You can do a poor and quite limited approximation of that with gmail.
Depending on which account you have selected in in thunderbird, it chooses the correct reply to address by default,
So does gmail. In fact, it does this even if you don't bother to separate your incoming mail into different labels or priority inboxes.
attaches the correct signature
So does gmail. In fact, it does this even if you don't bother to separate your incoming mail into different labels or priority inboxes.
maintains the sent items, drafts, etc, separately, etc.
Okay, that gmail doesn't do. I've never missed it, but I suppose you might. I don't have that many drafts at any given time and when I'm looking for sent items I just use the search.
One comment on drafts: I really like the way gmail handles them. I can start typing an e-mail at home on my home computer, and just walk away from it mid-sentence. Then when I open my netbook on the bus on the way to work I see a red "Draft" on the relevant conversation in my inbox... if I click on it I'm right back where I left off. Then I can type a few more sentences, suddenly snap the netbook shut because I'm about to miss my stop and then when I open my browser on my work machine, there's my draft, again right where I left off.
Thunderbird and IMAP4 could do that, but only if you save your draft before switching machines.
And there's no arbitrary limit to how many you can have.
I don't believe there's any limit on the number of different e-mail addresses you can have on your gmail account. I have a couple dozen (mostly throwaways that I only use for one mailing list each).
There's other things too... like no limit on the amount of mail you receive. I know a few people who are toting around mailboxes (lots of attachments) that would exceed gmails admittedly generous limits.
Yes, if you have more than 7.6 GB of e-mail, you'll have trouble. Personally, I have all of my e-mail going back to about 1995 in gmail and it only consumes a little over 3 GB. Clearly, gmail will not work for people with 10 GB mailboxes. Not this year, anyway.
Multiple accounts. Thunderbird lets you manage multiple accounts with multiple providers easily.
I think GMail actually does a better job of this. Set your other accounts up to forward, set gmail up to allow you to send as though sending from the other accounts and then you have a single inbox that integrates all of your accounts seamlessly. It does the right thing for replies, too. If you want to more easily see which account a given message is from, make a filter that automatically adds a label. If you decide that you don't want one of the accounts to go to the inbox, have the filter archive it (you'll still see the unread message count in the label list on the left). If you do that with all but one then you'll essentially have the same experience as with Thunderbird.
Search. Believe it or not, Thunderbird gives you better control of search than Gmail
I believe that this is the case if you don't know how to use GMail search:)
I agree on the other points.
Re:Is this why I am getting worse results
on
Google's New Design
·
· Score: 1
the search bar had the temerity to suggest that 'shit' was misspelled.
Yes, but to type in the programming exercises, do you recommend using vi or emacs?:-/
The author suggests gedit, for all platforms, which is a fair enough suggestion. However he then insists on using spaces over tabs, without any explanation of the relative merits, thus already choosing a side in yet another programming disagreement. A simple "choose one and stick to it" would have sufficed.
Personally If I follow the book I'll be using vim + tabs, because those are what I'm used to and prefer, but that's just me.
I think that's a foolish decision.
Sure, either tabs or spaces will work fine, as long as you're consistent. The problem is that once you move beyond toy programs you will be sharing code with other developers, modifying code you get from other sources, etc. And that other code will use spaces, which means that when you mix your tab-using code with it, stuff will break.
When writing Python, follow the Python community's coding conventions, and one of the strongest and most important is to use spaces, not tabs, for indentation.
You also have to keep in mind there are 2 perspectives here, the perspective of the email user and the perspective of the advertiser. If someone pays to put an ad on Google, they expect Google to place that ad in accordance with whatever contract they signed. If Google is taking their money and then still advertising it's own products over theirs, then that is definitely a conflict of interest.
Besides the other objection already noted, I think Google's model of for-pay advertising inoculates them from conflict of interest. You see, advertisers only pay for the ads that users (a) see and (b) click on. So if Google chooses to advertise its own products over a client's, the client actually didn't, and doesn't, pay at all.
If that situation were to arise (and, as the other poster noted, I don't think that's a reasonable description of this case, since Groupon didn't pay Google anything to deliver those e-mails), it would put Google in the position of being able to choose whether to show their own ads or their clients' ads based on which would make Google more money -- but that is exactly the same situation that arises on AdWords all the time when there are multiple advertisers vying for the top slot (which is basically always). Google runs a real-time auction and displays the ad that will pay Google the most, based on the price the advertiser is willing to pay per click and the estimated probability that it will get clicked.
If Google decides that its ad will generate more revenue for Google than the client/competitor's ad, that really is no different at all from two competitors duking it out for the top spot and one deciding it's willing to pay a little more. This is particularly true since the fee Google charges the advertiser that "wins" isn't what that advertiser is willing to pay, but what the top loser is willing to pay -- by putting itself in the top spot, Google is "paying" (by foregoing the revenue) what that advertiser would have paid. It's really no different than if another advertiser were to jump in and set its bid price at infinity.
Actually, I suspect it was indeed intentional, but at the same time, completely understandable.
I agree, but I think you're using "intentional" in a slightly different way than I was. I agree with your usage. What I meant by it, though, was that someone at Google had deliberately decide to weight Google Offers e-mails over Groupon e-mails as a way to compete with Groupon. I could certainly be wrong, but I don't think that's what happened.
Caveat: I'm mostly just an interested bystander (academic), though I do sometimes feel mildly uncomfortable from a libertarian perspective that theoretically it would now be very hard for someone to avoid giving Google data about themselves -- if they don't get it via search or email, they'll get it via Google Analytics installed on the other sites you visit.
Google recognizes that discomfort and provides tools for you to address it. I suppose some would argue that "opt-in" is a more appropriate model than "opt-out", but at least Google does make it possible -- and easy -- to opt out of all of their tracking.
Go to google.com, click the "Privacy" link at the bottom, then click "Privacy tools" in the left-hand navigation column to see all of the privacy settings and tools that Google provides. They even make browser plugins that will ensure that you *stay* opted out, even when cookies are deleted, etc.
I realize a lot of people find it very hard to believe that a corporation really would want to help people to avoid the tracking that is in the corporations best interest, but Google's perspective is that long-term the very best approach is to do the thing that is right for the user. Google feels that it acts responsibly with the user information it collects, and that it can use that information to provide a better user experience, helping people to find what they need faster and easier (and this includes ads -- Google's perspective on ads is that any ad you see that is not something you're interested in and find useful is a failure on their part), so that people will want to allow Google to gather the information, but also recognizes that people have legitimate privacy concerns and that they really should be able to avoid the tracking if they don't want it. The company really is committed to helping people maintain their privacy, even if it comes at the expense of Google's short-term bottom line. At least, that's what I see from my perspective as an employee.
There are a whole lot of very libertarian-minded folks at Google, you know, and it's not the type of company where top-down command-and-control directives telling employees to violate their own moral principles work very well.
Hmm, okay. So not anything related specifically to Priority Inbox, but the "manner, mode and extent" being "subject to change" would certainly seem to cover it.
My money is still on this being an unintentional side effect of a rule intended to boost the priority of service notifications, account changes, etc.
Hahahah LOL. Try it. I did. HR called me in a week later and asked why I "altered" my employment agreement. I told them I did not agree to some of the terms. They looked at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead and then informed me that none of the terms were negotiable, and that she's never in her life seen someone do anything like that.
And regardless of what the HR person thinks, the contract you signed was the altered one, and that's the one that would apply in court. Unless you then signed an unaltered copy, of course. In your shoes I'd have just said "Oh, so my changes don't apply? Okay then," and let it drop, hoping that they wouldn't be smart enough to demand I sign another one.
I once had an employer come back after I'd been working there for a month and tell me I needed to sign a new employment agreement. I said "Okay, I'll get it to you" and went back to work. Two weeks later they asked me about it and I said "Oh, yeah, I'll get that done". Repeat a couple more times, and then my response changed to "Oh, right, I keep meaning to run that by my attorney". Repeat a couple more times and then "I'm still waiting to hear back from my lawyer". By this time nearly a year had passed, and they eventually either just forgot about it or got the hint and gave up. I never did sign the agreement.
Try buying a house. If you're really going to read the entire stack of morgage papers, you're going to need a few days.
So? Federal law gives you three days, which is more than enough time to carefully read the 50 or so pages that you signed. I've signed four or five mortgage agreements in my life, and that's what I do every time -- while at the title company I just sign everything in sight, then I take my copies of all of it home and sit down and read it all through carefully. It doesn't actually take days. Two or three hours.
And there's no chance in hell you're going to catch anything shady like the above unless you have a lawyer there the entire time, and you can bet that's going to be an expensive few days.
Bah to both. Contracts really aren't that hard to read and understand. I wouldn't bother with a lawyer. And if you did get a lawyer who was familiar what that area of law it would take him/her far less time to read it all than it takes you, because they'll be going through it just looking for the differences from standard usage, rather than having to understand every bit from scratch.
This one pulled a double-shaft on him... the offending bit of legalese wasn't even in the document he signed. It was something like a "this agreement also includes stipulations covered in a different document". He couldn't possibly have caught that even with a lawyer reading over his shoulder
Nonsense. Any lawyer would have insisted on understanding the full agreement. I would have, too, for that matter. A couple of the employment agreements I've signed have referenced things like the employee handbook and such... so I insisted on reading them, too.
It's not really that hard to take responsibility for your own legal actions.
Well, to be fair, the ones that represent account changes and service notifications could reasonably be assumed to be important.
I strongly suspect that the cause of the offer prioritization is a rule that was put in place to accomplish exactly that, and that it never occurred to anyone to make an exception for offers in that rule.
...just in time for an antitrust investigation. Who at Google thought this was a good idea, anyway?
Most likely, no one, because mostly likely no one thought of it at all.
My bet is that this the result of a generic rule that boosts the importance of e-mails from Google, you know so that you're sure to see announcements of new gmail features, or Google account-related messages, etc., but no one thought to make an exception for Offers.
Given that Offers and gmail come from different groups within Google, and I'd expect that no one on the Offers team knows much about how priority inbox is implemented and no one on the gmail team was thinking much about Offers other than to note there was a launch party, I can see exactly how this would happen. Or maybe it is intentional... but I doubt it.
What will happen next is that the Priority Inbox rules will be modified to avoid giving any undue precedence to Google Offers, and lots of slashdotters will believe that Google was being Evil and only stopped when caught, regardless of the facts of the situation.
(Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer at Google, but I don't work on Offers or gmail.)
Let's try a thought experiment. How would americans have liked it, if after 9/11 George W. had declared that traffic accidents kill many more americans each year than al quaeda ever will, so to honor the memory of the twin tower victims he would enact policies to make american roads safer?
Me, for one. But rational response rarely plays well in politics.
javascript is an unbelievably inefficient mechanism for attacking the sort of problems where you would want a large distributed computing system
Not necessarily. This is true of most of the Javascript engines around, because they're pure interpreters of a language not designed to be particularly efficient, but Javascript can be compiled to machine code before execution. This is what Google's V8, the Javascript engine in Chrome, does. With JIT-compiled Javascript you'll get comparable efficiency to JIT-compiled Java, which is pretty competitive with compiled C.
The rest of your post is dead on, though. There really aren't any spare cycles today. Even desktop machines and servers dynamically adjust clock rate on demand, and automatically drop into various power-saving states to save even more power when the cycles aren't needed. So it would be rude to exploit users' CPUs without their permission, and in the case of battery-powered devices it could be much worse than just rude.
I think the problems you are trying to solve have been very addressed more practically and thoroughly by David Chaum's Punchscan and Scantegrity systems.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you backup those completely separate mailboxes in gmail?
Via IMAP4.
I think that believing you'll never have to share code with others is eventually going to cause you great pain. I hope I'm wrong :-)
Oh, and vim can be configured to always use spaces, but make that completely transparent to you.
You can do that with gmail.
You can do a poor and quite limited approximation of that with gmail.
Depending on which account you have selected in in thunderbird, it chooses the correct reply to address by default,
So does gmail. In fact, it does this even if you don't bother to separate your incoming mail into different labels or priority inboxes.
attaches the correct signature
So does gmail. In fact, it does this even if you don't bother to separate your incoming mail into different labels or priority inboxes.
maintains the sent items, drafts, etc, separately, etc.
Okay, that gmail doesn't do. I've never missed it, but I suppose you might. I don't have that many drafts at any given time and when I'm looking for sent items I just use the search.
One comment on drafts: I really like the way gmail handles them. I can start typing an e-mail at home on my home computer, and just walk away from it mid-sentence. Then when I open my netbook on the bus on the way to work I see a red "Draft" on the relevant conversation in my inbox... if I click on it I'm right back where I left off. Then I can type a few more sentences, suddenly snap the netbook shut because I'm about to miss my stop and then when I open my browser on my work machine, there's my draft, again right where I left off.
Thunderbird and IMAP4 could do that, but only if you save your draft before switching machines.
And there's no arbitrary limit to how many you can have.
I don't believe there's any limit on the number of different e-mail addresses you can have on your gmail account. I have a couple dozen (mostly throwaways that I only use for one mailing list each).
There's other things too... like no limit on the amount of mail you receive. I know a few people who are toting around mailboxes (lots of attachments) that would exceed gmails admittedly generous limits.
Yes, if you have more than 7.6 GB of e-mail, you'll have trouble. Personally, I have all of my e-mail going back to about 1995 in gmail and it only consumes a little over 3 GB. Clearly, gmail will not work for people with 10 GB mailboxes. Not this year, anyway.
Google does search better, but Thunderbird has some fine grain control that is handy sometimes.
For example? It's been a couple of years since I stopped using Thunderbird, but I don't recall anything I can't do with GMail.
stuff like multiple-imap account support is better in thunderbird
How so?
NM, dumb question.
Yes gmail has all kinds of features to do this, but i like COMPLETELY separate inboxes for some stuff
You can do that with gmail.
stuff like multiple-imap account support is better in thunderbird
How so?
Multiple accounts. Thunderbird lets you manage multiple accounts with multiple providers easily.
I think GMail actually does a better job of this. Set your other accounts up to forward, set gmail up to allow you to send as though sending from the other accounts and then you have a single inbox that integrates all of your accounts seamlessly. It does the right thing for replies, too. If you want to more easily see which account a given message is from, make a filter that automatically adds a label. If you decide that you don't want one of the accounts to go to the inbox, have the filter archive it (you'll still see the unread message count in the label list on the left). If you do that with all but one then you'll essentially have the same experience as with Thunderbird.
Search. Believe it or not, Thunderbird gives you better control of search than Gmail
I believe that this is the case if you don't know how to use GMail search :)
I agree on the other points.
the search bar had the temerity to suggest that 'shit' was misspelled.
How did the search bar suggest that?
Yes, but to type in the programming exercises, do you recommend using vi or emacs? :-/
The author suggests gedit, for all platforms, which is a fair enough suggestion. However he then insists on using spaces over tabs, without any explanation of the relative merits, thus already choosing a side in yet another programming disagreement. A simple "choose one and stick to it" would have sufficed.
Personally If I follow the book I'll be using vim + tabs, because those are what I'm used to and prefer, but that's just me.
I think that's a foolish decision.
Sure, either tabs or spaces will work fine, as long as you're consistent. The problem is that once you move beyond toy programs you will be sharing code with other developers, modifying code you get from other sources, etc. And that other code will use spaces, which means that when you mix your tab-using code with it, stuff will break.
When writing Python, follow the Python community's coding conventions, and one of the strongest and most important is to use spaces, not tabs, for indentation.
I thought all the dots that popped up on the map for "Find sex nearby!" were pretty funny. I had no idea there were so many local brothels.
There aren't. Those dots just track the nearby sluts.
Yes, google can't keep you from making bone headed mistakes. Also, email won't stop you from sending a stupid email, so no thanks.
GMail has an "Undo Send" feature in Labs.
What it actually does is delay sending for a few seconds, giving you a brief chance to "undo".
You also have to keep in mind there are 2 perspectives here, the perspective of the email user and the perspective of the advertiser. If someone pays to put an ad on Google, they expect Google to place that ad in accordance with whatever contract they signed. If Google is taking their money and then still advertising it's own products over theirs, then that is definitely a conflict of interest.
Besides the other objection already noted, I think Google's model of for-pay advertising inoculates them from conflict of interest. You see, advertisers only pay for the ads that users (a) see and (b) click on. So if Google chooses to advertise its own products over a client's, the client actually didn't, and doesn't, pay at all.
If that situation were to arise (and, as the other poster noted, I don't think that's a reasonable description of this case, since Groupon didn't pay Google anything to deliver those e-mails), it would put Google in the position of being able to choose whether to show their own ads or their clients' ads based on which would make Google more money -- but that is exactly the same situation that arises on AdWords all the time when there are multiple advertisers vying for the top slot (which is basically always). Google runs a real-time auction and displays the ad that will pay Google the most, based on the price the advertiser is willing to pay per click and the estimated probability that it will get clicked.
If Google decides that its ad will generate more revenue for Google than the client/competitor's ad, that really is no different at all from two competitors duking it out for the top spot and one deciding it's willing to pay a little more. This is particularly true since the fee Google charges the advertiser that "wins" isn't what that advertiser is willing to pay, but what the top loser is willing to pay -- by putting itself in the top spot, Google is "paying" (by foregoing the revenue) what that advertiser would have paid. It's really no different than if another advertiser were to jump in and set its bid price at infinity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7l0a2PVhPQ
Or maybe it is intentional... but I doubt it.
Actually, I suspect it was indeed intentional, but at the same time, completely understandable.
I agree, but I think you're using "intentional" in a slightly different way than I was. I agree with your usage. What I meant by it, though, was that someone at Google had deliberately decide to weight Google Offers e-mails over Groupon e-mails as a way to compete with Groupon. I could certainly be wrong, but I don't think that's what happened.
Caveat: I'm mostly just an interested bystander (academic), though I do sometimes feel mildly uncomfortable from a libertarian perspective that theoretically it would now be very hard for someone to avoid giving Google data about themselves -- if they don't get it via search or email, they'll get it via Google Analytics installed on the other sites you visit.
Google recognizes that discomfort and provides tools for you to address it. I suppose some would argue that "opt-in" is a more appropriate model than "opt-out", but at least Google does make it possible -- and easy -- to opt out of all of their tracking.
Go to google.com, click the "Privacy" link at the bottom, then click "Privacy tools" in the left-hand navigation column to see all of the privacy settings and tools that Google provides. They even make browser plugins that will ensure that you *stay* opted out, even when cookies are deleted, etc.
I realize a lot of people find it very hard to believe that a corporation really would want to help people to avoid the tracking that is in the corporations best interest, but Google's perspective is that long-term the very best approach is to do the thing that is right for the user. Google feels that it acts responsibly with the user information it collects, and that it can use that information to provide a better user experience, helping people to find what they need faster and easier (and this includes ads -- Google's perspective on ads is that any ad you see that is not something you're interested in and find useful is a failure on their part), so that people will want to allow Google to gather the information, but also recognizes that people have legitimate privacy concerns and that they really should be able to avoid the tracking if they don't want it. The company really is committed to helping people maintain their privacy, even if it comes at the expense of Google's short-term bottom line. At least, that's what I see from my perspective as an employee.
There are a whole lot of very libertarian-minded folks at Google, you know, and it's not the type of company where top-down command-and-control directives telling employees to violate their own moral principles work very well.
People actually use "services" like Groupon and whatever this Google thing is? That's the real scoop to me, anyway.
It surprises you that people like discounts on stuff?
Hmm, okay. So not anything related specifically to Priority Inbox, but the "manner, mode and extent" being "subject to change" would certainly seem to cover it.
My money is still on this being an unintentional side effect of a rule intended to boost the priority of service notifications, account changes, etc.
Hahahah LOL. Try it. I did. HR called me in a week later and asked why I "altered" my employment agreement. I told them I did not agree to some of the terms. They looked at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead and then informed me that none of the terms were negotiable, and that she's never in her life seen someone do anything like that.
And regardless of what the HR person thinks, the contract you signed was the altered one, and that's the one that would apply in court. Unless you then signed an unaltered copy, of course. In your shoes I'd have just said "Oh, so my changes don't apply? Okay then," and let it drop, hoping that they wouldn't be smart enough to demand I sign another one.
I once had an employer come back after I'd been working there for a month and tell me I needed to sign a new employment agreement. I said "Okay, I'll get it to you" and went back to work. Two weeks later they asked me about it and I said "Oh, yeah, I'll get that done". Repeat a couple more times, and then my response changed to "Oh, right, I keep meaning to run that by my attorney". Repeat a couple more times and then "I'm still waiting to hear back from my lawyer". By this time nearly a year had passed, and they eventually either just forgot about it or got the hint and gave up. I never did sign the agreement.
Try buying a house. If you're really going to read the entire stack of morgage papers, you're going to need a few days.
So? Federal law gives you three days, which is more than enough time to carefully read the 50 or so pages that you signed. I've signed four or five mortgage agreements in my life, and that's what I do every time -- while at the title company I just sign everything in sight, then I take my copies of all of it home and sit down and read it all through carefully. It doesn't actually take days. Two or three hours.
And there's no chance in hell you're going to catch anything shady like the above unless you have a lawyer there the entire time, and you can bet that's going to be an expensive few days.
Bah to both. Contracts really aren't that hard to read and understand. I wouldn't bother with a lawyer. And if you did get a lawyer who was familiar what that area of law it would take him/her far less time to read it all than it takes you, because they'll be going through it just looking for the differences from standard usage, rather than having to understand every bit from scratch.
This one pulled a double-shaft on him... the offending bit of legalese wasn't even in the document he signed. It was something like a "this agreement also includes stipulations covered in a different document". He couldn't possibly have caught that even with a lawyer reading over his shoulder
Nonsense. Any lawyer would have insisted on understanding the full agreement. I would have, too, for that matter. A couple of the employment agreements I've signed have referenced things like the employee handbook and such... so I insisted on reading them, too.
It's not really that hard to take responsibility for your own legal actions.
It even says this in the service details for priority inbox.
Where does it say that? I've looked and can't find it.
Well, to be fair, the ones that represent account changes and service notifications could reasonably be assumed to be important.
I strongly suspect that the cause of the offer prioritization is a rule that was put in place to accomplish exactly that, and that it never occurred to anyone to make an exception for offers in that rule.
It's not illegal, but it's also not Google's style. My bet is that it was an accident, and that it will be fixed.
...just in time for an antitrust investigation. Who at Google thought this was a good idea, anyway?
Most likely, no one, because mostly likely no one thought of it at all.
My bet is that this the result of a generic rule that boosts the importance of e-mails from Google, you know so that you're sure to see announcements of new gmail features, or Google account-related messages, etc., but no one thought to make an exception for Offers.
Given that Offers and gmail come from different groups within Google, and I'd expect that no one on the Offers team knows much about how priority inbox is implemented and no one on the gmail team was thinking much about Offers other than to note there was a launch party, I can see exactly how this would happen. Or maybe it is intentional... but I doubt it.
What will happen next is that the Priority Inbox rules will be modified to avoid giving any undue precedence to Google Offers, and lots of slashdotters will believe that Google was being Evil and only stopped when caught, regardless of the facts of the situation.
(Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer at Google, but I don't work on Offers or gmail.)
Let's try a thought experiment. How would americans have liked it, if after 9/11 George W. had declared that traffic accidents kill many more americans each year than al quaeda ever will, so to honor the memory of the twin tower victims he would enact policies to make american roads safer?
Me, for one. But rational response rarely plays well in politics.
javascript is an unbelievably inefficient mechanism for attacking the sort of problems where you would want a large distributed computing system
Not necessarily. This is true of most of the Javascript engines around, because they're pure interpreters of a language not designed to be particularly efficient, but Javascript can be compiled to machine code before execution. This is what Google's V8, the Javascript engine in Chrome, does. With JIT-compiled Javascript you'll get comparable efficiency to JIT-compiled Java, which is pretty competitive with compiled C.
The rest of your post is dead on, though. There really aren't any spare cycles today. Even desktop machines and servers dynamically adjust clock rate on demand, and automatically drop into various power-saving states to save even more power when the cycles aren't needed. So it would be rude to exploit users' CPUs without their permission, and in the case of battery-powered devices it could be much worse than just rude.
I think the problems you are trying to solve have been very addressed more practically and thoroughly by David Chaum's Punchscan and Scantegrity systems.