SOT gmail invites

[tony summerfelt]

Hmmm? afaik, they are only scanning it to provide targeted ads and
personal search capability.

"afaik" too, that's all their doing...i'm sure none of the results
they get are getting any vendors/advertisers

How does this affect web presence?

it still affects a web presence. the 'targetted ads' will likely be
ruby related...

i'm just guessing that google keeps track of the amount/types of ads
being dynamically generated ( i know *i* would be i had a web site
that implemented that). and they'll see an increase in 'ruby ads'
being generated...if those results were somehow 'leaked' to ide/editor
vendors...

all speculation of course, but nothing that happens on the web happens
in a vacuum...

http://home.cogeco.ca/~tsummerfelt1
telnet://ventedspleen.dyndns.org

 

[tony summerfelt]

Phew. Okay. For a minute there I thought I must be the only one
skeptical of the "gmail hype".

on the other hand, those of us living on the bleeding edge NEEDED a
gmail account...

i only hold certain gmail 'conversations' (as they call them) using
gmail. consequently i only get ads targeted for things i'm interested
in. that doesn't bother me at all. much better than yahoo's random
full graphic ads for something i have no interest in...


http://home.cogeco.ca/~tsummerfelt1
telnet://ventedspleen.dyndns.org

 

[tony summerfelt]

Software patents are like, if you play guitar, Eddie Van Halen
patenting Tapping (two-handed hammer-on technique). The damned
*IDEA* is the easy part. It's the implementation that's hard.

i would be upset if eddie got that particular patent...he certainly
didn't invent it. i've seen ritchie blackmore, ace frehley, steve howe
do it before eddie did...i used to laugh when he turned around to
'protect the technique from the audience' having said that 'eruption'
is ranks up there as one of the coolest guitar bits i've heard on
vinyl...
http://home.cogeco.ca/~tsummerfelt1
telnet://ventedspleen.dyndns.org

 

[Stefan Schmiedl]

The conversation system is not the same as a threaded view, by the way.
In the threaded view, you still have to wade through tons of
unwanted/previously-seen material before you get to what you want.
Thunderbird could really do well if they added something like this.
It's probably patented though.

Mutt has a feature (on key T IIRC) where it can hide quotations
leaving only the "new" text visible. So if it's patented there's
a good chance to get away with prior art.

s.

 

[Bill Kelly]

i would be upset if eddie got that particular patent...he certainly
didn't invent it.

Sorry I wasn't expressing myself very clearly. I didn't mean
to imply that he *had* applied for the patent, just that the
level of absurdity seemed well-matched to that of software
patents.



Sorry for the noise,


Regards,

Bill

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

Software patents are like, if you play guitar, Eddie Van Halen
patenting Tapping (two-handed hammer-on technique). The damned
*IDEA* is the easy part. It's the implementation that's hard.

In building software, though, turning ideas into profit is an
expensive and risky exercise. Much more so than busting a few guitar
moves.

Once you've seen the benefit of an idea you'd never have thought of
yourself, the implementation is often trivial. Just like many guitar
techniques Entity A proves the commercial viability of an idea at
great expense; entities B-Z exploit that idea at no expense. The
first-mover advantage very often _doesn't_ apply in software, as
pioneers don't have the scale to fully capitalise on their ideas.

I'm not arguing for or against the matter at hand here. I think the
current situation is a matter of some valid but bague principles being
exploited with all the desparation and environmental soundness of a
goldrush.

Cheers,
Gavin

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

In building software, though, turning ideas into profit is an
expensive and risky exercise. Much more so than busting a few guitar
moves.

Once you've seen the benefit of an idea you'd never have thought of
yourself, the implementation is often trivial. Just like many guitar
techniques Entity A proves the commercial viability of an idea at
great expense; entities B-Z exploit that idea at no expense. The
first-mover advantage very often _doesn't_ apply in software, as
pioneers don't have the scale to fully capitalise on their ideas.

I'm not arguing for or against the matter at hand here. I think the
current situation is a matter of some valid but bague principles being vague
exploited with all the desparation and environmental soundness of a
goldrush.

Sorry,
Gavin

P.S. While I'm here, remember this about software patents. On their
own, most of them wouldn't hold up in court. They're used for
bullying small players (tragically), but perhaps mainly for bargaining
chips in disputes/negotiations with other big players. Thus Microsoft
gets annoyed at IBM copying a technique, they demand a payment, both
sides produce relevant patent portfolios, and negotiate a more
reasonable payment (perhaps nothing).

 

[Mark Hubbart]

Hi,

Warning: Rambling rant ahead.


My personal take is that they just wanted to make sure that
*everybody* is keen on getting an account. Make it exclusive,
by invitation only. Seeding it amongst the geekest of geeks,
first generation invites went quickly. But seemingly invited
users got their own share of invites.

Only for a few levels, I think. otherwise, theya re doing some smart
filtering and not giving invitations to secondary accounts that I made
for myself.

Now it has become a practical test for the claim that every two people
in the U.S. can build a chain of mutually known persons of maximum
length 6. If that is true, how many invites per person would you need to
reach saturation?

Definitely a viral marketing thing, for sure

Make people sign up and store their information on your company disks?
Easy. Instead of crawling and begging them for their data, be a snob
and make it a challenge for them. They will fall for it.

On my box I have gobs of gigabytes for email storage, no ads
and a very fast interface via procmail, formail, mutt and grep.
I will not entrust a company with a service I can provide just
as good. I will be the last one without a Google email address.

I'm a packrat. I *like* having massive archives of the ruby-talk list
hanging around. My email client hates it. By the time I reached about
a 100 megabyte mailbox size, it was moving a bit slow, searches were
far less than instantaneous, and threading started having issues.
Gmail was an upgrade for me; I can do instant searches over all my
mail, plus a few other nice features.

As for privacy: If I understand correctly the privacy statement says
that they do not share any of your data with anyone, and *they* only
use statistics based on your data. So I'm not particularly worried
about that kind of thing.

Anyway, I guess it's all a matter of taste. I've grown very fond of
the gmail interface. For me, it's sorta like tabbed browsing; once I
got used to it, I didn't want to go back.

cheers,
Mark

 

[Bill Kelly]

In building software, though, turning ideas into profit is an
expensive and risky exercise. Much more so than busting a few guitar
moves.

Turning ideas into profit focuses on where the real
work is involved - the implementation. Which is protected
under Copyright law, and which has always seemed pretty
reasonable to me.

Once you've seen the benefit of an idea you'd never have thought of
yourself, the implementation is often trivial. Just like many guitar
techniques

Hmm... To me, software patents and guitar techniques often
fall into a category I'd say is pretty opposite from that:
trivial to explain, very difficult to implement.

Anyone can explain Tapping (two-handed hammer-ons) or
Rasgueado (flamenco strum) or Slap/Pop (bass) techniques
conceptually in about 20 seconds. Now hand the instrument
to the student and ... Maybe after about a year of diligent
practice, you'll be listening to a pretty good implementation.

With software, at least where I hang out, the situation has
seemed pretty similar. It's gotten to where there should be
a FAQ for amateur 3D graphics / game programmers doing voxels.
Someone will post their application/demo to a community site,
saying, "Hey, I was thinking about 3D pixels (voxels) and I
wanted to make a game where I could fly around through a
cave. Here's how I did it, in my spare time, in between
studying for finals. What do you think?" And the standard
answer is, "Neat! It may interest you to know that what you
discovered there looks a lot like the Marching Cubes algorithm,
which someone has decided to patent."

Over and over, it's NOT about "an idea you'd never have
thought of yourself." Not even remotely. It's about bleeding
obvious* ideas that come up when you get into the nitty gritty
of figuring out how to implement something. ((*) By bleeding
obvious I mean when you're deep, deep into the problem, and
suddenly it's like, Ah-ha!! I.e., bleeding obvious to anyone
who has arrived at that same deep context, driven out of
necessity to solve the problem.)

http://www.base.com/software-patents/disputes.html
... The IDEA of host-independent network byte ordering ? ? ? ?

Entity A proves the commercial viability of an idea at
great expense; entities B-Z exploit that idea at no expense.

Why is the software developed by B-Z less expensive than that
of A to implement? Take a look at Quake (the 3D first-person
shooter playable over the internet.) id Software not only
didn't patent their techniques, they released Quake open source
under the GPL when Quake II came out. And you know what?
Even having the *source code*, let alone just the *idea*, I
can't turn around and snap my fingers and come up with my own
implementation of what their game does. Ideas are easy,
implementation is hard. Even staring at someone else' source
code.


Regards,

Bill

 

[ruby talk]

I have 6 at this account email me with the subject Gmail invite

 

[Mauricio Fernández]

If you are concerned about the abuse of software patents, there is some
encouraging activity these days. Both the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (http://www.eff.org/patent), and the Public Patent Foundation
(http://www.pubpat.org) are researching and persuing court cases in the
U.S. to challenge bad patents. Both foundations could use your support.

See also: http://www.eff.org/effector/17/18.php#II

A most important battle is being fought on European soil, again:

http://swpat.ffii.org/

 

[mare]

http://www.ardice.com/Games/Video_Games/Computer_Platforms/Windows/3D_Graphics

 

[Carl Youngblood]

gmail's conversation approach _is_ different. But the idea of
collapsing threads isn't - many high-quality MUAs do this or can be
configured to do it, e.g. mutt.



Yes, if you don't collapse the threads.

Even if you collapse the threads, in the actual thread you're viewing,
you see a huge jumble of other messages before getting to the one you
want. Also, threads are ordered by the time of the first post to the
thread, so threads receiving new posts don't show up at the top of your
inbox, which they do in Gmail.

I actually like the linear view because it is sufficient for me to get
the context of who is responding to whom. If I ever get confused, I
expand the suppressed quotes and can quickly figure out what's going
on. But to each his own, I guess. The most annoying thing for me about
Gmail so far has been its occasional unresponsiveness. When it works,
it works really well, IMO.

Carl

 

[Edgardo Hames]

I've tried the email list thing on gmail. At first it seemed good, but I
soon realized it had some massive failings, for me. I don't mind not
having threads in the initial view, but in the 'conversation view', I
sorely miss threading. Reading a thread linearly doesn't cut it unless
it's a linear thread. Some people apparently don't need to read a thread
in logical order and are content to jump around in the thread in
chronological or even no specific order. I get frustrated doing that - I
need the context. Maybe it's because I have a deficient ability to
maintain state in my head, or maybe I'm too impatient to want to figure
out where I am in the thread now with other clues (e.g. quotations which
I summarily ignore as much as possible).

Quotations can be used to bring up the context, but they are certainly
misused most of the time. I believe MS Outlook can be blamed on this,
since by default it top-posts the reply to a message. What I expected
from GMail was the ability to mark threads by using different colors
in a conversation, but I'm color-blind, so I don't care too much

Regards,
Ed

 

[Logan Capaldo]

I have invites too, just email me off list (So I don't start sending
invites to people who already got one etc.) Try and put something like
gmail in the subject line

 

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

Some more clarification. All the threaded views in email clients that
I've seen order threads by the date of the first message in the thread.
So if a new message comes in, it gets added to a thread that is halfway
down the list of threads. Gmail always puts the conversations with the
most recent activity at the top of the list. It is a very thoughtful
and intuitive interface, regardless of the privacy concerns, and other
programs would be wise to learn from it.

They probably learned from mutt here

Michal Suchanek

 

[Carl Youngblood]

Ah, well can tell you're not a mutt user. You're apparently comparing
gmail with a lame threading mail reader (or perhaps to slashdot or
other web forums). I don't blame you for thinking gmail is superior.
If you'd like I can send you a screenshot privately. Mutt does all of
the things you mentioned - sorts threads and subthreads
chronologically by last post, easy to see the overall tree and you
only read one message at a time, etc.

Yep, I was actually thinking about Thunderbird. I still haven't made
the leap to pure text-based email reading.

 

[Jamis Buck]

Yep, I was actually thinking about Thunderbird. I still haven't made
the leap to pure text-based email reading.

For what it's worth, I tried mutt, once. I ran, screaming.
(Metaphorically speaking.)

That said, it wasn't the UI that put me off. I mean, I've a vim guy, and
mutt seems to me to be to email clients what vim is to text editors. It
was the massive hodge-podge of options that you had to wade through to
set it up. I took one look at the options screen and went back to
Thunderbird.

Also, I pop all my mail, and I haven't had the time to sit down and
figure out how to get that to work with mutt.

Maybe someday I'll have the patience to try again. I'm sure I'd love it,
once I got used to it, but like you, Carl, I'm not quite ready for that
leap yet.

- Jamis

 

[Adam Fabian]

For what it's worth, I tried mutt, once. I ran, screaming.
(Metaphorically speaking.)

My .muttrc is about 5k long. I'd suggest you just start using it, and
when something strikes you as wrong or kludgy, read through the
documentation and look at .muttrc's to see how it could be done
better. It really doesn't take very long before you've got a pretty
nice configuration that you wouldn't trade for any flashy GUI.

 

[Thomas Kirchner]

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That said, it wasn't the UI that put me off. I mean, I've a vim guy, and= =20
mutt seems to me to be to email clients what vim is to text editors. It= =20
was the massive hodge-podge of options that you had to wade through to=20
set it up. I took one look at the options screen and went back to=20
Thunderbird.

It really is the vim of editors. Also like vim, it has pretty good
default settings (aside from mbox, imho). It's the sort of thing you can
set a few options in, be efficient in working with, and gradually set
options the way you want over the course of... well, forever. I've been
using mutt for a while now and I still find neat new tricks. They're not
necessary things, but they're definitely far above and beyond Thunderbird
or any other mail client.

Also, I pop all my mail, and I haven't had the time to sit down and=20
figure out how to get that to work with mutt.

Mutt has built-in pop support that (knowing mutt) should be sufficient,
though I haven't used it. I recommend getmail, a python mail fetcher.
It's also very easy to configure and powerful.

Maybe someday I'll have the patience to try again. I'm sure I'd love it,= =20
once I got used to it, but like you, Carl, I'm not quite ready for that= =20
leap yet.

It's definitely worth the effort After all, if we didn't occasionally
take such leaps, we'd all program in FORTRAN or C rather than ruby
Tom

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