As long as clients are sending correctly formatted multipart emails to allow plain text readers the chance to read as well, HTML email is a good thing.
I used to be a hater too. But over the last many years of writing many, many long emails and seeing them get ignored, I found I could write long emails and just highlight the importand parts in bold or with colour. That way the low-attention-span people at the other end who couldn't take 5 minutes out of their day to read my carefully justified reasoning about why I wanted to do something in a certain way (...because the alternative was sending them a one line email saying what I wanted to do and then getting forfty thousand follow-up emails about why) could just focus on the bright shiny important bits (such as questions) which I really wanted them to see.
Sure, I could have just written in dot point form. There's a few reasons I write non-terse emails though - 1) I enjoy writing 2) I like making sure I've covered every possible eventuality and writing them all out helps me 3) I like providing all the information a recipient will (hopefully) need to make a decision.
I've changed my writing style several times over the years to try and communicate more clearly with people who a) rely on email for their job and b) don't like reading and it's been a pretty painful process. No doubt I still haven't gotten it right, but formatting in HTML email is one thing that I've found that makes it easier for me to tailor emails to a given audience.
But still, I'd probably believe Microsoft's own figures before I'd believe these - at least, without reading the research methodology of this survey (hey, its entirely possible they did do a decently random sample so maybe it is pretty accurate!)
I loved the new BSG series - one of the things I've enjoyed doing most involving a screen in the last several years. But this just seems like a really shameless attempt to get more money out of me. At least let a couple years pass; I can't even buy all the episodes of BSG on DVD yet.
Many content providers hope to float their expenses solely on the back of advertising dollars, and rely completely on advertising networks that do little to match the aesthetic or sensibility of an advertisement to the needs of any of the publishers' readerships.
Many content providers already are doing this. Like us. And we have done for almost ten years.
Instead, AdBlocker users just sit on the same page hitting refresh constantly while cackling at the money the publisher is losing, penny by penny.
This is a gross exaggeration, and a bit of strawman that diverts from the real issue - that people with adblock are completely, blissfully ignorant and uncaring about the effects of installing and running that software.
Remember, your most important revenue streams are spreading FUD, making people feel guilty, and optionally implementing DRM and expanding bureaucracy.
Heh, you're accusing me of spreading FUD? You're talking down to me like I'm some self-righteous asshole for wanting people to come to our site and not block ads. If your life is so busy and your eyeball time so important that you can't justify a couple ads, then maybe you shouldn't even be on the Internet at all!
Remember, the world is rife with people who want to patronize your content, and some will even fork cash over to you. It is your responsibility to deploy convoluted signup systems [uie.com] to make it difficult to complete a transaction or to remain signed in, and to blend your navigational elements into the advertisements so that your readers drive a click through each time they try to access page 2 out of 20 in your 500 word article.
We operate one of the very few file download sites in the world that requires no signup, no user accounts, no massive huge ads, etc.
We move more than 30TB a month (at least) on average to users all over the world, for free.
Our goal is to keep doing that. We pride ourselves on our user experience. We feel that ads are a small price to pay for users to be able to download the latest gaming files (which are often under high demand at release) quickly and easily.
Our current plans are to offer a subscription-based service to give people the/choice/ to get rid of ads. I don't expect a lot of people to take it, but we want to offer the choice - so when I'm having discussions like this with people like you, I can say "well, here's the alternative to ad-supported services".
Again, I hope you do steer clear from my wares. As you have demonstrated, you sound like the sort of person that would gleefully come to our site with ads blocked and download the latest 2 gigabyte demo without the slightest feeling of guilt.
Why do you come to our site? Because we don't require signup or monthly fees. The entire download process through our site (if you end up on it through google or whatever) is two clicks, and then you're downloading.
We're free, because we support our service through advertising. I think that, compared to 99% of the sites of the Internet, our advertising is relatively low-key and tasteful. Our advertisers are high quality - big government organisations, banks, etc - not the latest "free systems check!" shit you'll see on so many other sites.
At the end of the day, all the people that work on this site are heavy Internet users. We know what sucks and what doesn't, and we take pains to make our site not suck.
If you base your content delivery model on such shifting sand, you must be within a year or two behind them, and you do not have my pity.
I don't want it. I just don't want you coming to my site on your terms. If you don't want to view the ads, then don't block them - because you consume resources and cost us money and we get nothing. Just don't come to our site at all, and then we're both happy.
If you do visit a site that does have ads but has content that you really want, just accept that it's part of the unwritten social contract between you and the site operator that you might, occasionally, have to suffer the grand indignity of having an animated ad occasionally flicker into your sphere of awareness. Pretty small price to pay.
And if you're not prepared to pay it, well, there's a whole bunch of other websites out there.
This seemed like a really simple statement when I first read it but the more I thought about it the more I thought it was fascinating.
I know when I actually go out of my way to seek news, it's always super depressingly painful stuff. Oh, another suicide bomber in Israel. Great, another insurgent attack in Iraq. Another dead kid. Another brutal beating. The media industry trying to take away my rights. The government wanting to pry into every aspect of my life and that of my friends and family to keep me safe from "terrorists".
Why would I/want/ to know about any of that stuff? Sure, being an informed citizen helps me decide where to throw my vote, but how many users really expect any of those things to change? I would imagine that feeling of apathy would be even greater in the US (I'm in Australia) with it's pretty obvious two party system (not like we're a lot better).
It's sort of a sad state of affairs that the majority of people in western society care more about the winner of the current most popular reality TV show than they do about current affairs in their country and the world they live in.
As the owner/operator of several ad-supported websites, I wholeheartedly support such as scheme - providing you allow us the right to block your access to my service completely if I detect you're not willing to accept the level of ads that I feel are needed to support our site, or provide you with a reduced service by levels as your ad acceptance parameters decrease.
For example, if you decide you don't want any animated ads, I'd probably counter that by not letting you access any of our video content.
Obviously it would be trivial to workaround at the user end - I'm just pointing out that such a scheme should be give-and-take on both parts. Users obviously have all the control - they can block (most) ads, they can simply stop visiting sites, etc. But I'd like to try and find a happy medium.
Why would they get bent? You haven't actually posted anything other than an unfounded statement with no real information about why you think it's true.
They probably would get bent if you actually said "it is a joke in a studio environment because..." and then provided a list of reasons, if those reasons were valid (or invalid!). But I assume they'll just ignore you, unlike me (I'm not a muso and don't know anything about REAPER or music software; just thought your comment was interesting.)
This is the exact same shit the music and movie industries are trying to pull. It's not really new in software; just check the average EULA from any major vendor - they're trying to make it so you're not buying the game, you're just buying a license to use it temporarily.
I guess at some point it'll come to a head when someone finally cracks the shits and takes someone to court about it. The sooner the better, I reckon.
...ever since Nullsoft's WASTE was released and AOL (or whoever) pulled it and revoked the license. From http://www.nullsoft.com/free/waste/ :
If you downloaded or otherwise obtained a copy of the Software, you acquired no lawful rights to the Software and must destroy any and all copies of the Software, including by deleting it from your computer. Any license that you may believe you acquired with the Software is void, revoked and terminated.
It was released under a GPL license (IIRC). So they have effectively revoked the license. They haven't tried (actively) to stop redistribution - indeed, there's forks on Sourceforge. I think Asus or someone even made a derivative product from it?
I hope I don't live in a country where the government operates like that.
Government information should be open and transparent. Putting government documents on the web is a good idea on many levels as it encourages transparency and accountability.
Obviously there would have to be some exceptions, like security and defence.
We stopped supporting it on our site - www.ausgamers.com. If you go to it in IE6 you get a big fat warning at the top advising you to upgrade along with a link to Firefox.
I've often wondered about the effectiveness of Thunderbird. Does it automatically classify everything non-spam as ham?
I find Spambayes has admirably kept up with all these new variations/changes in spam techniques. Sure, some still get through, but its only a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage. And as I continue to train it, those new attacks vanish.
Every now and then when there appears to be a new spam thing I just scrap my whole database and start again, which seems to work really well.
I spend a lot of time on it - probably more than I would if I was just deleting the spams manually:) - because I'm fascinated by how it works and the creepy effectiveness on it under most circumstances.
1 out of 3 manually fed spams was classified incorrectly? That's incredibly high. After feeding it the first few hundred spam e-mails, it should already be working well enough that the end ratio should be much lower.
That is only the stuff I've trained. The vast, vast, vast majority of that 829 were at the start of the training session, when I bulk-trained it on a few hundred items. I probably have to manually classify between 0-10 emails as spam on a given day so it is gradually increasing. So that stat looks a bit scary, but I don't feel it accurately portrays how it's working.
You're trying to draw a line that attempts to explain some sort of correlation between people giving companies money for doing mean/stupid/evil things, and the trend of that company to continue doing mean/stupid/evil things! That's crazy! You can't expect companies to change their ways just because everyone stops buying their products. Clearly, the only way to stop them is to keep buying the products, and complain loudly about it on the Internet.
(I'm also iPhone-free until I don't need to jailbreak it to run whatever I want)
A big part of my job for the last ten years has been running game servers for PC-based video games (Counter-Strike, Battlefield, etc - your standard dedicated-server based games, mostly FPS).
Over the years as games have become more complicated, the trend has been for these games to consume more and more CPU. They support more players, they're doing complicated collision detection and physics and tracking stats and doing all sorts of other things. CPU usage and memory usage just goes up and up and up.
Say we can fit several hundred people (depending on the game type) on one, physical game server, spread out over several software servers running on it (usually just Windows applications). This isn't a huge amount - we have a/lot/ of physical servers, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear. We're just one of many game providers in Australia (population roughly 20 million). It is a massive investment to provide this many game servers.
Now, think about this from the perspective of doing all that crunching for the client side. We're not doing ANY of the rendering, or client side physics, or handling of input. When I start thinking about how to support that many game clients - the whole end-to-end experience - on normal hardware, I just can't figure out how many servers we'd need. We buy high-density blade servers - just asked our Ops guys, and apparently they do have expansion slots in which you could put a video card, but they're small slots so you couldn't put in, for example, a quad-SLI thing to try and crunch lots of video at once, or something.
So yeh, I'm super-curious to know how they plan to scale this sort of technology. I am interested in it from the perspective of reducing the impact of cheating in online games, but it also just sounds cool. I played with the OnLive stuff at GDC really briefly this year and it looked sort of cool, but I had the same questions (...which noone on the floor could, or would, answer).
Wow, what Bayesian filter are you using that is only giving you a 20% catch rate?
I'm using spambayes (a pop3 proxy) and I would estimate it catches well above 95% of my spam. My inbox would be utterly unusable without it.
It requires some training - the more training you give it and the more religious you are, the better it works. I've trained it on around 3000 ham and 3000 spam messages and it is incredibly accurate (almost scarily, sometimes) at catching spam. False positives are extremely low - here's the stats it reports:
SpamBayes has processed 114790 messages - 56469 (49%) good, 54032 (47%) spam and 4289 (3%) unsure. 2328 messages were manually classified as good (2 were false positives). 2483 messages were manually classified as spam (829 were false negatives). 34 unsure messages were manually identified as good, and 1583 as spam.
Yeh, I wasn't sure about that, but compared to Da Vinci code (woops, I linked the wrong page in my first post, meant to link this BBC article it didn't sound that unreasonable that 6.5 million was the world total, given 30 million was Da Vinci code, and I would have said that would have massssiiiveeellyyy outsold Neuromancer, even given the massively different amount of time they've been made available. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
BBC tells me Da Vinci code sold 30 million (back in 2006). Wikipedia refers me to this article from 2006 which says Neuromancer sold around 6.5 million copies - which seems a bit more believable.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are you writing from, 1980?!
As long as clients are sending correctly formatted multipart emails to allow plain text readers the chance to read as well, HTML email is a good thing.
I used to be a hater too. But over the last many years of writing many, many long emails and seeing them get ignored, I found I could write long emails and just highlight the importand parts in bold or with colour. That way the low-attention-span people at the other end who couldn't take 5 minutes out of their day to read my carefully justified reasoning about why I wanted to do something in a certain way (...because the alternative was sending them a one line email saying what I wanted to do and then getting forfty thousand follow-up emails about why) could just focus on the bright shiny important bits (such as questions) which I really wanted them to see.
Sure, I could have just written in dot point form. There's a few reasons I write non-terse emails though - 1) I enjoy writing 2) I like making sure I've covered every possible eventuality and writing them all out helps me 3) I like providing all the information a recipient will (hopefully) need to make a decision.
I've changed my writing style several times over the years to try and communicate more clearly with people who a) rely on email for their job and b) don't like reading and it's been a pretty painful process. No doubt I still haven't gotten it right, but formatting in HTML email is one thing that I've found that makes it easier for me to tailor emails to a given audience.
That treats the symptom though, not the problem.
Heh that was my first thought. Is TPB's tracker software open source?
Don't forget Google just bought On2 and thus the VP6 codec. I personally can't waaaaaaaaaait to see what they're going to do with this.
Excellent point!
But still, I'd probably believe Microsoft's own figures before I'd believe these - at least, without reading the research methodology of this survey (hey, its entirely possible they did do a decently random sample so maybe it is pretty accurate!)
I don't think they're out in Australia :(
Penny Arcade talks about milking brands.
I loved the new BSG series - one of the things I've enjoyed doing most involving a screen in the last several years. But this just seems like a really shameless attempt to get more money out of me. At least let a couple years pass; I can't even buy all the episodes of BSG on DVD yet.
I can't believe I had to get to the bottom of this thread before I found someone who said this.
Many content providers hope to float their expenses solely on the back of advertising dollars, and rely completely on advertising networks that do little to match the aesthetic or sensibility of an advertisement to the needs of any of the publishers' readerships.
Many content providers already are doing this. Like us. And we have done for almost ten years.
Instead, AdBlocker users just sit on the same page hitting refresh constantly while cackling at the money the publisher is losing, penny by penny.
This is a gross exaggeration, and a bit of strawman that diverts from the real issue - that people with adblock are completely, blissfully ignorant and uncaring about the effects of installing and running that software.
Remember, your most important revenue streams are spreading FUD, making people feel guilty, and optionally implementing DRM and expanding bureaucracy.
Heh, you're accusing me of spreading FUD? You're talking down to me like I'm some self-righteous asshole for wanting people to come to our site and not block ads. If your life is so busy and your eyeball time so important that you can't justify a couple ads, then maybe you shouldn't even be on the Internet at all!
Remember, the world is rife with people who want to patronize your content, and some will even fork cash over to you. It is your responsibility to deploy convoluted signup systems [uie.com] to make it difficult to complete a transaction or to remain signed in, and to blend your navigational elements into the advertisements so that your readers drive a click through each time they try to access page 2 out of 20 in your 500 word article.
We operate one of the very few file download sites in the world that requires no signup, no user accounts, no massive huge ads, etc.
We move more than 30TB a month (at least) on average to users all over the world, for free.
Our goal is to keep doing that. We pride ourselves on our user experience. We feel that ads are a small price to pay for users to be able to download the latest gaming files (which are often under high demand at release) quickly and easily.
Our current plans are to offer a subscription-based service to give people the /choice/ to get rid of ads. I don't expect a lot of people to take it, but we want to offer the choice - so when I'm having discussions like this with people like you, I can say "well, here's the alternative to ad-supported services".
Again, I hope you do steer clear from my wares. As you have demonstrated, you sound like the sort of person that would gleefully come to our site with ads blocked and download the latest 2 gigabyte demo without the slightest feeling of guilt.
Why do you come to our site? Because we don't require signup or monthly fees. The entire download process through our site (if you end up on it through google or whatever) is two clicks, and then you're downloading.
We're free, because we support our service through advertising. I think that, compared to 99% of the sites of the Internet, our advertising is relatively low-key and tasteful. Our advertisers are high quality - big government organisations, banks, etc - not the latest "free systems check!" shit you'll see on so many other sites.
At the end of the day, all the people that work on this site are heavy Internet users. We know what sucks and what doesn't, and we take pains to make our site not suck.
If you base your content delivery model on such shifting sand, you must be within a year or two behind them, and you do not have my pity.
I don't want it. I just don't want you coming to my site on your terms. If you don't want to view the ads, then don't block them - because you consume resources and cost us money and we get nothing. Just don't come to our site at all, and then we're both happy.
If you do visit a site that does have ads but has content that you really want, just accept that it's part of the unwritten social contract between you and the site operator that you might, occasionally, have to suffer the grand indignity of having an animated ad occasionally flicker into your sphere of awareness. Pretty small price to pay.
And if you're not prepared to pay it, well, there's a whole bunch of other websites out there.
Wow!
This seemed like a really simple statement when I first read it but the more I thought about it the more I thought it was fascinating.
I know when I actually go out of my way to seek news, it's always super depressingly painful stuff. Oh, another suicide bomber in Israel. Great, another insurgent attack in Iraq. Another dead kid. Another brutal beating. The media industry trying to take away my rights. The government wanting to pry into every aspect of my life and that of my friends and family to keep me safe from "terrorists".
Why would I /want/ to know about any of that stuff? Sure, being an informed citizen helps me decide where to throw my vote, but how many users really expect any of those things to change? I would imagine that feeling of apathy would be even greater in the US (I'm in Australia) with it's pretty obvious two party system (not like we're a lot better).
It's sort of a sad state of affairs that the majority of people in western society care more about the winner of the current most popular reality TV show than they do about current affairs in their country and the world they live in.
As the owner/operator of several ad-supported websites, I wholeheartedly support such as scheme - providing you allow us the right to block your access to my service completely if I detect you're not willing to accept the level of ads that I feel are needed to support our site, or provide you with a reduced service by levels as your ad acceptance parameters decrease.
For example, if you decide you don't want any animated ads, I'd probably counter that by not letting you access any of our video content.
Obviously it would be trivial to workaround at the user end - I'm just pointing out that such a scheme should be give-and-take on both parts. Users obviously have all the control - they can block (most) ads, they can simply stop visiting sites, etc. But I'd like to try and find a happy medium.
Why would they get bent? You haven't actually posted anything other than an unfounded statement with no real information about why you think it's true.
They probably would get bent if you actually said "it is a joke in a studio environment because..." and then provided a list of reasons, if those reasons were valid (or invalid!). But I assume they'll just ignore you, unlike me (I'm not a muso and don't know anything about REAPER or music software; just thought your comment was interesting.)
This is the exact same shit the music and movie industries are trying to pull. It's not really new in software; just check the average EULA from any major vendor - they're trying to make it so you're not buying the game, you're just buying a license to use it temporarily.
I guess at some point it'll come to a head when someone finally cracks the shits and takes someone to court about it. The sooner the better, I reckon.
...ever since Nullsoft's WASTE was released and AOL (or whoever) pulled it and revoked the license. From http://www.nullsoft.com/free/waste/ :
If you downloaded or otherwise obtained a copy of the Software, you acquired no lawful rights to the Software and must destroy any and all copies of the Software, including by deleting it from your computer. Any license that you may believe you acquired with the Software is void, revoked and terminated.
It was released under a GPL license (IIRC). So they have effectively revoked the license. They haven't tried (actively) to stop redistribution - indeed, there's forks on Sourceforge. I think Asus or someone even made a derivative product from it?
I hope I don't live in a country where the government operates like that.
Government information should be open and transparent. Putting government documents on the web is a good idea on many levels as it encourages transparency and accountability.
Obviously there would have to be some exceptions, like security and defence.
We stopped supporting it on our site - www.ausgamers.com. If you go to it in IE6 you get a big fat warning at the top advising you to upgrade along with a link to Firefox.
I've often wondered about the effectiveness of Thunderbird. Does it automatically classify everything non-spam as ham?
I find Spambayes has admirably kept up with all these new variations/changes in spam techniques. Sure, some still get through, but its only a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage. And as I continue to train it, those new attacks vanish.
Every now and then when there appears to be a new spam thing I just scrap my whole database and start again, which seems to work really well.
I spend a lot of time on it - probably more than I would if I was just deleting the spams manually :) - because I'm fascinated by how it works and the creepy effectiveness on it under most circumstances.
1 out of 3 manually fed spams was classified incorrectly? That's incredibly high. After feeding it the first few hundred spam e-mails, it should already be working well enough that the end ratio should be much lower.
That is only the stuff I've trained. The vast, vast, vast majority of that 829 were at the start of the training session, when I bulk-trained it on a few hundred items. I probably have to manually classify between 0-10 emails as spam on a given day so it is gradually increasing. So that stat looks a bit scary, but I don't feel it accurately portrays how it's working.
You're trying to draw a line that attempts to explain some sort of correlation between people giving companies money for doing mean/stupid/evil things, and the trend of that company to continue doing mean/stupid/evil things! That's crazy! You can't expect companies to change their ways just because everyone stops buying their products. Clearly, the only way to stop them is to keep buying the products, and complain loudly about it on the Internet.
(I'm also iPhone-free until I don't need to jailbreak it to run whatever I want)
A big part of my job for the last ten years has been running game servers for PC-based video games (Counter-Strike, Battlefield, etc - your standard dedicated-server based games, mostly FPS).
Over the years as games have become more complicated, the trend has been for these games to consume more and more CPU. They support more players, they're doing complicated collision detection and physics and tracking stats and doing all sorts of other things. CPU usage and memory usage just goes up and up and up.
Say we can fit several hundred people (depending on the game type) on one, physical game server, spread out over several software servers running on it (usually just Windows applications). This isn't a huge amount - we have a /lot/ of physical servers, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear. We're just one of many game providers in Australia (population roughly 20 million). It is a massive investment to provide this many game servers.
Now, think about this from the perspective of doing all that crunching for the client side. We're not doing ANY of the rendering, or client side physics, or handling of input. When I start thinking about how to support that many game clients - the whole end-to-end experience - on normal hardware, I just can't figure out how many servers we'd need. We buy high-density blade servers - just asked our Ops guys, and apparently they do have expansion slots in which you could put a video card, but they're small slots so you couldn't put in, for example, a quad-SLI thing to try and crunch lots of video at once, or something.
So yeh, I'm super-curious to know how they plan to scale this sort of technology. I am interested in it from the perspective of reducing the impact of cheating in online games, but it also just sounds cool. I played with the OnLive stuff at GDC really briefly this year and it looked sort of cool, but I had the same questions (...which noone on the floor could, or would, answer).
Yeh, that's information that would have been useful yesterday. Now I feel dirty.
Look at it this way:
At least it's not Norton !
Wow, what Bayesian filter are you using that is only giving you a 20% catch rate?
I'm using spambayes (a pop3 proxy) and I would estimate it catches well above 95% of my spam. My inbox would be utterly unusable without it.
It requires some training - the more training you give it and the more religious you are, the better it works. I've trained it on around 3000 ham and 3000 spam messages and it is incredibly accurate (almost scarily, sometimes) at catching spam. False positives are extremely low - here's the stats it reports:
SpamBayes has processed 114790 messages - 56469 (49%) good, 54032 (47%) spam and 4289 (3%) unsure.
2328 messages were manually classified as good (2 were false positives).
2483 messages were manually classified as spam (829 were false negatives).
34 unsure messages were manually identified as good, and 1583 as spam.
Yeh, I wasn't sure about that, but compared to Da Vinci code (woops, I linked the wrong page in my first post, meant to link this BBC article it didn't sound that unreasonable that 6.5 million was the world total, given 30 million was Da Vinci code, and I would have said that would have massssiiiveeellyyy outsold Neuromancer, even given the massively different amount of time they've been made available. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
160 million sounds like.... a lot.
BBC tells me Da Vinci code sold 30 million (back in 2006). Wikipedia refers me to this article from 2006 which says Neuromancer sold around 6.5 million copies - which seems a bit more believable.