"Until Hotmail et al starts offering bayesian filtering with a separate 'spam' mailbox, consider server side filtering worthless."
Actually, Yahoo offers something very similiar to bayesian filtering (or it may even BE bayesian filtering). All messages marked spam get thrown into a junk mailbox. Yahoo even gives you the option to report any spam that still gets through. It works wonders. I get about 20 spam(s?) a day, Yahoo catches 18-19 of them.
Honestly, most photography and design proffessionals would scoff at gimp. I know, becuase I'm one of them. They really aren't even in the same league. It's sad, becuase Photoshop is EXPENSIVE, I would love an open source alternative. But for proffesional design, gimp just doesn't cut it.
Now to be fair, I haven't used gimp in some time, and I'm sure the newer versions have added a lot of capabilities. The next time I install linux I'll be sure to check it out. But I'm looking on the website and (after only a quick glance, it may be hidden) can't find any mention of:
adjustment layers
image slicing
intelligent masking ("Extract..." in photoshop)
and the biggest one: vector text layers
These may seem like very specialized features (and they are, for the most part), but graphic proffesionals expect them. Those that expect gimp to take over the proffesional desktop publishing/design sector will have to wait much longer than they assume. I think the gimp creators realize this, as well; It's a segment of the GPL fanatics that don't.
When I read it the first thing that came to mind wasn't 'oh, he's insulting women'. He was, in fact, insulting how they are brought up. It's a social problem, and one that can arguably be pinned on men. His point was (I think) that women are brought up poorly in society, which includes men and women. If women were brought up with the mindset that they can be hugely succesful in life and made to realize their full potential (in science, business, whatever), things would be better for everyone. Things are better a hundred times over compared to a century ago, but there's still lots of issues.
At least, that's what I think his point was. And I'd say it's a fairly decent one.
I'm posting this knowing that I'm going to sound like a complete idiot: but what is Nethack? Maybe I'm just weird, but fighting jelly corpses and kittens sounds REALLY fun.
Keep in mind that they're not pulling Premier from the store shelves quite yet. I'm sure they'll be selling copies of the latest version for at least another year or so. They have, however, cut developement, which is the bulk of the cost anyway.
Detect them how? Handheld scanners used to be like this, and they had horrible tracking. Remember the old hand held scanners that you had to move up an down the piece of paper with? Kind of like a paint roller (same movements) but looked more like a supermarket bar code scanner, and didn't do a very good job of keeping things aligned.
I don't know about Xolox or BearShare, but Limewire is open source, and the cvs version does not contain adware. http://www.limewire.org if you are interested.
It's not as convienient as just downloading from the website, obviously, but it does get you an ad-free version of the client.
The moderators are your peers: people who contribute to the forums get a certain amount of mod points every few weeks. It's the readers who mod up and down posts, not anyone that works at Slashdot.
As quoted from the Reuters article (my own emphasis added):
"Adobe Systems has not been able to find proof that anyone made illegal copies of electronic books using software that could sidestep copyright safeguards in the company's eBook software, an Adobe engineer has testified. "
There's a difference in not finding proof that Elcomsoft's software didn't crack the ebooks and not finding any ebooks that were cracked by it (as the Slashdot article suggests). Sorry to be picky, but the person that wrote the slashdot story was a little sensational in his wording, and I thought there was a big enough difference to mention that.
I can understand how unbelievably hard it would be to find proof of cracking with Elcomsoft's software just by downloading cracked ebooks. I doubt Elcomsoft's software leaves any footprints in the decoded file, especially considering the extremely simplistic 'encryption' algorithm;o)
Yeah, I typed everything out in paragraphs, but since I clicked the "HTML Formatted" option and forgot to put breaks in, it was all for nought. My mistake, I apologize!!:o)
You bring up some very interesting rebuttels to my post, and I thank you for your feedback. I'll let you know that I agree with almost all of your points (that computers should not be dumbed down for the layman). However, that is not exactly what I meant to imply. Computers will always have their place. You can turn my PC into an appliance over my dead body! What I'm suggesting is that if there was a way to provide simple services such as email (in text/voice/video form) that everyone would benefit. A breed of device seperate from a typical PC that anyone can use.
On the point of mouse clicks/keyboard presses: If you wanted to bring simple webservices like email to a person that's never used a computer before you would probably sign them up for a free service such as hotmail or yahoo. I want to diagram how many button presses are involved (this all may sound ridiculous and extremely mellodramatic, but the truth is non-geeky people often get confused by all the steps involved):
- Double Click Internet Explorer from the standard 5-15 icons that are on the desktop. Keep in mind that the Internet Explorer icon is about 1/100th the size of the entire desktop, and a non-tech user can often get lost in the many icons present.
[ 2 clicks ]
- Click in the address bar (which is among 20 other buttons) and type in the (archaic) web address http://www.hotmail.com.
[1 click, 22 key presses]
- In the sign in box type your user name (again, sometimes lost in all the buttons on the screen. Sounds ridiculous, but I've seen users have trouble finding it)
[1 click, ~8 key presses ]
- Same for the password
[1 click, ~8 key presses ]
- Sign In Button
[1 click]
Now you are provided with a user interface (the website) inside of a user interface (the browser) inside of _another_ user interface (the OS). When I sign in to my Yahoo! account, there are no less than 50 links on the page. The browser has another 20 buttons, and the OS has a task bar with who knows what in the tray, a min/max/close button, ect. It's a kalidescopic nightmare for the untrained user.
And that's just email.
Granted it gets easier with time, granted we all had to learn it, but it seems like nothing has changed in the last 20 years. It feels like we have made very little ground. And it seems like an incomprehensible mess to a first time user. Now how many key presses does it take to read each message? Which button out of the 50 available does what I want? You mean that small (16x16 pixel) button? The one next to the other 12 buttons that's below the big bar of other buttons and next to the message that says my computer "Isn't optimized for the Internet"? Couldn't this confusion be halved/quarted/_almost_ totally eliminated?
Past solutions have involved dumbing down the PC. I think that's a terrible idea. Millions of people use PC's with out (many) problems and love the flexibality they provide, including myself. But most don't care about flexability. They don't care that their comptuer can run all the latest applications/OSes. They just want email!
I'm just throwing some food out. I would love to hear rebuttles/other ideas.
500 million people certainly is a lot, and the industry as a whole has quite a bit to brag about (that much growth in only 10 years is phenominal.)
However, there are a lot of the things the industry should be ashamed of, too. Usability seems to have come a long way in the last few years, but the best thing to ever happen to personal computing in terms of usability, the introduction of the GUI-based PC to the masses, will be the celebrating it's 20th birthday in 2004. 20 years and there is still a market for 400 page manuals on How To Use Microsoft Windows selling in Barnes and Nobles. How many 400 page manuals do you see selling on how to operate your microwave or your alarm clock? Your TV?
How about how to send snail mail or take/develop photos?
Sure PC's are complicated machines, sure the PC can do a lot more than a microwave... but does Jane Doe Grandma care? Not really, she just wants to see pictures of her grandchildren on that live hundreds miles of away, and she wants them on Christmas morning as they open their gifts. How likely is she to spend hours trying to learn how to buy a computer, plug in the 7 different wires, figure out how to dial up to a service provider, learn how to launch and use her email client, and load up the attached pictures in her photo-editing software.
Not likely. It's not that she or the billions of other people on this planet that are not connected aren't capable of learning, it's that it's just not worth it to them. Face it: using a PC takes a time investment of several hours _just_ to do basic tasks, and all these people want to do is send email/pictures/video to their families, maybe read the news, and be done with it.
What other home appliance (since that's what the PC is and should be to these people) have you seen that takes 2 minutes to boot up? How about that you have to push 30+ buttons to operate (how many keyboard presses & mouse clicks does it take to do what Jane Doe Grandma wants?). This all sounds pretty trivial to us geeks because we're used to pressing THOUSANDS of buttons a day to get what we want done, but we are a minority. To the 5.5 billion other people on this planet: it just seems too complicated.
Have there been attempts at bridging the gap between layman and machine? Of course, but most have failed miserably. Email appliances were clunky, ugly, and still unbelievably hard to use. Windows XP still has the same complicated GUI that has been around for more 7 years (just with bigger, brighter, more obxnoxious buttons). Does it look easier? Sure, I guess. Still takes hundreds of mouse clicks to read email/news. My TV takes three to get CNN.
Slashdot Mirror
"Until Hotmail et al starts offering bayesian filtering with a separate 'spam' mailbox, consider server side filtering worthless."
Actually, Yahoo offers something very similiar to bayesian filtering (or it may even BE bayesian filtering). All messages marked spam get thrown into a junk mailbox. Yahoo even gives you the option to report any spam that still gets through. It works wonders. I get about 20 spam(s?) a day, Yahoo catches 18-19 of them.
Now to be fair, I haven't used gimp in some time, and I'm sure the newer versions have added a lot of capabilities. The next time I install linux I'll be sure to check it out. But I'm looking on the website and (after only a quick glance, it may be hidden) can't find any mention of:
These may seem like very specialized features (and they are, for the most part), but graphic proffesionals expect them. Those that expect gimp to take over the proffesional desktop publishing/design sector will have to wait much longer than they assume. I think the gimp creators realize this, as well; It's a segment of the GPL fanatics that don't.
When I read it the first thing that came to mind wasn't 'oh, he's insulting women'. He was, in fact, insulting how they are brought up. It's a social problem, and one that can arguably be pinned on men. His point was (I think) that women are brought up poorly in society, which includes men and women. If women were brought up with the mindset that they can be hugely succesful in life and made to realize their full potential (in science, business, whatever), things would be better for everyone. Things are better a hundred times over compared to a century ago, but there's still lots of issues.
At least, that's what I think his point was. And I'd say it's a fairly decent one.
I'm posting this knowing that I'm going to sound like a complete idiot: but what is Nethack? Maybe I'm just weird, but fighting jelly corpses and kittens sounds REALLY fun.
Keep in mind that they're not pulling Premier from the store shelves quite yet. I'm sure they'll be selling copies of the latest version for at least another year or so. They have, however, cut developement, which is the bulk of the cost anyway.
Detect them how? Handheld scanners used to be like this, and they had horrible tracking. Remember the old hand held scanners that you had to move up an down the piece of paper with? Kind of like a paint roller (same movements) but looked more like a supermarket bar code scanner, and didn't do a very good job of keeping things aligned.
I wish I had mod points!!! Oh! how I wish I had mod points
I'm not a lawyer either, but does the fact that the GPL retains the copyright owner play into this?
i.e. even if SCO releases a Linux port, isn't the kernel code still copyright GNU (or whoever owns the copyright to the kernel)
I don't know about Xolox or BearShare, but Limewire is open source, and the cvs version does not contain adware. http://www.limewire.org if you are interested. It's not as convienient as just downloading from the website, obviously, but it does get you an ad-free version of the client.
The moderators are your peers: people who contribute to the forums get a certain amount of mod points every few weeks. It's the readers who mod up and down posts, not anyone that works at Slashdot.
As quoted from the Reuters article (my own emphasis added):
;o)
"Adobe Systems has not been able to find proof that anyone made illegal copies of electronic books using software that could sidestep copyright safeguards in the company's eBook software, an Adobe engineer has testified. "
There's a difference in not finding proof that Elcomsoft's software didn't crack the ebooks and not finding any ebooks that were cracked by it (as the Slashdot article suggests). Sorry to be picky, but the person that wrote the slashdot story was a little sensational in his wording, and I thought there was a big enough difference to mention that.
I can understand how unbelievably hard it would be to find proof of cracking with Elcomsoft's software just by downloading cracked ebooks. I doubt Elcomsoft's software leaves any footprints in the decoded file, especially considering the extremely simplistic 'encryption' algorithm
Yeah, I typed everything out in paragraphs, but since I clicked the "HTML Formatted" option and forgot to put breaks in, it was all for nought. My mistake, I apologize!! :o)
You bring up some very interesting rebuttels to my post, and I thank you for your feedback. I'll let you know that I agree with almost all of your points (that computers should not be dumbed down for the layman). However, that is not exactly what I meant to imply. Computers will always have their place. You can turn my PC into an appliance over my dead body! What I'm suggesting is that if there was a way to provide simple services such as email (in text/voice/video form) that everyone would benefit. A breed of device seperate from a typical PC that anyone can use.
On the point of mouse clicks/keyboard presses:
If you wanted to bring simple webservices like email to a person that's never used a computer before you would probably sign them up for a free service such as hotmail or yahoo. I want to diagram how many button presses are involved (this all may sound ridiculous and extremely mellodramatic, but the truth is non-geeky people often get confused by all the steps involved):
- Double Click Internet Explorer from the standard 5-15 icons that are on the desktop. Keep in mind that the Internet Explorer icon is about 1/100th the size of the entire desktop, and a non-tech user can often get lost in the many icons present.
[ 2 clicks ]
- Click in the address bar (which is among 20 other buttons) and type in the (archaic) web address http://www.hotmail.com.
[1 click, 22 key presses]
- In the sign in box type your user name (again, sometimes lost in all the buttons on the screen. Sounds ridiculous, but I've seen users have trouble finding it)
[1 click, ~8 key presses ]
- Same for the password
[1 click, ~8 key presses ]
- Sign In Button
[1 click]
Now you are provided with a user interface (the website) inside of a user interface (the browser) inside of _another_ user interface (the OS). When I sign in to my Yahoo! account, there are no less than 50 links on the page. The browser has another 20 buttons, and the OS has a task bar with who knows what in the tray, a min/max/close button, ect. It's a kalidescopic nightmare for the untrained user.
And that's just email.
Granted it gets easier with time, granted we all had to learn it, but it seems like nothing has changed in the last 20 years. It feels like we have made very little ground. And it seems like an incomprehensible mess to a first time user. Now how many key presses does it take to read each message? Which button out of the 50 available does what I want? You mean that small (16x16 pixel) button? The one next to the other 12 buttons that's below the big bar of other buttons and next to the message that says my computer "Isn't optimized for the Internet"? Couldn't this confusion be halved/quarted/_almost_ totally eliminated?
Past solutions have involved dumbing down the PC. I think that's a terrible idea. Millions of people use PC's with out (many) problems and love the flexibality they provide, including myself. But most don't care about flexability. They don't care that their comptuer can run all the latest applications/OSes. They just want email!
I'm just throwing some food out. I would love to hear rebuttles/other ideas.
500 million people certainly is a lot, and the industry as a whole has quite a bit to brag about (that much growth in only 10 years is phenominal.) However, there are a lot of the things the industry should be ashamed of, too. Usability seems to have come a long way in the last few years, but the best thing to ever happen to personal computing in terms of usability, the introduction of the GUI-based PC to the masses, will be the celebrating it's 20th birthday in 2004. 20 years and there is still a market for 400 page manuals on How To Use Microsoft Windows selling in Barnes and Nobles. How many 400 page manuals do you see selling on how to operate your microwave or your alarm clock? Your TV? How about how to send snail mail or take/develop photos? Sure PC's are complicated machines, sure the PC can do a lot more than a microwave... but does Jane Doe Grandma care? Not really, she just wants to see pictures of her grandchildren on that live hundreds miles of away, and she wants them on Christmas morning as they open their gifts. How likely is she to spend hours trying to learn how to buy a computer, plug in the 7 different wires, figure out how to dial up to a service provider, learn how to launch and use her email client, and load up the attached pictures in her photo-editing software. Not likely. It's not that she or the billions of other people on this planet that are not connected aren't capable of learning, it's that it's just not worth it to them. Face it: using a PC takes a time investment of several hours _just_ to do basic tasks, and all these people want to do is send email/pictures/video to their families, maybe read the news, and be done with it. What other home appliance (since that's what the PC is and should be to these people) have you seen that takes 2 minutes to boot up? How about that you have to push 30+ buttons to operate (how many keyboard presses & mouse clicks does it take to do what Jane Doe Grandma wants?). This all sounds pretty trivial to us geeks because we're used to pressing THOUSANDS of buttons a day to get what we want done, but we are a minority. To the 5.5 billion other people on this planet: it just seems too complicated. Have there been attempts at bridging the gap between layman and machine? Of course, but most have failed miserably. Email appliances were clunky, ugly, and still unbelievably hard to use. Windows XP still has the same complicated GUI that has been around for more 7 years (just with bigger, brighter, more obxnoxious buttons). Does it look easier? Sure, I guess. Still takes hundreds of mouse clicks to read email/news. My TV takes three to get CNN.
How soon can we expect signing EULAs for cable service that commits us to watching the commercials in return for the 'agreed upon entertainment'?