the sentence for spamming should be to lock the spammer in a cell with a computer recieving a flood of spam. He is let out when he "just hits delete" a number of times equal to the number of spam messages he sent or caused to be sent.
Even better would be to do exactly what you said but hide a key code to his cell in one of the emails. this will force him to at least scan the the contents of each email. Then he would feel the annoyance we feel when we have to sort out spam from legitimate content.
I have always felt lucky that I learned most of the software I use while they where still version 1.x. I can see the struggle people face when they have to learn a piece of software that is in its 5+ version and you have so many features you cant make heads or tails which ones are important. I even have a theory that most softwares usability degrades sharply after version 3.5. The process would go something like this:
v1. a great new tool comes to the market v2. user feedback has corrected the first kinks in the product and a few cant-live-without-features are added v3. some of the great new feature that didn't make version two are added. v4. the less great new features are added. v5. we need to sell upgrades lets add more features v6. the computer press reviews our product by counting features lets add some more etc.
First of all I think there is some confusion (at least in my mind) around QuickTime and the.mov file format. Installing QuickTime on a Mac or a pc should allow you to play a whole bunch of file formats (you can find a whole list here). The QuickTime file format is more like a meta file format that can include a whole bunch of codecs even sprites and filters.
So apple has the choice of opening up the format or the Quicktime "driver" (not sure driver is the right word here) each desision would have diferent implications in the short run.
Opening up the file format would be complicated as it would require all the licenced codecs to be opened up also. Sorenson, Cinepac etc... now these are not owned by Apple.
Now Apple might be able to open up the "driver" This would allow a maximum number of platforms to read their format which would encourage multimedia developers to continue developing on the mac translating into better mac sales. Now I am not even sure Apple can open this part up to the public as it might also contain non Apple code.
So for us user it would make all the sense in the world to open the QT format and "driver" but sadly it might not be in the cards. However this does not prevent Apple from porting Quicktime to Linux and co. They will be forced to do it anyway for MacOS X and the jump from there to BSD and Linux should not be that enourmous. And helping Linux hurts Windows a lot more then it hurts Apple.
In a strange way this somehow reminds me of when Apple introduced the MAC and there were discussions on how inefficient and stupid the GUI interface was. Arguments like this popped up: "Hey its much faster to hit control F7 to repaginate a document then to lift your hand off the keyboard to the mouse and then go up in a menu to find the right item". Those people just as some of the people in this tread totally missed the point. The average users didn't want to learn cryptic commands to use a computer. Apple's Philosophy was that you should be able to use a computer with minimal training and then after accessing the save menu for the n'th time you would learn that the shortcut for save was cmd-S and so on for the most common commands*.
Sadly I don't have a Linux nor a BSD machine yet. But from looking at friends computers and the screen shots at themes.org, I see a lot of efforts to make the Linux environment easier to use. So will Apple, This is certainly not be a bad thing.
As for the appliance statement, the introduction of the GUI was an effort to bring the computer closer to the appliance, and I personally hope to see more efforts in that direction. I don't really want to spend time configuring my computer I want to spend time working and playing.
Carl
Dyslexia didn't screw up my writing, My teachers ignorance did.
*Interestingly enough if you observe today a secretary working with recent version of MSWord chances are that she doesen't use any keyboard shortcuts at all. This IMHO is due to bad interface design from MicroSoft and their implementation of an icon bar that doesent encourage users to learn keyboard shortcuts, Had they just implemented ToolTips that included the shortcut people would maybe learn.
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Sadly I very much doubt that USB will be able to power a desktop 500gig HD.
I am not the right person for this, but maybe you should check out Tim O'Reilly's piece on switchers today some interesting perspectives there.
Even better would be to do exactly what you said but hide a key code to his cell in one of the emails. this will force him to at least scan the the contents of each email. Then he would feel the annoyance we feel when we have to sort out spam from legitimate content.
I end up hitting the "print this article" to consolidate the article on one page even if I am reading on screen.
But I still think frames are a bad idea most of the time.
I have always felt lucky that I learned most of the software I use while they where still version 1.x. I can see the struggle people face when they have to learn a piece of software that is in its 5+ version and you have so many features you cant make heads or tails which ones are important.
I even have a theory that most softwares usability degrades sharply after version 3.5.
The process would go something like this:
v1. a great new tool comes to the market
v2. user feedback has corrected the first kinks in the product and a few cant-live-without-features are added
v3. some of the great new feature that didn't make version two are added.
v4. the less great new features are added.
v5. we need to sell upgrades lets add more features
v6. the computer press reviews our product by counting features lets add some more etc.
Carl
First of all I think there is some confusion (at least in my mind) around QuickTime and the .mov file format. Installing QuickTime on a Mac or a pc should allow you to play a whole bunch of file formats (you can find a whole list here).
The QuickTime file format is more like a meta file format that can include a whole bunch of codecs even sprites and filters.
So apple has the choice of opening up the format or the Quicktime "driver" (not sure driver is the right word here) each desision would have diferent implications in the short run.
Opening up the file format would be complicated as it would require all the licenced codecs to be opened up also. Sorenson, Cinepac etc... now these are not owned by Apple.
Now Apple might be able to open up the "driver" This would allow a maximum number of platforms to read their format which would encourage multimedia developers to continue developing on the mac translating into better mac sales. Now I am not even sure Apple can open this part up to the public as it might also contain non Apple code.
So for us user it would make all the sense in the world to open the QT format and "driver" but sadly it might not be in the cards. However this does not prevent Apple from porting Quicktime to Linux and co. They will be forced to do it anyway for MacOS X and the jump from there to BSD and Linux should not be that enourmous. And helping Linux hurts Windows a lot more then it hurts Apple.
Sadly I don't have a Linux nor a BSD machine yet. But from looking at friends computers and the screen shots at themes.org, I see a lot of efforts to make the Linux environment easier to use. So will Apple, This is certainly not be a bad thing.
As for the appliance statement, the introduction of the GUI was an effort to bring the computer closer to the appliance, and I personally hope to see more efforts in that direction. I don't really want to spend time configuring my computer I want to spend time working and playing.
Carl
Dyslexia didn't screw up my writing, My teachers ignorance did.
*Interestingly enough if you observe today a secretary working with recent version of MSWord chances are that she doesen't use any keyboard shortcuts at all. This IMHO is due to bad interface design from MicroSoft and their implementation of an icon bar that doesent encourage users to learn keyboard shortcuts, Had they just implemented ToolTips that included the shortcut people would maybe learn.