No: not every idea is worth implementing or not enough money can be raised. There are a lot of people, who like me, have hundreds of good ideas a year. But it takes a lot of money to go from an idea to an actual implementation. Ideas are cheap, implementation: no.
But this isn't a Gimp Feature, but something the filer (?) supports, like Nautilus. Since the directory I use is already a bookmark, I do indeed use this method, but it's cumbersome. Just a simple tick box with "use this folder from now as a default" and it's solved. But there are many places in Gimp that suffer (IMO) from
exactly those issues: arbitrary (IMO) defaults, no easy way to make my defaults the ones I want, etc.
Again, this might all be my own fault; I haven't read the fine manual, nor the 3 books I have on Gimp, thoroughly
Thanks! I recall that I used this method once, but it's just too cumbersome. I still think that just drawing a line and have Gimp figure it out is easier. This comes close, but one still has to tweak the grid, which is more cumbersome (IMO) than just drawing a line.
Yup, I don't get it, for example, why rotating a photo to get the horizon straight is not just a matter of drawing a straight line over horizon, and have GIMP figure out how to rotate the photo to get it straight. Instead one has to tweak in a preview window. I use the top of another window (from a different program) to check if it's straight... Yes, I guess there are better ways to do this, using a grid in Gimp itself, but this is easier and faster to me....
I use Gimp mostly for: cropping a photo (4:3 selection), resizing it, and sharpening it. And each time it amazes me how many steps are required to achieve this... Might very well be my inexperience with Gimp, though.
Unsharp Mask: Radius 5.0, Amount: 0.50. Are there actually people who use those IMO crazy defaults?
It would've been nice if there was an option in that dialog to "use these values as default".
Ditto for the "Save as". Why isn't there an option to set the default "Save to" directory in that dialog window? Maybe it's just me but I prefer not to save the results in the directory that has the originals.
Working with the Gimp is in my experience a never ending pain in the ass. But that's probably partially to blame on my inexperience with it. But each time I get the impression that the motto is: easy tasks hard and hard tasks impossible.
Now replace dentist with an other profession, for example programmer, and the job with programming, and presto, you got a very recognizable story. In short: in every profession the majority just fucks up very often.
Yup, exactly. There are already so many ways to pass on information, even spoken or in song. While books do last in Mexico not as long as in the Netherlands, for example (moisture, termites, etc.), they certainly last at least 10x longer than a tablet.
Uhm, yeah, a street kid needs an iPad to learn that a local shelter is open...
How many gringos do you think are there in Mexico? I live in Xalapa, which has a population of about half a million people and I stand out. I hardly see any white people ever. If the people on the streets here had to live from a few English words and being able to read... And how do they get those magical tables? Are they going to be handed out on the streets?
Moreover, if you want to improve reading skills and learning English, don't you think that stopping dubbing over movies and use subtitles instead doesn't have a greater impact? That stuff is already in place (a lot of people have TV) and it costs nothing to get it rolling (it might even be cheaper).
Mexico has good internet access, in Xalapa there's a cybercafe at nearly every corner (I met my wife online, and she used one close to her house). To me, the whole "let's push technology on them so they can improve their lives" sounds to much like someone hasn't done his/her homework. Or has done his/her homework very well, but has a very different agenda.
Even if this whole project becomes a "success", I am afraid that I will encounter those magical learning devices 2 or 3 years after they have been "given" to the poor in the places I hike. Dumped in illegal trash heaps causing another problem. And the poor will still be poor. Or, I am afraid, will be even more poor.
Don't forget AMD's 50x15 project as well. The computer in a breadbox. I saw it here in Mexico, and it was as expensive as a cheap desktop computer with much lower specs. Ah, well, you can still Donate for Haiti on 50x15.org...
It's still a silly idea. I live in Mexico, and here still a lot of children can't go to school for the simple reason that they have to help their family with staying alive. How is a tablet going to fix that? I often read "with a tablet they can learn about better farming methods, etc.". If that's the case, why can't they learn such things now? To me projects like this sound too much like "Every major village needs a McDonalds so people can have access to healty fast food". Right!
And also, before I forget: the corollary of "filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them" is that "when smart people program those filters, they're very effective."
My experience is that even very smart people come up with naive rules that seem to work OK but have from the start a lot of false positives and shortly after many false negatives. Even learning systems like SpamAssassin keep suffering from this (at least in my experience, maybe my fault). And this doesn't surprise me: since an algorithm that can learn to distinguish ham from spam can also be used to create spam that aforementioned system will consider ham...
To paraphrase: we have n spam filter rules that almost work. Let's add one more. And now we have n+1 spam filter rules that almost work.
Yes, spam filters are getting better. But spam is still big business.
And email is not slowly getting better and better. No, it's slowly getting less and less worse. But too slow. Back in the 90s I complained about a single spam message a day. Now I am happy if I get less than 10 per account, so in my book we are not keeping up, at all. And I don't want to think about the number of spam that daily hammers my server, eating resources I am paying for.
...Except that Twitter can see all of the posts simultaneously, even though you can't, so posting from multiple accounts isn't an automatically effective dodge.
And how are you going to distinguish between thousands of people posting something like "The iPhone 5 someurl" and a spammer doing the same? The thing is, you need to keep adding layers and layers of complexity and learn to live with false positives, and hence disgruntled people.
You could also make the threshold 3-5% or any arbitrary number...
Yes, and add more and "better" rules, ad nauseum. And CAPTCHAs and more and more hoops.
neither solution by itself solves anything.
I didn't reply to this, since it's obvious. There isn't a 100% working solution. But IMO filters are just the same as looking the other way when people litter. Or put a high fence around the litter, to filter it out.
I've been reporting spam for nearly 20 years and my experience is that most people just don't care. On one hand I can understand it. To an ISP it's a choice between an "upset geek" and a paying customer. And the more people filter, the less complaints they get. And on top of that some ISPs don't accept abuse@ spam reports any more: you have to use a form. Or put a spam filter on abuse@ (really).
I am sure that going after some of the bigger assholes will not make spam disappear. But it will stop people like "Cohen" from flaunting their services openly on YouTube, Linked-In, etc.
A few years back I got comment spam for a comment spamming tool (from aforementioned Cohen) video on YouTube. It took quite an effort to get that video taken down (had to contact someone inside Google directly). And that's how it is.
Plus, you could write the rules intelligently so that just a cursory alteration of the non-URL portion of the tweet wouldn't let the message pass as "spam."
How many false positives would this give?
For example, it's really hard to imagine that 10,000 tweets to some random landing page on bit.ly coming in over the course of a few seconds from the same account is anything but spam.
And coming from 10,000 accounts? You can outsource twitter account creation and use a bot net.
Likely, the "best" spammers were on this route long before
Exactly. "Intelligent rules" have been in use for a long time for email (e.g. SpamAssassin) but email spam still happens, as do false positives.
No, I wouldn't mind if Twitter went after asshats like "Daniel Cohen"
email campain tools = the knife I mentioned earlier on.
"mark as spam".... yeah, visit Digg and YouTube to see how well that works.
What I really don't get is that we've seen all those "solutions" for decades in the real world: after many attempts at "easy" solutions, the thing that works bothers a lot of normal people (like humps in roads to slow down drivers). Maybe because back then people could get away with so much makes this behaviour "acceptable" online as well?
My point exactly. Filters don't work. Especially not naive filters like "if the message is identical". It takes a few minutes of programming to make messages no longer identical. Moreover, this would mark tweets of quotes suspicious (they are identical).
I also agree with going after the spammers. But I also agree with going after the tool makers. We're not talking here (I hope) about going after a knife maker because people get stabbed. We're talking here (again, I hope) going after people who make dedicated tools with the sole purpose of spamming services.
A few years ago I tried to report comment spam coming from Israel. It turned out that the software for spamming was made by a former(?) owner / associate of an Israeli ISP. The spam came via the ISP, and the software to spam was peddled on YouTube, and a % of the comments that were posted to my blog. Good luck going after the users of the software. The ISP ignores all reports (and probably can claim they never got any, since I didn't use the proper abuse address, or their form, etc). And the coder of the software gets away as well, and goes on making money by selling to suckers.
In my experience (which might be very wrong) a lot of spam comes from suckers who hired services / paid for software and are as stupid as people actually buying spamvertized products. And the people who seem to keep getting away are the infrastructure providers (ISPs: we didn't receive your complains, or let us whitelist you) and the people who provide the software.
We saw the same ignorance with email spam. Filter! Filter!
The next step will be that the messages are no longer identical...
No, I think Twitter is doing the right thing here. Instead of "filters" and other failures go after the spammers and their tools.
ISPs and hosting providers are also getting better and better at avoiding to handle abuse complains. Some don't have an email address at all, and you have to use a ticket system. And if you are finally able to reach them (via Facebook(!), or their sales chat), you might get list washed or just plainly ignored. As a spam reporter you're not making them any money, just costing them.
Slashdot Mirror
No: not every idea is worth implementing or not enough money can be raised. There are a lot of people, who like me, have hundreds of good ideas a year. But it takes a lot of money to go from an idea to an actual implementation. Ideas are cheap, implementation: no.
But this isn't a Gimp Feature, but something the filer (?) supports, like Nautilus. Since the directory I use is already a bookmark, I do indeed use this method, but it's cumbersome. Just a simple tick box with "use this folder from now as a default" and it's solved. But there are many places in Gimp that suffer (IMO) from exactly those issues: arbitrary (IMO) defaults, no easy way to make my defaults the ones I want, etc.
Again, this might all be my own fault; I haven't read the fine manual, nor the 3 books I have on Gimp, thoroughly
Thanks! I recall that I used this method once, but it's just too cumbersome. I still think that just drawing a line and have Gimp figure it out is easier. This comes close, but one still has to tweak the grid, which is more cumbersome (IMO) than just drawing a line.
Yup, I don't get it, for example, why rotating a photo to get the horizon straight is not just a matter of drawing a straight line over horizon, and have GIMP figure out how to rotate the photo to get it straight. Instead one has to tweak in a preview window. I use the top of another window (from a different program) to check if it's straight... Yes, I guess there are better ways to do this, using a grid in Gimp itself, but this is easier and faster to me....
I use Gimp mostly for: cropping a photo (4:3 selection), resizing it, and sharpening it. And each time it amazes me how many steps are required to achieve this... Might very well be my inexperience with Gimp, though.
Unsharp Mask: Radius 5.0, Amount: 0.50. Are there actually people who use those IMO crazy defaults?
It would've been nice if there was an option in that dialog to "use these values as default".
Ditto for the "Save as". Why isn't there an option to set the default "Save to" directory in that dialog window? Maybe it's just me but I prefer not to save the results in the directory that has the originals.
Working with the Gimp is in my experience a never ending pain in the ass. But that's probably partially to blame on my inexperience with it. But each time I get the impression that the motto is: easy tasks hard and hard tasks impossible.
If you supervise/assist, how about Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!
Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners by Warren and Carter Sande. Uses Python.
Maybe I watch the wrong kind of TV series, but the impression I often get:
I do notice that seeing people eat makes me hungry.
Now replace dentist with an other profession, for example programmer, and the job with programming, and presto, you got a very recognizable story. In short: in every profession the majority just fucks up very often.
Yup, exactly. There are already so many ways to pass on information, even spoken or in song. While books do last in Mexico not as long as in the Netherlands, for example (moisture, termites, etc.), they certainly last at least 10x longer than a tablet.
Uhm, yeah, a street kid needs an iPad to learn that a local shelter is open...
How many gringos do you think are there in Mexico? I live in Xalapa, which has a population of about half a million people and I stand out. I hardly see any white people ever. If the people on the streets here had to live from a few English words and being able to read... And how do they get those magical tables? Are they going to be handed out on the streets?
Moreover, if you want to improve reading skills and learning English, don't you think that stopping dubbing over movies and use subtitles instead doesn't have a greater impact? That stuff is already in place (a lot of people have TV) and it costs nothing to get it rolling (it might even be cheaper).
Mexico has good internet access, in Xalapa there's a cybercafe at nearly every corner (I met my wife online, and she used one close to her house). To me, the whole "let's push technology on them so they can improve their lives" sounds to much like someone hasn't done his/her homework. Or has done his/her homework very well, but has a very different agenda.
Even if this whole project becomes a "success", I am afraid that I will encounter those magical learning devices 2 or 3 years after they have been "given" to the poor in the places I hike. Dumped in illegal trash heaps causing another problem. And the poor will still be poor. Or, I am afraid, will be even more poor.
Anyway, a very good read on this all: http://www.deeshaa.org/2005/11/05/formula-for-milking-the-digital-divide/
Belgium.... it's not far from the Netherlands, were I was born...
Don't forget AMD's 50x15 project as well. The computer in a breadbox. I saw it here in Mexico, and it was as expensive as a cheap desktop computer with much lower specs. Ah, well, you can still Donate for Haiti on 50x15.org...
It's still a silly idea. I live in Mexico, and here still a lot of children can't go to school for the simple reason that they have to help their family with staying alive. How is a tablet going to fix that? I often read "with a tablet they can learn about better farming methods, etc.". If that's the case, why can't they learn such things now? To me projects like this sound too much like "Every major village needs a McDonalds so people can have access to healty fast food". Right!
As for Amazon's after sale support.... be glad you didn't import a Kindle Touch yourself: Kindle Fire outside the USA: fun while it lasts
My experience is that even very smart people come up with naive rules that seem to work OK but have from the start a lot of false positives and shortly after many false negatives. Even learning systems like SpamAssassin keep suffering from this (at least in my experience, maybe my fault). And this doesn't surprise me: since an algorithm that can learn to distinguish ham from spam can also be used to create spam that aforementioned system will consider ham...
To paraphrase: we have n spam filter rules that almost work. Let's add one more. And now we have n+1 spam filter rules that almost work.
Yes, spam filters are getting better. But spam is still big business. And email is not slowly getting better and better. No, it's slowly getting less and less worse. But too slow. Back in the 90s I complained about a single spam message a day. Now I am happy if I get less than 10 per account, so in my book we are not keeping up, at all. And I don't want to think about the number of spam that daily hammers my server, eating resources I am paying for.
And how are you going to distinguish between thousands of people posting something like "The iPhone 5 someurl" and a spammer doing the same? The thing is, you need to keep adding layers and layers of complexity and learn to live with false positives, and hence disgruntled people.
Yes, and add more and "better" rules, ad nauseum. And CAPTCHAs and more and more hoops.
I didn't reply to this, since it's obvious. There isn't a 100% working solution. But IMO filters are just the same as looking the other way when people litter. Or put a high fence around the litter, to filter it out.
I've been reporting spam for nearly 20 years and my experience is that most people just don't care. On one hand I can understand it. To an ISP it's a choice between an "upset geek" and a paying customer. And the more people filter, the less complaints they get. And on top of that some ISPs don't accept abuse@ spam reports any more: you have to use a form. Or put a spam filter on abuse@ (really).
I am sure that going after some of the bigger assholes will not make spam disappear. But it will stop people like "Cohen" from flaunting their services openly on YouTube, Linked-In, etc.
A few years back I got comment spam for a comment spamming tool (from aforementioned Cohen) video on YouTube. It took quite an effort to get that video taken down (had to contact someone inside Google directly). And that's how it is.
How many false positives would this give?
And coming from 10,000 accounts? You can outsource twitter account creation and use a bot net.
Exactly. "Intelligent rules" have been in use for a long time for email (e.g. SpamAssassin) but email spam still happens, as do false positives.
No, I wouldn't mind if Twitter went after asshats like "Daniel Cohen"
email campain tools = the knife I mentioned earlier on.
"mark as spam".... yeah, visit Digg and YouTube to see how well that works.
What I really don't get is that we've seen all those "solutions" for decades in the real world: after many attempts at "easy" solutions, the thing that works bothers a lot of normal people (like humps in roads to slow down drivers). Maybe because back then people could get away with so much makes this behaviour "acceptable" online as well?
Hundreds, thousands of accounts, using proxies/botnet.
short URLs
yes, that's it!
My point exactly. Filters don't work. Especially not naive filters like "if the message is identical". It takes a few minutes of programming to make messages no longer identical. Moreover, this would mark tweets of quotes suspicious (they are identical).
I also agree with going after the spammers. But I also agree with going after the tool makers. We're not talking here (I hope) about going after a knife maker because people get stabbed. We're talking here (again, I hope) going after people who make dedicated tools with the sole purpose of spamming services.
A few years ago I tried to report comment spam coming from Israel. It turned out that the software for spamming was made by a former(?) owner / associate of an Israeli ISP. The spam came via the ISP, and the software to spam was peddled on YouTube, and a % of the comments that were posted to my blog. Good luck going after the users of the software. The ISP ignores all reports (and probably can claim they never got any, since I didn't use the proper abuse address, or their form, etc). And the coder of the software gets away as well, and goes on making money by selling to suckers.
In my experience (which might be very wrong) a lot of spam comes from suckers who hired services / paid for software and are as stupid as people actually buying spamvertized products. And the people who seem to keep getting away are the infrastructure providers (ISPs: we didn't receive your complains, or let us whitelist you) and the people who provide the software.
In short: I think Twitter has a plan, a good one.
Look up "Joe Job".
We saw the same ignorance with email spam. Filter! Filter! The next step will be that the messages are no longer identical... No, I think Twitter is doing the right thing here. Instead of "filters" and other failures go after the spammers and their tools.
ISPs and hosting providers are also getting better and better at avoiding to handle abuse complains. Some don't have an email address at all, and you have to use a ticket system. And if you are finally able to reach them (via Facebook(!), or their sales chat), you might get list washed or just plainly ignored. As a spam reporter you're not making them any money, just costing them.
Then we agree :-) Yes, some things one has to hold and feel.