It is nothing like Google's strategy, which (like Yahoo's) is inherently limited and hyper-expensive, depending as it does on doing deals to arrange feeds from content providers, who can decide what to share and who will eventually and inevitably extract their pound of flesh. Truveo's technology does not depend on feeds, nor metadata (notoriously bad). Their servers instantiate and visually crawl the content, including dynamic content, and extract information from the content itself and its context - including subtitles where present and even speech-to-text if necessary. Pulling that off at scale is super hard, and Truveo is doing it. Very cool, ground-breaking, and apparently patent-pending stuff.
"Microsoft is not alone and joins companies such as American Airlines, Ford and General Motors, Wal-Mart and more that have engaged in practices that while good for their stockholders, have not been good for the competition."
Setting aside Wal-Mart, uh... really? AA, Ford and GM are all on the brink of bankruptcy after getting their lunch eaten by Southwest Airlines, Nissan, Toyota et al.
As for Wal-Mart, the bashing grows tiresome. It is not illegal or even uncool to beat the competition via economies of scale, great promotional sense, smart data-driven location scouting, low labor costs, and a world-class IT-driven distribution system. Contrary to popular mythology, their success at fending off unionization is primarily due to treating their employees well enough to dampen unions' appeal, not by treating them like s***. The failure of small-town Main Streets to compete with Wal-Mart is lamentable (for this small-town boy) but it's structural, not sinister; and there is no excuse other than poor execution for the failure of KMart etc. to compete.
We found some poorly written code today during a code review.
Piece of sh** MS Visual Studio...
Re:Outlook is the bane of email
on
Email Turns 34
·
· Score: 1
Outlook has had conversation view (and many other rather cool views) since the day it shipped, as did its predecessor, the "Exchange Client" of April '96. Nobody knows about it because its not terribly easy to find without RTFM which nobody does or ever will. If you need a manual, your UI sucks anyway.
GMail's implementation shines by making the feature obvious and accessible.
In part, that's why IBM picked both a rather substandard hardware design and a rather substandard vendor to supply the operating system (IBM didn't have a choice but to go outside for their software--they were under antitrust scrutiny).
They went outside for faster time-to-market, not antitrust issues. And if substandard PC software was their goal, why did they subsequently invest over $1B in OS/2?
And it worked as IBM intended: it took 15 years for PC software to catch up with the state of the art of the mid-80's. That translated into a lot of extra sales for IBM's mainframes, servers, and workstations.
"The original product was designed to work in a NetBIOS LAN-only file-server environment, with a proprietary dialup interface hacked on later, and SMTP client support grudgingly and unreliably added even later. Back in 1994, it was the third-worst mail system I'd ever used"
You're confusing MS Mail with Exchange. There's not a line of code in common. I know because I was there (for better or worse).
Exchange Server first shipped in April 1996, and its primary components were the replicating message store (developed inhouse, based on Jet Blue client/server db, only distantly related to Access' Jet Red technology); a directory (also inhouse, evolved eventually to AD); a richly functional but bloated X.400-based MTA (licensed and modified); an SMTP MTA, essentially an X.400/SMTP gateway; and an admin component.
Outlook shipped somewhat later and was developed by a different division with inexcusably poor communication with the Exchange team. It showed. Much improved UI over MS Mail or the 1995 "Windows Messaging client", but poor client/server performance in its first release, and almost unusable SMTP client support. This took years to improve. And its calendaring/scheduling functions actually dropped dozens of features from its predecessor Schedule+, many of which haven't returned 9 years later.
It was a different world in 1994, for sure. Email market was far more fragmented, even within companies. Some companies (or departments) used the crappy file-share based cc:Mail (bought by Lotus) or MS Mail; others used mainframe or mini-based systems like IBM Profs, HP OpenMail, DEC, etc. Lotus Notes (also file-based) was beginning to take off. Virtually none used SMTP internally, it was primarily an inter-company protocol. Companies like Soft*Switch sold multi-system email gateways at huge prices. Momentum was high in large corporations towards X.400, with European companies *demanding* Microsoft and Lotus standardize on it.
X.400 addressing was a user interface disaster but X.400 is an extremely robust protocol. My great regret is that we (meaning the email engineering community overall) didn't work harder to combine some of X.400's robustness - guaranteed delivery, non-repudiation, other things that make email truly reliable and spam non-viable - into SMTP's simplicity, before SMTP's usage exploded.
I do not work or consult for Sound Transit or any other transit system or supplier or lobbyist. But Reverberant is right. The point is not that monorails aren't quiet, but that modern LRT is also quiet, and that's not FUD but fact. Speculation is not required, just go listen to Portland's Max as he keeps saying, including its higher-speed segments in dedicated right-of-way.
Chicago's EL is ear-splitting for good reason. The 100-year-old supporting structure is a noisy relic - open-decked steel with no vibration dampening. The cars are newer but still heavier with clumsier suspensions than modern LRTs. A modern elevated ROW would use ballasted decks on concrete with lightweight cars on sophisticated suspension - absolutely no comparison.
To the posters who cited freight trains - please. These are pulled by multiple roaring 4000+ horsepower GE or GM diesel-electric locomotives approaching half a million pounds each. Loaded freight cars carry up to 140 tons each, and trains can have 100+ cars. Car sides are made from noisy sheet steel which rattles constantly. The crude spring suspensions are designed for low cost and high ruggedness vs. highly advanced passenger car suspensions, leading to more rattling, clanking, and flange squeal on curves. Instead of passenger cars' slackless or low-slack dampened couplers, freight trains carry up to a foot of slack between each car joined by steel-on-steel couplers, which sound like a thunderstorm when a long train starts up. Comparing all this to LRT is like comparing a Kenworth semi to a Prius.
As a traveler I've spent many hours on or around Chicago's EL, Boston's T, various subways, Seattle and Disney monorails, and light and heavy rail around the world. Bottom line, both monorail and modern LRTs are far quieter than heavy rail or ancient elevated transit.
Slashdot Mirror
This is wisdom.
It will be precisely as successful as the X.400 email protocol, which was to be the worldwide standard (OSI said so).
RTFA and TTFP before posting, please.
Who is Erm?
"Microsoft is not alone and joins companies such as American Airlines, Ford and General Motors, Wal-Mart and more that have engaged in practices that while good for their stockholders, have not been good for the competition."
Setting aside Wal-Mart, uh... really? AA, Ford and GM are all on the brink of bankruptcy after getting their lunch eaten by Southwest Airlines, Nissan, Toyota et al.
As for Wal-Mart, the bashing grows tiresome. It is not illegal or even uncool to beat the competition via economies of scale, great promotional sense, smart data-driven location scouting, low labor costs, and a world-class IT-driven distribution system. Contrary to popular mythology, their success at fending off unionization is primarily due to treating their employees well enough to dampen unions' appeal, not by treating them like s***. The failure of small-town Main Streets to compete with Wal-Mart is lamentable (for this small-town boy) but it's structural, not sinister; and there is no excuse other than poor execution for the failure of KMart etc. to compete.
We found some poorly written code today during a code review. Piece of sh** MS Visual Studio...
Outlook has had conversation view (and many other rather cool views) since the day it shipped, as did its predecessor, the "Exchange Client" of April '96. Nobody knows about it because its not terribly easy to find without RTFM which nobody does or ever will. If you need a manual, your UI sucks anyway. GMail's implementation shines by making the feature obvious and accessible.
"The original product was designed to work in a NetBIOS LAN-only file-server environment, with a proprietary dialup interface hacked on later, and SMTP client support grudgingly and unreliably added even later. Back in 1994, it was the third-worst mail system I'd ever used"
You're confusing MS Mail with Exchange. There's not a line of code in common. I know because I was there (for better or worse).
Exchange Server first shipped in April 1996, and its primary components were the replicating message store (developed inhouse, based on Jet Blue client/server db, only distantly related to Access' Jet Red technology); a directory (also inhouse, evolved eventually to AD); a richly functional but bloated X.400-based MTA (licensed and modified); an SMTP MTA, essentially an X.400/SMTP gateway; and an admin component.
Outlook shipped somewhat later and was developed by a different division with inexcusably poor communication with the Exchange team. It showed. Much improved UI over MS Mail or the 1995 "Windows Messaging client", but poor client/server performance in its first release, and almost unusable SMTP client support. This took years to improve. And its calendaring/scheduling functions actually dropped dozens of features from its predecessor Schedule+, many of which haven't returned 9 years later.
It was a different world in 1994, for sure. Email market was far more fragmented, even within companies. Some companies (or departments) used the crappy file-share based cc:Mail (bought by Lotus) or MS Mail; others used mainframe or mini-based systems like IBM Profs, HP OpenMail, DEC, etc. Lotus Notes (also file-based) was beginning to take off. Virtually none used SMTP internally, it was primarily an inter-company protocol. Companies like Soft*Switch sold multi-system email gateways at huge prices. Momentum was high in large corporations towards X.400, with European companies *demanding* Microsoft and Lotus standardize on it.
X.400 addressing was a user interface disaster but X.400 is an extremely robust protocol. My great regret is that we (meaning the email engineering community overall) didn't work harder to combine some of X.400's robustness - guaranteed delivery, non-repudiation, other things that make email truly reliable and spam non-viable - into SMTP's simplicity, before SMTP's usage exploded.
I do not work or consult for Sound Transit or any other transit system or supplier or lobbyist. But Reverberant is right. The point is not that monorails aren't quiet, but that modern LRT is also quiet, and that's not FUD but fact. Speculation is not required, just go listen to Portland's Max as he keeps saying, including its higher-speed segments in dedicated right-of-way.
Chicago's EL is ear-splitting for good reason. The 100-year-old supporting structure is a noisy relic - open-decked steel with no vibration dampening. The cars are newer but still heavier with clumsier suspensions than modern LRTs. A modern elevated ROW would use ballasted decks on concrete with lightweight cars on sophisticated suspension - absolutely no comparison.
To the posters who cited freight trains - please. These are pulled by multiple roaring 4000+ horsepower GE or GM diesel-electric locomotives approaching half a million pounds each. Loaded freight cars carry up to 140 tons each, and trains can have 100+ cars. Car sides are made from noisy sheet steel which rattles constantly. The crude spring suspensions are designed for low cost and high ruggedness vs. highly advanced passenger car suspensions, leading to more rattling, clanking, and flange squeal on curves. Instead of passenger cars' slackless or low-slack dampened couplers, freight trains carry up to a foot of slack between each car joined by steel-on-steel couplers, which sound like a thunderstorm when a long train starts up. Comparing all this to LRT is like comparing a Kenworth semi to a Prius.
As a traveler I've spent many hours on or around Chicago's EL, Boston's T, various subways, Seattle and Disney monorails, and light and heavy rail around the world. Bottom line, both monorail and modern LRTs are far quieter than heavy rail or ancient elevated transit.