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Oh, and online games have been around for a LONG time, and there's nothing special about Second Life. I'm a long time player of Counter-Strike and Quake III (both online games) and I could kick those loser's asses who play "Second Life". I mean, Second Life looks like a game that guys with no balls play. Seriously.
Nothing special about Second Life? First of all, Second Life isn't a game. Hope that helps.
Second of all, Second Life has a business model that +I+ can participate in. Quake, and Counter-Strike don't.
Third, Second Life has a distributed architecture that neither of these games have. Second Life can be an infinite world. Neither of those can be.
Fourth, you can build a game of your own INSIDE Second Life. You can't do that in Counter-Strike or Quake.
Fifth, Second Life is an operating system of its own. It has its own programming language, file storage, and, even soon, the ability to paint RSS feeds onto objects. None of those things are possible in the games you play.
Are you really a geek or just a wannabe? :-)
Oh, I'm a geek, I thought we covered this already. You can talk the talk, but can't walk the walk. RSS this, program that, install this, configure that. Fine. You can talk all day about that.
But I can actually do it. ;)
Runescape is a browser based MMOG done in Java. No, it's not pretty but it does however have one of the higher subscription bases among all on-line games. Check out http://www.mmogchart.com for the ballpark numbers.
World of Warcraft it is not, but it's nice to know that decent game play and ease of access (browser based) can compete with "real" mmogs.
With 95% of email being spam (if you judge by my inboxes that figure is still not high enough), spam trackbacks and comments in blogs being pandemic, newsgroups being unindated with crap, spam sites filling much of the first page of many search results, spam blogs everywhere, trick domains filled with spammy advertising one wonders whether the spammers, scammers and slammers have taken over online, leaving no useful purpose left for the web or the internet.
Perhaps it will just collapse under its own weight of useless data being moved from place to place?
Is there any hope even that new usage paradigms (Second Life?) will redeem it?
I loved it for its integrated feature with mail, appointments, post-it, etc.
I hated it for it's awkward dialogs, especially for options... you know... go in options, advanced options, advanced options options, parameters tab....
I hated it...for having integrated that virus called Visual Basic For Applications...
That was a good enough reason for me to NOT use Outlook outside of the corporate world.
Get your Yahoo mail into a POP client with YahooPOPs from sourceforge.
Thunderbird also purports to access all of these Webmails (haven't tried).
Comparing games like Quake 3 and Counter-Strike is comparing apples with oranges. They were meant to have different functions and their target audience is obviously very different as well. Robert has already pointed out some main differences.
As far as Outlook goes, I'd like to see when Cody gets a real office job and complain to his manager that they should be using Pine or Thunderbird. ;)
Regarding useless information on the web, they exist in real life just as well. I just checked my mail (snail mail) and out of the 15 pieces I received today, 12 were spam for my business, 2 were spam for my personal life, and 1 was actually something I needed.
A.
In the process of starting to use multiple machines (at home and at my internship), I've been looking for ways to have everything available and sync'ed wherever I am. I'm currently using FeedDemon/NetNewsWire to sync my RSS via NewsGator. I began using GMail online because POP isn't synchronous and I've grown to like the interface quite a bit. My school email still comes in to Mail.app since Outlook Web Access is terrible on non-IE browsers and we only get 50 MB of storage on the server. Exchange does an okay job of synchronizing my email between my desktop client, my Treo and OWA (for the few times I've used it).
I've posted more of my thoughts on my blog about two months ago when I was faced with the problem:
http://www.martingordon.org/blog/2006/06/06/bec...
I wonder if at some point, Google Notebook will be opened up as to allow synching with Outlook notes.
Email at it's core is so simple that you can send one from a UNIX command line. Email shouldn't require Outlook.
I know that ray and the rest of MS are still clinging to the smart client (e.g xaml in vista ) fantasy but that way of doing business is going away. the experience of things like Gmail is crippled by poor infrastructure - MS should be building the next infrastructure that makes it so that you can build a web based experience that isnt based on html and ajax/javscript. html is just a better ansi.sys from the BBS days...utnil we get something more widely deployed we are stuck.
So I suppose if we can "conduct our email business" with Pine, that means we should conduct our email business with Pine.
But, as it says on Pine's home page, Pine was "originally designed for retards^H^H^H^H^H^H inexperienced mail users," so it's no shocker you're such a fan.
Thunderbird is better, to the extent that it's an incomplete, lame ripoff of Outlook that requires you to refrain from receiving mail while you manually compact mail folders.
Personally, I loathed using web based email clients until GMail came along. I love using it.
Cody is right, if you need Outlook to read and manage your email, you need to assess your use of email. Granted going purely web based does have its limitations. And Gmail frustrates me with its lack of a flexible folder structure. But I can manage may mail just fine with other clients besides OL. But, then again, all I'm managing is text files and folders, so it's not all that difficult.
Using hotmail (which deletes your inbox and deactivates your account if you don't login every thirty days) will do that to you.
gmail is safe. 2GB of permanent email. In contrast to hotmail users, I have never heard of anyone losing email to gmail.
Say what?!
Personally, I have always refused to use outlook and have never worked with an employer (nor would I work for one) that forced me to use products from Microsoft.
Eudora and thunderbird are a lot more common in my circle than Outlook.
Windows Live Mail (which replaces Hotmail) help says:
"Free Windows Live Mail accounts become inactive if you don't sign in for 120 days, or within the first 10 days after signing up for an account. Once an account becomes inactive, all messages, folders, and contacts are deleted, but the account name is still reserved. If the account stays inactive for a further 90 days, the account name is permanently deleted."
Gmail Program Policies says:
"Google will terminate your account in accordance with Section 9 of the Terms of Use if you fail to login to your account for a period of nine months."
Nooo. Noooooo. Not Section 9!!!
Yes, Gmail accounts can be inactive for about five months longer than Windows Live Mail. Which would come in handy if, you know, you get sent to prison for smoking Google Crack (Beta) and can't check your mail.
Is 120 days the same as 30 days? No.
Is nine months the same as permanently? No. Not unless you're pregnant, in which case it probably only feels that way.
I've used it a few times, but I found it not very useful for Outlook.
Like some-one said before, Outlook 2007 can use it by default. However, mine seemed to "forget" its calendars.
I definitely think that the integration between online and offline tools needs to improve. Alternately, we need to be in a situation where we are always online, but that isn't happening anytime soon. Personally, since I am almost always online, I am fine with gmail, since its ideal for my workflow, but your point on being able to access email offline is very valid. In theory though, shouldn't the blackberries and treos of the world take care of being ona plane and needing to catch up on email?
To those who hate Outlook/Exchange, I hope you never have to use Lotus Notes/Domino. Enough to test the most magnanimous amongst us.
You implied that if you use Outlook you are out of your mind, but did not give any evidence to support it. Tell us some feature that Pine or Thunderbird has that Outlook misses. Btw, can your Pine read RSS feeds? Outlook 2007 can do so!
Second, you said that Robert talks the talk, but you walk the walk. Using MediaWiki is not walking the walk IMHO. If you wrote your own wiki software, your own OS, your own email client, your own word processor, your own browser... now THAT would be walking the walk! If you use a software that someone else wrote, where is "walking the walk" in that?
Robert talks about wikis...can't install one himself.
I don't talk about wikis often...but I can install one.
There was nothing about programming your own wiki. A true computer geek can install a wiki, no big deal. I was proving my point, to which I succeeded.
That said, I tend to use webmail, and view offline mail readers as archiving tools. (As mbox readers, basically.)
I have yet to find an RSS reader that I enjoy using enough to be bothered to tweak. An integrated one shows some promise as a concept, but I'd rather be able to pick which RSS display engine is used by Outlook than be tied to only one.
Oh, and calendaring? Not helpful if my coorespondents cannot read/write to my calendar database. The universality of email is what is wanted - not vendor lock in. [apple, I'm looking at you] I haven't found one yet that is good enough at approximating solutions (to known hard problems) of complex scheduling conflicts. I'd even settle for one that could correctly manage appointments/events across time zones. Does Office 2007 do these things?
-r.
Er... able run on something other than Windows? That's the first thing that comes to mind.
Uh... Thunderbird is free?
What, is Plain Text too hard for you to grasp? ;)
1. Instant access to all my mail on the three machines I use almost every day: two Macs and one Windows XP PC.
2. Wicked fast search of the nine thousand email messages I have received and sent over the last two years. For example, GMail found my 190 email messages that include the word "Robert" in less than three seconds. The oldest received in 7/04, the newest received yesterday.
3. Very reliable, seamless spam filtering.
4. Automatic harvesting of every email address I ever received or sent mail to into my contact list, currently over 550 contacts.
5. Conversations. This was the hardest feature to get used to but now I find it difficult to follow email threads in Yahoo! or Hotmail without this UI feature.
6. Ability group emails using tags or Labels. Emails can be associated with more than one label.
7. Really nice Ajax-based spell checker.
8. Awesome email access on my Nokia 6625 mobile phone.
9. Automatic parsing of email for events to be included in the integrated Calendar.
10. Automatic SMS alerts for calendar reminders.
11. Optional forwarding to another account. I do this to my free Yahoo! account for redundency.
12. Over 2.7GB of available storage and growing every day
Text emails? I honestly think it has been AGES since I have received a text-only email. Most of my emails are HTML or Richtext!
Yes Outlook runs on windows only - that is a valid argument. I still do not think pine is the best - thunderbird is alright - I would give it a try if I were moving to a non-windows environment.
Gmail and live-mail are great, but I still do not like web-based email. I prefer to get them on Outlook (or another good email client capable of reading html and richtext emails), preferably using IMAP or Exchange protocol. The AJAX interface may be good, but I prefer my thick client to the AJAXed thin-client.
The other good thing I like about Outlook is the spam filters - they are updated almost every month, and they really catch 90% of my spam, of not more.
That said, there is one thing I *really* want to see in Outlook - ability to send personalized emails (without using the crappy mail-merge feature in MSWord).
How about natively storing their mail in an accessible, nonproprietary format that literally thousands of tools on every platform can easily read from, write to, search, and archive?
Ever had a PST file take a crap on you? It's not a place you want to be.
Storing email as searchable, accessible, archivable text, accessible on every platform.
OpenOffice, AbiWord, Pine, Thunderbird, etc...FREE
That's $400 I don't have to spend. So that's one big reason why I hate Outlook, because of that fact.
1. Pine does support tagging and has since version 4.60, which was released more than 2 years ago (2004 May 10). AFAIK, Pine is the only IMAP client that supports unlimited user-defined tags (aka labels or keywords).
2. Someone in the corporate world *does* use Pine, namely Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products and User Experience at Google. I blogged about this here:
http://deflexion.com/2006/03/pine-in-fortune-ma...
If all these email clients and servers supported a standard access protocol, e.g. IMAP, we wouldn't need to have this conversation. IMHO, the #1 thing people can do to move email, and Internet messaging in general, forward is to just say no to clients and servers that don't support open standard protocols.
Amen!
I loved how you blogged about it, with all those juicy screencaps from 24. No doubt the reason why the chick in the picture has such a look of anxiety on her face is that she can't figure out how to get Pine to filter all the spam she's getting. ;-)
But maybe she doesn't share your philosophy on spam, which is apparently to NOT filter spam, don't fight spam, just let it happen.
The Marissa Mayer quotes are great too. She said she gets as many as 700 to 800 emails a day, so she needs something "fast." (She didn't say how many of the 800 emails were spam.)
Of course even with the blazing speed of Pine, she still can't keep on top of her 800 emails a day, so what does she do? Quote: "I do marathon e-mail catch-up sessions, sometimes on a Saturday or Sunday. I'll just sit down and do e-mail for ten to 14 hours straight."
I suppose it's a great email client if you're like Marissa and you love killing 14 hours on a Saturday plowing through Viagra ads.
Call me when they figure out that Ctrl-C means Copy and Ctrl-V means Paste....
"It gives me peace of mind to know I’m in control of my access to my email."
I honestly have no clue what you're talking about. Zero. As far as I know, if I fire up Outlook, I have to wait for my mail to be delivered to me. Now, correct me if I'm wrong but I think that means Outlook actually has to make a network connection to some box that has my mail on it. Who cares if that box is an exchange server or Google? You're still in the same amount of control.
Ok, so lets move away from the enterprise. What are my options now? Outlook magically giving me full control to my mail? Chances are my ISP is running an email server for me or I'm using a web-email with Outlook.
If you want to argue that you have more control to access to your email over a local network connection as opposed to the Internet fine. But that's a pretty lame argument if you ask me.
Also, Robert it's painfully obvious you don't play video games. In Starcraft & Warcraft we could create our own games inside it. And in case you missed it, some one ported the original doom into doom 3: http://battleteam.net/tech/fis/
And obviously Robert's never heard of the Quake console, which has been there since v1.0: http://console.planetquake.gamespy.com/commands...
Second Life is definitely interesting. But don't act as if the gaming world hasn't toyed with such ideas before it came along.
And most importantly, what's the coolest thing you wrote for second life (before you were banned)? Or were just praising it with minimal interaction?
*MY* email should be on *MY* system. I will never have it any other way.