd be a way for people to support those who were working for the benefit of society without actually having to give money they may or not be able to afford.
Which is why I hitched my wagon to a management guy I know with experience in finance, sales, and marketing. He has connections to financial people and knows how to make more. He gets someone that can produce a product he can sale and I get someone trying to sale the products I produce. Hopefully it works out. I need to get a good investor so that I can hire some of my fellow geeks. :)
Any economic model taken to it's most extreme version will eat itself. Socialism and communism have proben to do this. Capitalism is close to proving it'll do the same. A gift economy is no different. An ideal situation is to use some intelligence to manage the economy and to use more than one system in parallel. There is no reason at all that capitalism and a gift economy can't work together. Capitalism has proven very good at distributing rare resources. Gift economies have proven very good at distributing abundant resources. These two are a perfect pairing. Capitalism has always been paired with a gift economy. Businesses would cease to operate without some sort of gift economy as that economy is what makes up a lot of our social networking. Our social networking plays a vital part in business. We just need to recognize that the gift economy is just as vital as the capitalist economy.
I'd like to find some people that wanted to handle producing the client. I don't really care about how the final game looks as long as the protocols defining the gameplay are flexible that the clients can range from text-based to fullout 3D Everquest 2 style interfaces.
I'd like to develop the server end of things and design much of the logic of the game. Mostly I just want to work out a MMO where the characters are spirits that can enslave the bodies of NPC's to play with. I think it'd be great to be able to take over any creature in the game that was weakly enough willed to be conquered and then use that creature to fight other creatures and other players. You could have characters die but their spirit could just go grab a new body and keep much of their stats. Also I'd like to experiment with the performance and stability of the servers. It always seems odd to me that there are frequently times that MMO servers are down so that the game isn't playable. Also it seems odd that they break the game up onto multiple servers rather than having everyone participate in a single world. Why not just run a single game image across as many servers as needed and use load balancing to keep everything running smoothly. I think that MMO companies could learn something from studying Google.
I don't know if volunteers would work out. I think an actual budget would be needed and I can't afford to fund it myself.