All of this could be avoided if I had a user side application that indexed my browser cache. A local database of indexed webpages that I have already seen would heed the best results under the previous scenario.
How were you thinking the implementation would look? Like an option 'search sites I've already visited' next to 'search'? Or some other way?
For what it is worth, I actually use PINE (which is an even better IMAP client than mulberry). It is a shame not to see some very good text-based clients such as pine and mutt in this comparison as well.
I second this. I've never been so productive with e-mail as I was with Pine, thanks to simple keyboard shortcuts and an uncluttered text-based interface. It even stored your sent mail into named folders automatically at the end of each month, something that I've yet to see a 'second-generation' mail client do.
As Pine was basically a Unix client, work has been underway to bring it to the PC platform in the form of PC-Pine. However, this never really worked well, integrated horribly with Windows, never supported POP3 without extra add-ons and workarounds, and development seems to have stalled on it.
I think the moral of this story is 'less is more' - apart from good spam filtering, the basically requirements of e-mail haven't changed since 1998. Who needs all gimmicky functionalities these nextgen clients offer? Do Virtual folders, graphical emoticons and a built-in RSS reader really make anybody more productive?
No - the article you refer to was corrected the day after it was posted. I quote from here:
"I was wrong about Plaxo's supposed ability to break your Outlook password. Company officials confirm that it doesn't do that. I was misinformed, and I apologize for passing along erroneous information."
I'd like to second this. I was a member of the Kosmic Free Music Foundation from 1997 on. As the name implies, anyone could download our music for free.
However the group, and our website, generated a lot of traffic and interest and I think the users might have been willing to pay for access to certain services in order to communicate directly with their favorite artists, have access to chatroom sessions for Q&As, get 'members only' info or betas of upcoming tracks. Let the music prove you're good by putting it out for free, and once the fans are locked in, they won't think twice about paying to get privileged access. (N.B. We never did this, but I guess that's because it would have been 'against the spirit' of the demoscene.)
Selling 'cover art' is a waste of time IMO; as some people have already pointed out here, it's not worth the hassle of the printing process.
Another thing that Kosmic did was to sell archive CDs (containing, e.g. a year of tracks) and T-shirts. Alright, we're moving away from the core issue, but afaik these always sold OK.
Fatal Error: It appears that you have not created the database tables for phpGroupWare. Click here to run setup.
Not a very encouraging advertisement...
My experience from blogging Australia
on
Cybercafè Travel Kit?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I just came back from backpacking around Australia for a few months. I documented the whole thing on my website and uploaded the photos from my digital camera while on the road. I've got the following tips:
As always, only blog when you have something to say. I posted once every few days. This gave me time to see things and made sure I had some news worth posting.
Tell your readers about the places you've been to but also what you thought of the places. If you found something was worth checking out, or if you wasted your time seeing something that turned out to be dull, say so. But keep it concise, and make sure that you've said everything you want to say in a few paragraphs.
Don't bore your readers with accounts and descriptions of the people that you met/hung out with/got drunk with/kissed/whatever! No-one really cares about Eddie's Personal Soap Opera except Eddie. Just keep your blog focused on your travels.
Always include links for places or areas of interest so that people can get more info. A quick set of Google searches will make your blog much more interesting and accessible.
Make sure you use a cybercafe that allows you to pay after you've used the machines (i.e. not one where you have to buy 'credits' and where your time is being counted down on the screen all the time). It sucks to be pressured to write because you're running out of time.
Perhaps an obvious one, but use weblog software that won't break. You may not be able to telnet into your box to rework the config files when you're travelling, and it's so frustrating when you're not able to post that all-important account of your experiences. I use Blogger which is an online weblog service and is free for the basic version.
If you're in a city for a while (e.g. a few days), don't use mainstream cybercafes. They often have software that restricts your use of the machine. Spend some time searching for a facility that may be off the high street or smaller, but that offers the same deal without the restrictions. The best places I found were not cybercafes at all - they were travel shops that had a few internet-connected PCs. The advantage is that, in these places, the owners are less tech-savvy and you'll have a machine that you can install things on (e.g. software for processing and uploading photos - see below). Plus you won't be restricted because of firewalls etc. (e.g. for FTP).
Photos: I uploaded my photos once every few weeks. I regularly dumped them to CD in a photo store, made a selection, processed each image in Photoshop, created thumbnails and HTML files with Express Thumbnail Creator and uploaded them to my site with WS FTP LE. Photoshop is obviously not free, and I had to find cybercafes that had it pre-installed (wasn't always easy). Express Thumbnail Creator is shareware, and WS FTP LE is free. The best thing would obviously be to have all this stuff on CD before you sit down at the PC.
Be aware that some cybercafes will charge you for upload bandwidth (never very much though).
COMMENT all your photos! It takes time but it's worth it. Express Thumbnail Creator has this feature built in. Nobody really wants to go through pages and pages of unlabelled thumbnails of sunsets and mountains. Also, commenting your photos is a good test for yourself to ensure that you're only putting interesting photos up.
As soon as your photos are up, announce it in your blog and send out a mail to everyone in your address book who may be interested (mail to yourself, BCC everyone you're sending to).
It wasn't so long ago that people were touting text ads as a bandwidth-friendly and clean solution to the banners mess. A lot of major sites (Google...) and other popular sites (fuckedcompany, blogger) adopted them. What happened?
I just CAN'T believe that "social" uses of picture-taking phones will be more than a brief-lived novelty/gimmick/fad.
How about: Girlfriend tries on dress in shop, wants boyfriend's advice before buying it. Or, guy sits on home on Saturday night, receives an MMS message from his friends with a photo of the party, decides to hit the party.... Etc.
It's no secret why MMS is currently being pushed so hard in Europe ($$$ - many mobile operators freely admit that the SMS boom caught them unawares and they were forced to maintain a low unit charge), but I think it has a real chance to be a lot more than a gimmick.
(Anyway, MMS could be viewed as just a stepstone for the KILLER 3G app - real-time videoconferencing.)
The rumors about the 9310 appear to be true... according to this article Nokia is set to release their latest Communicator model (phone/PDA/mobile office) later today, with support for GPRS. See also on Google's news for other articles on the 9310.
I have a Canon Powershot 330. It's far from a professional camera (2 mp), and I'm far from a professional photographer. My question is that in every photo I take with this camera, every element is perfectly in focus - even in macro mode, I can never get a nice looking shot with only the subject in focus. Is this an issue that is related to digital cameras specifically, or more to my model? How much more do I have to pay for a digital camera that will allow me to control the depth of field?
Only a few people, using Google or other search engines, would be able to guess who I am -- and these are probably my closest friends. And even them would probably have a hard time guessing it was me.
James Tucker of 126 Northpoint Houston, Texas 77060, here's looking at you!
I'll buy into the matrix when I see how well the film stands up to an audience that has seen bullet time and slow-mo action in every action movie made in the last two years.
The groundbreaking visual technique in The Matrix was 'flow-mo'. 'Slow-mo' has been in use for quite a while longer (like, since the beginning of film).
OK, but for end-users to have an IM client that supports multiple networks only solves the problem at one end of the chain.
"Imagine," says Sonu Aggarwal, CEO of Cordant, a Bellvue, WA maker of IM gateway software, "having a contact in your IM buddy list that represents your Delta flight reservation. Rather than having to call an 800-number and digging up your reservation code, that 'buddy' is your ticket, constantly communicating the status of the reservation."
For IM to become a real killer app in the way described above (i.e. for the medium to be taken seriously for commercial use), some consolidation and an official standard would be needed.
OK maybe this is totally off the wall but I don't really see the point of using an address book anyway. Most of the time you're replying to a mail, or writing to someone whose address you know (come on geeks, who can't remember a handful of e-mail addresses?). And no address book = no klez.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, I notice the domain G-MAIL.COM is up for sale.
Somebody stands to make a lot of money soonish....
Agreed, really well written. From IBM's counterclaims:
SCO undertook to create fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace in regard to SCO's rights in and to that [Unix] technology.
This has to be the first time I've seen jargon actually fit concisely and neatly into a legal text!
Go IBM...
All of this could be avoided if I had a user side application that indexed my browser cache. A local database of indexed webpages that I have already seen would heed the best results under the previous scenario.
How were you thinking the implementation would look? Like an option 'search sites I've already visited' next to 'search'? Or some other way?
It's quite a neat idea actually.
I can go onto IRC (using a neat little open source J2ME IRC client)
What client do you use for IRC over J2ME exactly? Do you have any recommendations for a good J2ME IM client? Cheers...
You are right - be flattered, or be angry?
Be amused. Your comment was modded '+5 insightful' while the rip-off was deemed 'Redundant'; gotta give you a little buzz, no?
For what it is worth, I actually use PINE (which is an even better IMAP client than mulberry). It is a shame not to see some very good text-based clients such as pine and mutt in this comparison as well.
I second this. I've never been so productive with e-mail as I was with Pine, thanks to simple keyboard shortcuts and an uncluttered text-based interface. It even stored your sent mail into named folders automatically at the end of each month, something that I've yet to see a 'second-generation' mail client do.
As Pine was basically a Unix client, work has been underway to bring it to the PC platform in the form of PC-Pine. However, this never really worked well, integrated horribly with Windows, never supported POP3 without extra add-ons and workarounds, and development seems to have stalled on it.
I think the moral of this story is 'less is more' - apart from good spam filtering, the basically requirements of e-mail haven't changed since 1998. Who needs all gimmicky functionalities these nextgen clients offer? Do Virtual folders, graphical emoticons and a built-in RSS reader really make anybody more productive?
No - the article you refer to was corrected the day after it was posted. I quote from here:
"I was wrong about Plaxo's supposed ability to break your Outlook password. Company officials confirm that it doesn't do that. I was misinformed, and I apologize for passing along erroneous information."
I'd like to second this. I was a member of the Kosmic Free Music Foundation from 1997 on. As the name implies, anyone could download our music for free.
However the group, and our website, generated a lot of traffic and interest and I think the users might have been willing to pay for access to certain services in order to communicate directly with their favorite artists, have access to chatroom sessions for Q&As, get 'members only' info or betas of upcoming tracks. Let the music prove you're good by putting it out for free, and once the fans are locked in, they won't think twice about paying to get privileged access. (N.B. We never did this, but I guess that's because it would have been 'against the spirit' of the demoscene.)
Selling 'cover art' is a waste of time IMO; as some people have already pointed out here, it's not worth the hassle of the printing process.
Another thing that Kosmic did was to sell archive CDs (containing, e.g. a year of tracks) and T-shirts. Alright, we're moving away from the core issue, but afaik these always sold OK.
From the main page of thePHP Groupware site, two minutes ago:
Fatal Error: It appears that you have not created the database tables for phpGroupWare. Click here to run setup.
Not a very encouraging advertisement...
As always, only blog when you have something to say. I posted once every few days. This gave me time to see things and made sure I had some news worth posting.
Tell your readers about the places you've been to but also what you thought of the places. If you found something was worth checking out, or if you wasted your time seeing something that turned out to be dull, say so. But keep it concise, and make sure that you've said everything you want to say in a few paragraphs.
Don't bore your readers with accounts and descriptions of the people that you met/hung out with/got drunk with/kissed/whatever! No-one really cares about Eddie's Personal Soap Opera except Eddie. Just keep your blog focused on your travels.
Always include links for places or areas of interest so that people can get more info. A quick set of Google searches will make your blog much more interesting and accessible.
Make sure you use a cybercafe that allows you to pay after you've used the machines (i.e. not one where you have to buy 'credits' and where your time is being counted down on the screen all the time). It sucks to be pressured to write because you're running out of time.
Perhaps an obvious one, but use weblog software that won't break. You may not be able to telnet into your box to rework the config files when you're travelling, and it's so frustrating when you're not able to post that all-important account of your experiences. I use Blogger which is an online weblog service and is free for the basic version.
If you're in a city for a while (e.g. a few days), don't use mainstream cybercafes. They often have software that restricts your use of the machine. Spend some time searching for a facility that may be off the high street or smaller, but that offers the same deal without the restrictions. The best places I found were not cybercafes at all - they were travel shops that had a few internet-connected PCs. The advantage is that, in these places, the owners are less tech-savvy and you'll have a machine that you can install things on (e.g. software for processing and uploading photos - see below). Plus you won't be restricted because of firewalls etc. (e.g. for FTP).
Photos: I uploaded my photos once every few weeks. I regularly dumped them to CD in a photo store, made a selection, processed each image in Photoshop, created thumbnails and HTML files with Express Thumbnail Creator and uploaded them to my site with WS FTP LE. Photoshop is obviously not free, and I had to find cybercafes that had it pre-installed (wasn't always easy). Express Thumbnail Creator is shareware, and WS FTP LE is free. The best thing would obviously be to have all this stuff on CD before you sit down at the PC.
Be aware that some cybercafes will charge you for upload bandwidth (never very much though).
COMMENT all your photos! It takes time but it's worth it. Express Thumbnail Creator has this feature built in. Nobody really wants to go through pages and pages of unlabelled thumbnails of sunsets and mountains. Also, commenting your photos is a good test for yourself to ensure that you're only putting interesting photos up.
As soon as your photos are up, announce it in your blog and send out a mail to everyone in your address book who may be interested (mail to yourself, BCC everyone you're sending to).
M.
Fixed - It's now back on the page.
Errr... they seem to have pulled RC3 off the releases page. Last minute changes?
Just about the only thing this device seems to be missing is an FM transmitter like the Neuros, for playing tunes wirelessly on the car radio.
For more background check out the links at the top of Searchking.com, in particular 'Google confesses' (!)
Whoops, just saw FC now has a fat banner up top.
It wasn't so long ago that people were touting text ads as a bandwidth-friendly and clean solution to the banners mess. A lot of major sites (Google...) and other popular sites (fuckedcompany, blogger) adopted them. What happened?
How about: Girlfriend tries on dress in shop, wants boyfriend's advice before buying it. Or, guy sits on home on Saturday night, receives an MMS message from his friends with a photo of the party, decides to hit the party.... Etc.
It's no secret why MMS is currently being pushed so hard in Europe ($$$ - many mobile operators freely admit that the SMS boom caught them unawares and they were forced to maintain a low unit charge), but I think it has a real chance to be a lot more than a gimmick.
(Anyway, MMS could be viewed as just a stepstone for the KILLER 3G app - real-time videoconferencing.)
The rumors about the 9310 appear to be true... according to this article Nokia is set to release their latest Communicator model (phone/PDA/mobile office) later today, with support for GPRS. See also on Google's news for other articles on the 9310.
There are some good previews of the Nokia 3650 over on GSMBOX and Howard Chui's site. I'd still vote for the 7210 though, integrated cam or not.
I have a Canon Powershot 330. It's far from a professional camera (2 mp), and I'm far from a professional photographer. My question is that in every photo I take with this camera, every element is perfectly in focus - even in macro mode, I can never get a nice looking shot with only the subject in focus. Is this an issue that is related to digital cameras specifically, or more to my model? How much more do I have to pay for a digital camera that will allow me to control the depth of field?
James Tucker of 126 Northpoint Houston, Texas 77060, here's looking at you!
The groundbreaking visual technique in The Matrix was 'flow-mo'. 'Slow-mo' has been in use for quite a while longer (like, since the beginning of film).
"Imagine," says Sonu Aggarwal, CEO of Cordant, a Bellvue, WA maker of IM gateway software, "having a contact in your IM buddy list that represents your Delta flight reservation. Rather than having to call an 800-number and digging up your reservation code, that 'buddy' is your ticket, constantly communicating the status of the reservation."
For IM to become a real killer app in the way described above (i.e. for the medium to be taken seriously for commercial use), some consolidation and an official standard would be needed.
OK maybe this is totally off the wall but I don't really see the point of using an address book anyway. Most of the time you're replying to a mail, or writing to someone whose address you know (come on geeks, who can't remember a handful of e-mail addresses?). And no address book = no klez.
... here and here.