It depends on the services you're advertising. I do ColdFusion consulting, and mostly to test out AdWords I set up some ads and I have it manage my campaign and spend a maximum of $10/month. I'm working on a client right now who found me "through Google" and have so far done about $4000 of work for them. So that's not a bad return.
You're right though, if you're fighting for space with established players, it's a tough game.
...it is being dropped from many undergrad curriculum with the assumption that...
I couldn't agree more. For instance, back in the day, any junior grammar school student would have known from latin class that the plural of "curriculum" is "curricula".
Sorry, I really do agree, but I just couldn't resist being obnoxious;-)
Re:How is this possible?
on
Rails Recipes
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· Score: 1
I think he needs to learn that you're not supposed to actually EAT the recipe book. Sometimes the difference between an object and its subject can be confusing, I suppose.
Did I say anywhere that there was a continent called "America"? I think I was pretty clear in saying "North America" where appropriate. Similarly, if, say, the French started calling themselves "Earthians" you'd probably have a similar reaction. You'd probably get over it, but still.
I also didn't intend to bash Americans or the United States. The fact is, that there are enough Americans and you are geographically isolated from most of the rest of the world to a great enough extent, that many Americans tend to forget that the rest of the world exists. This was exemplified in the anecdote I gave.
I like the US. I lived in California for 9 years and spent a bit of time in Arkansas too. Not all Americans are clueless, and it's not like everyone else in the world has a clue. Pointing out in a neutral manner something that's generally true about Americans is not "America-bashing".
Does anyone have evidence from Bill Gates that he actually is an atheist? I've just done a bunch of searching and the only words of his I can find online regarding his religious views seem to peg him as an agnostic: http://www.celebatheists.com/index.php?title=Bill_ Gates Even though the URL of that site is celebathiests.com, they even seem to file him under "agnostic". I believe that Bill showed up a few times at a church I used to attend in San Diego, but who knows what his reason were for doing that. I never saw him there, but that's just what the pastor said. A couple times, from the pulpit.
Anyway, if the US DOES need an atheist president (which I would argue against), Bill Gates wouldn't seem to be a qualified choice, given what I can find of his views on the subject. If anyone can see where Bill Gates has claimed to be an atheist, I'd like to see that.
I'd say that what the US needs is a president who is honest about his or her personal and religious views, or who at least doesn't make an issue of politicizing them. There's so much spin and character assassination that goes on in that arena though that it's impossible for the rest of us to know what someone really thinks.
The country name is not "America". The country name is the "United States of America". It was, and remains to some extent, a coalition of sometimes and erstwhile independent states in the continent of North America. From that point of view, both Mexico and Canada are "North American States" although they are not part of the United States of America. Therefore, your argument about Prians is a bit of a red herring.
That having been said, citizens of the Unites States of America have annexed the term "Americans", and in my opinion they're overall welcome to it. It does still strike many people as a little pretentious and self-centred though. For instance, yesterday I was watching an American TV show and some educator asked the question/joke "What's that big mass of land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans?" The answer was "America". Well, that's true, but it was meant as the "United States of America", which is a grossly incomplete answer. It's this sort of attitude that rubs many non-Americans the wrong way, and which causes then to call Americans USAsians.
Is your OCR filter smart enough to read the second image in the animated.gifs spammers are using now? The first image in the set is just noise, and then a split second later the actual image they want you to see comes up. You've probably noticed this trick and I've been wondering if there are filters widely available to catch this yet.
I just use spamassassin with a bunch of the pyzor/razor/dcc checks and it does a pretty good job, but these types of spam are still getting through too often.
I'll second a lot of this from my experiences with guru.com. For example, from one $300 project I ended up with a $30k+ followup project. For those of us without big teams of programmers behind us, it doesn't take many larger projects like that to keep us busy.
However, the signal to noise ratio of most of these sites seems to be high enough that once I get busy, I don't bother bidding any more. I do still very occasionally get people contacting me from guru.com though, because I have a good rating from when I did use it. If I ever have time, I'll go back and maybe cherry pick some of the better projects to bid on, but of course I'd rather not have the time to do that...
I don't buy Nike shoes, and I am not much of a runner anyway, but one thing Saucony, Nike, Reebok, etc. are doing that Kwang Fo isn't doing is research. Paying Tiger Woods millions of dollars maybe isn't the best research, but when you have many of the world's top athletes relying on your shoes to help them break world records, that is going to translate into a better shoe for the rest of us. These companies expect more from the athletes than simply "wearing their shoes."
How old are you, seriously? 14? If you're older, have you travelled much, and by travelled I mean actually SPENT TIME anywhere except Norway? Do you do much critical reading of international issues from OTHER THAN a Norwegian, Scandinavian, or western European perspective? You have a reasonably low/. ID so you're probably not a kid. Start thinking and writing like a reasoned, educated adult.
Thanks for the generalization. Southern USA is a bit different. They usually are Ku-klux Klan members.
The person to which you were responding is European, which was obvious to me from his/her original post. I'm not sure why you decided to respond with a racist, ignorant diatribe against southern Americans. It was inciteful, rather than insightful, and off-base on many levels. Norway has had its own sad brushes with racism, which I can relate to you if you're not up to date on that. Every country, and each of us, has our not-so-proud moments, but to apparently assume that someone is American because they have a certain point of view strikes me as being the most racist and ignorant viewpoint I've read on this thread so far.
As for transparency; I thought US was the country where standard political practice was bill-amendments, so that by calling the new law "Child Protection Act", and amend some minor law about mandatory ID-cards to it, everybody would vote for it, since nobody has time to read all the amendments, and we must protect our children.
This one is very true and it's hard to imagine how political corruption will decrease while underhanded tactics like this continue to be allowed. I imagine most politicians go along with this because they see it as a "necessary evil", but that still makes it evil.
Look, just because you can read about it in your newspaper, doesn't mean that everyone else in the world reads the same newspaper. The silly little bickerings you have about privacy-laws in the US, interests us about the same as you would consider the debate about Oslos new opera building interesting.
Taken on its own, this thought stands well. The USA is in many ways the world's most powerful and important nation, and it makes sense that we should have a general understanding of what it's doing. However, as a Canadian I find it frustrating that often I get more American news than Canadian. I'm in Austria for a couple weeks, and Bush seems to often make headline news above local and Europen news.
More to the point, people in civilized democracies (such as most of Europe) mostly ignores american politics, except that they dislike Bush, and thought Clinton was a jolly good fellow.
See, now you've gone and blown the (very) short run of common sense you started to show. Weren't you, just above, getting upset at the previous poster for making generalisations? W.T.F. Seriously. Back to the German news here in Austria (the TV station was German). The headline was something like "Bush Totally Loses Control in Iraq". First of all, "Bush" ISN'T IN IRAQ !!! Some might wish he was, but he's not. American troops are in Iraq. It's completely ridiculous to blame George Bush for the entire Iraq war and everything that's happening. Do you honestly think that you're getting fair, unbiased news coverage of international, and particularly American, events across Europe? Things here are just as skewed as they are in the American media, and pretty much everywhere else. Everyone has an agenda, and the people printing your newspapers and writing your 18:00 news commentary are trying to make you believe something too.
I've never met George Bush, and I wouldn't vote for him, but COME ON. If you look at political polls, most Americans aren't too happy with him right now either. Stop believing everything you read in the news. Stop following the groupthink. Maybe you'll end up with the same opinion you already have, bu
The only one I tried worked great, although it didn't "just work" in the usual Mac way. I had to do some non-standard setup for some of this but I used it as a wireless GPRS modem, synced via bluetooth, and had Salling Clicker installed giving me all sorts of fun goodies. It was an Ericsson something-or-other. I'm back to CDMA land now so I don't use it any more.
Currently I use a Logitech bluetooth mouse which "just works", as well as an Apple bluetooth keyboard which "just works", as one would expect.
This seems as good a place as any to ask these quesions...
Last weekend I bought a core 2 duo CPU and related hardware for a new home server. I decided to do all my server work within virtual machines, and am using VMWare. Debian and Ubuntu don't support my motherboard yet (Asus P5B-VM) so I'm using a Windows Server 2003 x64 trial as my host OS.
I haven't been following hardware that much in recent years, but I know the conroe chips have hardware-based virtualization. I'm pretty sure Microsoft's Virtual Server supports this, as does Xen, but does VMWare? This seems like it would be a Big Deal. Just for fun I ran super pi on my host OS and on my Windows virtual machine, and actually got a FASTER score in the VM so I'm not disappionted by its performance so far.
Also, I've noticed that VMWare is a 32-bit program, so how is its support for 64-bit virtual machines? I only have 2GB of RAM at the moment, but can I get a 64-bit Windows VM to recognize 6GB of RAM if I load up my host?
Well, I'm responding to a stale thread, but here it is.
My previous comment was simply attempting to clarify what I felt the grandparent poster was trying to say. I felt they were saying that Apple is not attempting to directly compete model for model with Dell's low end computers. You could be pedantic and pull apart the semantics of what I or the other poster said, but if common sense is applied to my comment it becomes clear what I am trying to say.
If you re-read my comment, you'll also notice that I didn't make any judgement on either Dell or Apple, or their respective computers. I didn't say cheap computers are "bad" or "good". I was merely making a point of computers in a certain sense not being comparable.
Certainly one can compare any two items or concepts. I could compare "urgency" with "a banana" and say that one is a noun denoting a sense of temporal imperativeness while the other is a fruit.
Well, you're right, I don't think I'd want piles. Ewww.
After hearing you and others in this thread go on and on about how productive Exposé is, I wondered if maybe I'm missing the point. I hardly ever use it, really. I tried a little experiment and switched between Firefox, Safari and Mail using Exposé and then went to cmd-tab back and forth. That's when I realized the reason cmd-tab is easy for me is that I hit cmd-tab and then mouse over the program I want and take my fingers off the keyboard. Very fast.
On the occasion I have to use Windows I really miss that feature in alt-tab.
There are obviously SOME people who have replaced Win98 with Linux. For instance, I did it on my father's computer. I'd been planning to do it for ages but didn't have the time. Microsoft ending official support for Win98 also gave me a reason for making the switch that my 85 year old father would understand.
Now that I have Ubuntu on there, he doesn't have the problem with grandkids putting crap on his computer and filling it with spyware. People aren't going to change his email client to download their own mail since Windows 98 is only single user. I can use it for a backup server.
Even though not everybody is making this switch, it's pretty clear that a lot of people are
The CHEAP ones aren't comparable. Apple doesn't compete there. As in, both companies make $2500 laptops but Apple doesn't make a $600 laptop. Therefore Dell's $600 laptop doesn't really compare to an Apple one.
First I'll admit I'm a little confused by the article. Are they measuring a page's popularity in a search engine by its number of inbound links? So they're saying that as the number of inbound links increases (i.e., in their opinion, the site's ranking in the search engine), the number of page visits increases? Maybe I'm missing something, but if that's the case this research raises an eyebrow here at least. If they have page ranking data from Yahoo, why not use that instead of inbound links? Or maybe by "page ranking" they mean "number of inbound links".
I guess people need to study something, and sometimes one will come up with surprising results. But this study reminds me of the "Long Tail" discussion that was all the rage for a couple weeks. "Wow, with the internet we can find niche information!" Who didn't know that? So now some information pundit (don't remember his name) gets to make a bunch of money for putting a name on a self-evident truth so that business types can sit around and discuss it like it's something revolutionary.
If people didn't use the internet to find things, then why would Google be worth billions of dollars? If people didn't use the internet to find things, then why would companies be paying Google huge sums of money for page rankings? Those who track ROI will usually tell you that it makes them money (and if not they'd stop doing it, if they were tracking ROI).
I don't follow professional sports, but a lot of people do. So a lot of people are going to search for "Toronto Blue Jays". Good for them. There are ~6 billion people in the world, each with some common interests, and each with some less common interests. If you're making a web site to sell iPods then likely you'll be lost in the crowd and have a hard time gaining traction. If you're selling refurbished vintage Massey Ferguson tractors with patent leather seats and Corvette LS1 engines, then likely you'll end up #1 on Google pretty quickly. Do you want 0.0000000001% of a billion dollar market or 100% of a $0 market? Your choice.
Nifty cool and all that, and you probably already know what I'm about to tell you, but you can already get Mail to flash the screen instead of beeping if the sound is off. Go into System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Hearing and check "Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs".
Slashdot Mirror
This is Slashdot, where we can all make tired old jokes. I should remind you, though, that in Korea only tired old people make jokes.
It depends on the services you're advertising. I do ColdFusion consulting, and mostly to test out AdWords I set up some ads and I have it manage my campaign and spend a maximum of $10/month. I'm working on a client right now who found me "through Google" and have so far done about $4000 of work for them. So that's not a bad return.
You're right though, if you're fighting for space with established players, it's a tough game.
...it is being dropped from many undergrad curriculum with the assumption that...
;-)
I couldn't agree more. For instance, back in the day, any junior grammar school student would have known from latin class that the plural of "curriculum" is "curricula".
Sorry, I really do agree, but I just couldn't resist being obnoxious
I think he needs to learn that you're not supposed to actually EAT the recipe book. Sometimes the difference between an object and its subject can be confusing, I suppose.
Did I say anywhere that there was a continent called "America"? I think I was pretty clear in saying "North America" where appropriate. Similarly, if, say, the French started calling themselves "Earthians" you'd probably have a similar reaction. You'd probably get over it, but still.
I also didn't intend to bash Americans or the United States. The fact is, that there are enough Americans and you are geographically isolated from most of the rest of the world to a great enough extent, that many Americans tend to forget that the rest of the world exists. This was exemplified in the anecdote I gave.
I like the US. I lived in California for 9 years and spent a bit of time in Arkansas too. Not all Americans are clueless, and it's not like everyone else in the world has a clue. Pointing out in a neutral manner something that's generally true about Americans is not "America-bashing".
Does anyone have evidence from Bill Gates that he actually is an atheist? I've just done a bunch of searching and the only words of his I can find online regarding his religious views seem to peg him as an agnostic: http://www.celebatheists.com/index.php?title=Bill_ Gates Even though the URL of that site is celebathiests.com, they even seem to file him under "agnostic". I believe that Bill showed up a few times at a church I used to attend in San Diego, but who knows what his reason were for doing that. I never saw him there, but that's just what the pastor said. A couple times, from the pulpit.
Anyway, if the US DOES need an atheist president (which I would argue against), Bill Gates wouldn't seem to be a qualified choice, given what I can find of his views on the subject. If anyone can see where Bill Gates has claimed to be an atheist, I'd like to see that.
I'd say that what the US needs is a president who is honest about his or her personal and religious views, or who at least doesn't make an issue of politicizing them. There's so much spin and character assassination that goes on in that arena though that it's impossible for the rest of us to know what someone really thinks.
The country name is not "America". The country name is the "United States of America". It was, and remains to some extent, a coalition of sometimes and erstwhile independent states in the continent of North America. From that point of view, both Mexico and Canada are "North American States" although they are not part of the United States of America. Therefore, your argument about Prians is a bit of a red herring.
That having been said, citizens of the Unites States of America have annexed the term "Americans", and in my opinion they're overall welcome to it. It does still strike many people as a little pretentious and self-centred though. For instance, yesterday I was watching an American TV show and some educator asked the question/joke "What's that big mass of land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans?" The answer was "America". Well, that's true, but it was meant as the "United States of America", which is a grossly incomplete answer. It's this sort of attitude that rubs many non-Americans the wrong way, and which causes then to call Americans USAsians.
Is your OCR filter smart enough to read the second image in the animated .gifs spammers are using now? The first image in the set is just noise, and then a split second later the actual image they want you to see comes up. You've probably noticed this trick and I've been wondering if there are filters widely available to catch this yet.
I just use spamassassin with a bunch of the pyzor/razor/dcc checks and it does a pretty good job, but these types of spam are still getting through too often.
Yeah, but we're the TOP 20%. And we won't let you forget that :-)
"Less" and "fewer" have different meanings.
I'll second a lot of this from my experiences with guru.com. For example, from one $300 project I ended up with a $30k+ followup project. For those of us without big teams of programmers behind us, it doesn't take many larger projects like that to keep us busy.
However, the signal to noise ratio of most of these sites seems to be high enough that once I get busy, I don't bother bidding any more. I do still very occasionally get people contacting me from guru.com though, because I have a good rating from when I did use it. If I ever have time, I'll go back and maybe cherry pick some of the better projects to bid on, but of course I'd rather not have the time to do that...
I don't buy Nike shoes, and I am not much of a runner anyway, but one thing Saucony, Nike, Reebok, etc. are doing that Kwang Fo isn't doing is research. Paying Tiger Woods millions of dollars maybe isn't the best research, but when you have many of the world's top athletes relying on your shoes to help them break world records, that is going to translate into a better shoe for the rest of us. These companies expect more from the athletes than simply "wearing their shoes."
Well thanks. It looks like we're losing karma over this one together :-/
Good thing it's only Slashdot!
How old are you, seriously? 14? If you're older, have you travelled much, and by travelled I mean actually SPENT TIME anywhere except Norway? Do you do much critical reading of international issues from OTHER THAN a Norwegian, Scandinavian, or western European perspective? You have a reasonably low /. ID so you're probably not a kid. Start thinking and writing like a reasoned, educated adult.
Thanks for the generalization. Southern USA is a bit different. They usually are Ku-klux Klan members.
The person to which you were responding is European, which was obvious to me from his/her original post. I'm not sure why you decided to respond with a racist, ignorant diatribe against southern Americans. It was inciteful, rather than insightful, and off-base on many levels. Norway has had its own sad brushes with racism, which I can relate to you if you're not up to date on that. Every country, and each of us, has our not-so-proud moments, but to apparently assume that someone is American because they have a certain point of view strikes me as being the most racist and ignorant viewpoint I've read on this thread so far.
As for transparency; I thought US was the country where standard political practice was bill-amendments, so that by calling the new law "Child Protection Act", and amend some minor law about mandatory ID-cards to it, everybody would vote for it, since nobody has time to read all the amendments, and we must protect our children.
This one is very true and it's hard to imagine how political corruption will decrease while underhanded tactics like this continue to be allowed. I imagine most politicians go along with this because they see it as a "necessary evil", but that still makes it evil.
Look, just because you can read about it in your newspaper, doesn't mean that everyone else in the world reads the same newspaper. The silly little bickerings you have about privacy-laws in the US, interests us about the same as you would consider the debate about Oslos new opera building interesting.
Taken on its own, this thought stands well. The USA is in many ways the world's most powerful and important nation, and it makes sense that we should have a general understanding of what it's doing. However, as a Canadian I find it frustrating that often I get more American news than Canadian. I'm in Austria for a couple weeks, and Bush seems to often make headline news above local and Europen news.
More to the point, people in civilized democracies (such as most of Europe) mostly ignores american politics, except that they dislike Bush, and thought Clinton was a jolly good fellow.
See, now you've gone and blown the (very) short run of common sense you started to show. Weren't you, just above, getting upset at the previous poster for making generalisations? W.T.F. Seriously. Back to the German news here in Austria (the TV station was German). The headline was something like "Bush Totally Loses Control in Iraq". First of all, "Bush" ISN'T IN IRAQ !!! Some might wish he was, but he's not. American troops are in Iraq. It's completely ridiculous to blame George Bush for the entire Iraq war and everything that's happening. Do you honestly think that you're getting fair, unbiased news coverage of international, and particularly American, events across Europe? Things here are just as skewed as they are in the American media, and pretty much everywhere else. Everyone has an agenda, and the people printing your newspapers and writing your 18:00 news commentary are trying to make you believe something too.
I've never met George Bush, and I wouldn't vote for him, but COME ON. If you look at political polls, most Americans aren't too happy with him right now either. Stop believing everything you read in the news. Stop following the groupthink. Maybe you'll end up with the same opinion you already have, bu
The only one I tried worked great, although it didn't "just work" in the usual Mac way. I had to do some non-standard setup for some of this but I used it as a wireless GPRS modem, synced via bluetooth, and had Salling Clicker installed giving me all sorts of fun goodies. It was an Ericsson something-or-other. I'm back to CDMA land now so I don't use it any more.
Currently I use a Logitech bluetooth mouse which "just works", as well as an Apple bluetooth keyboard which "just works", as one would expect.
This seems as good a place as any to ask these quesions... Last weekend I bought a core 2 duo CPU and related hardware for a new home server. I decided to do all my server work within virtual machines, and am using VMWare. Debian and Ubuntu don't support my motherboard yet (Asus P5B-VM) so I'm using a Windows Server 2003 x64 trial as my host OS.
I haven't been following hardware that much in recent years, but I know the conroe chips have hardware-based virtualization. I'm pretty sure Microsoft's Virtual Server supports this, as does Xen, but does VMWare? This seems like it would be a Big Deal. Just for fun I ran super pi on my host OS and on my Windows virtual machine, and actually got a FASTER score in the VM so I'm not disappionted by its performance so far.
Also, I've noticed that VMWare is a 32-bit program, so how is its support for 64-bit virtual machines? I only have 2GB of RAM at the moment, but can I get a 64-bit Windows VM to recognize 6GB of RAM if I load up my host?
Well, I'm responding to a stale thread, but here it is.
My previous comment was simply attempting to clarify what I felt the grandparent poster was trying to say. I felt they were saying that Apple is not attempting to directly compete model for model with Dell's low end computers. You could be pedantic and pull apart the semantics of what I or the other poster said, but if common sense is applied to my comment it becomes clear what I am trying to say.
If you re-read my comment, you'll also notice that I didn't make any judgement on either Dell or Apple, or their respective computers. I didn't say cheap computers are "bad" or "good". I was merely making a point of computers in a certain sense not being comparable.
Certainly one can compare any two items or concepts. I could compare "urgency" with "a banana" and say that one is a noun denoting a sense of temporal imperativeness while the other is a fruit.
All right, that's enough for now.
- Andrew.
Well, you're right, I don't think I'd want piles. Ewww.
After hearing you and others in this thread go on and on about how productive Exposé is, I wondered if maybe I'm missing the point. I hardly ever use it, really. I tried a little experiment and switched between Firefox, Safari and Mail using Exposé and then went to cmd-tab back and forth. That's when I realized the reason cmd-tab is easy for me is that I hit cmd-tab and then mouse over the program I want and take my fingers off the keyboard. Very fast.
On the occasion I have to use Windows I really miss that feature in alt-tab.
There are obviously SOME people who have replaced Win98 with Linux. For instance, I did it on my father's computer. I'd been planning to do it for ages but didn't have the time. Microsoft ending official support for Win98 also gave me a reason for making the switch that my 85 year old father would understand.
Now that I have Ubuntu on there, he doesn't have the problem with grandkids putting crap on his computer and filling it with spyware. People aren't going to change his email client to download their own mail since Windows 98 is only single user. I can use it for a backup server.
Even though not everybody is making this switch, it's pretty clear that a lot of people are
The CHEAP ones aren't comparable. Apple doesn't compete there. As in, both companies make $2500 laptops but Apple doesn't make a $600 laptop. Therefore Dell's $600 laptop doesn't really compare to an Apple one.
John Ronald Reuel, is that you?
First I'll admit I'm a little confused by the article. Are they measuring a page's popularity in a search engine by its number of inbound links? So they're saying that as the number of inbound links increases (i.e., in their opinion, the site's ranking in the search engine), the number of page visits increases? Maybe I'm missing something, but if that's the case this research raises an eyebrow here at least. If they have page ranking data from Yahoo, why not use that instead of inbound links? Or maybe by "page ranking" they mean "number of inbound links".
I guess people need to study something, and sometimes one will come up with surprising results. But this study reminds me of the "Long Tail" discussion that was all the rage for a couple weeks. "Wow, with the internet we can find niche information!" Who didn't know that? So now some information pundit (don't remember his name) gets to make a bunch of money for putting a name on a self-evident truth so that business types can sit around and discuss it like it's something revolutionary.
If people didn't use the internet to find things, then why would Google be worth billions of dollars? If people didn't use the internet to find things, then why would companies be paying Google huge sums of money for page rankings? Those who track ROI will usually tell you that it makes them money (and if not they'd stop doing it, if they were tracking ROI).
I don't follow professional sports, but a lot of people do. So a lot of people are going to search for "Toronto Blue Jays". Good for them. There are ~6 billion people in the world, each with some common interests, and each with some less common interests. If you're making a web site to sell iPods then likely you'll be lost in the crowd and have a hard time gaining traction. If you're selling refurbished vintage Massey Ferguson tractors with patent leather seats and Corvette LS1 engines, then likely you'll end up #1 on Google pretty quickly. Do you want 0.0000000001% of a billion dollar market or 100% of a $0 market? Your choice.
cmd-k for searching, cmd-l for typing an address. It's not that hard, really.
Substitute ctrl for cmd if you're a Linux or Windows user. All this assuming you're using Firefox.
Nifty cool and all that, and you probably already know what I'm about to tell you, but you can already get Mail to flash the screen instead of beeping if the sound is off. Go into System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Hearing and check "Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs".