I had this idea the other day for a new style of forum software. And maybe this has been done, but I haven’t seen it anywhere:

The Infinite Forum (or The Freeforall or Guten Tag )

The specifics of the forum structure would be these:

• There would be no mandatory “forum categories” per se. Or, if there were they would only be organized according to some politeness schema (like age appropriateness, potential offensiveness level) or maybe along lines of preferred language spoken.

• In place of standard topical categories each post would be defined by a unique identifier and a set of tags. These tags would take the place of standard forum categories. This is the centerpiece of this system, the cornerstone around which the rest of the forum software is generally organized.

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I tried posting this inquiry on some message board specifically intended for dealing with Gateway laptops. But it’s not the most active board out there. And after about a week of not getting any help I thought:

“Protozoic has always given me plenty of love. Maybe they’d have some insight into this whole issue.”

So here’s the project at hand:

We have this old Gateway 2150 laptop that we never used for about 5 years due to the fact that it ran really slowly compared to our newer computers, and had a tendency to crash even when operating standard Windows 98 applications.

Also the battery doesn’t seem to recharge.

And also the fan didn’t seem to come on ever.

But this year I decided I’d try resuscitating the thing. I only plan to use it for word-processing, a little e-mail checking on occasion, possibly to learn linux.

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Loki, I may just not fully understand what the problem is but I think I may have figured out a solution to the the floating sofa issue. Actually the picture of the sofa you provided in your last entry on the subject gave me a hint.

But let me take a step back from this issue for a moment and digress heavily.

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Here’s some workflow helper scripts for digital photography. A couple of assumptions are made with these scripts:

• You use OS X 10.4 - mandatory since this stuff uses Automator.
• You use Adobe DNG (version 3.2) - not mandatory, but you have to take out the dng conversion steps.
• You want your photos stored in a date hierarchy, specifically /yy/mmddyy/yyyymmdd-xxxx.dng. The xxxx is the original number from the raw file. As an example, a photo taken on Aug. 11th, 2005 would be stored in /05/081105/20050811-2927.dng.

• I use a Canon Digital Rebel, so the naming conventions are CRW_xxxx.CRW, CRW_xxxx.THM, and IMG_xxxx.JPG

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Two days ago, Apple Computer announced that they would be moving away from the PowerPC chip in favor of chips from Intel. This transition would start about a year from now and finish one year later.

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I wrote this script to export an OmniOutliner list into iCal as a list of To Do items. I’ve used iCal off and on, and it’s not great, but it does currently hook into the syncing system of OS X. OmniOutliner is infinitely more usable in my mind, and lets you work the way you want to.

The primary motivation for this script is to let me sync my to do list to my phone, which only syncs through iCal. I’m sure others might find other uses for it. If you like it, have a suggestion, etc., leave a comment or send an email.

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So today I watched Minority Report that bear lent to me and noticed, apart from that Philip K. Dick liked to write stories about future prediction, the computer interface Tom Cruise used was reminicient of what Keanu Reeves used in Johnny Mnenomic, only without the goggles. That is, not only did they use their hands as if they were a computer mouse, but gestures were added that performed functions you’d normally find in some hotkey or drop-down menu list. I really think that this kind of interface (albeit rather exaggerated in the movies to be efficient), along with voice commands, is the future. Except, they aren’t the future at all. Gestures are already here.

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Mark Mayo of VMUNIX discusses his move to SpamSieve. I think he will be pleasantly surprised at how well it handle a butt-load of junk mail. Sure, sometimes with large loads of mail, it takes a minute to get processed through SpamSieve, but it does a great job at learning what is junk and what isn’t. I get on average 100-300 spam emails a day, and SpamSieve keeps on chugging. It works great in combination with SpamAssassin and other spam filtering utilities that tag spam in the headers since SpamSieve can learn about the spaminess of any portion of an email, including all headers. A++.

What gives with upgrading software? I’ve been using computers for quite a few years now, and while the abilities of software continues to expand, the amount of money we have to layout for fixes/new features is rising at an astounding rate.

My big gripe is with Adobe Photoshop. I purchased Photoshop 7 the other year. PS is not a cheap program ($650 to non educational users). There was one update to 7.0.1 in August of 2002. There have been some minor plugin updates to the program, but the meat of the program was not touched for more than a year. Then version CS came out. Thats it. To upgrade would cost me $169. This is a professional program made by a company that is apparently intent on selling a product and getting you to pay $170 every year to stay current, with no hope of minor feature additions with out paying. CS has been on the market for over a year with out any updates. I suppose that means that CS 2 will be out soon. Adobe Illustrator is the same way.

Lets take a look at Apple. They do it right and they do it wrong. Final Cut Pro seems to get it right.

Version 4 came out and had some amazing new features. There were some bugs. Versions 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 came out a couple of months later and fixed some bugs and added some performance. v4.1 came out and added some new features, followed by v4.1.1 that fixed some bugs. A year after v4 was orginally released, v4.5 HD was made available for free and gave a whole slew of new features, one of which was support for HD video. At no point during this process did the end user have to spend a dime on his software other than the original cost it took to get into version 4 of the software.

I bought Final Cut Express about a year and a half ago when I got my new computer. I got version 1. I dutifully updated to version 1.0.1 that fixed some bugs. That was it, even though FCE 1.0.1 had some serious bugs that were acknowledged by Apple. It was on the market for 11 months with no bug fixes, only to be superseded by FCE 2. In the three months following this release, v2.0.2 and v2.0.3 came out and fixed some bugs. I’ve not used v2.x at all, so I don’t know if there are any more outstanding bugs in it, but v3 was just announced, so v2.x can be considered as dead.

BareBones gets it right. Sure, some complain that the software is over priced. BBEdit is expensive for what is ultimately a text editor, and who would pay the price of Mailsmith when there are so many free email programs around? Almost every update, even a little bitty x.0.1 update has bug fixes and (minor) feature addtions. There are frequently large updates that that add/fix a whole bunch at once, not the BBEdit software is buggy to begin with; it is in fact quite the opposite. You get a lot for your money here. Never mind that you can get a special competitive updgrade price on most of their software, usually using a free program as the one you are updgrading from. This means that BareBones software is cheaper than it looks at first glance.

On to their “consumer” version of BBEdit, TextWrangler. Originally it was a cheaper feature limited version of BBEdit. Well, version 2 came out the other week. It is free, not to upgrade, but the whole dang program. Free to all, free as in beer. One might think that this is a slap in the face to existing owners. Well, BareBones gave full credit for the original price of TextWrangler to all owners of the software. I’d like to see some other software companies do that for software they’ve EOL‘d.

These programs aren’t cheap to upgrade. $100 for FCE, $300 for FCP. I think the FCP is worth the steep entry/upgrade prices, because at least you know that you will end up with a relatively bug free piece of software. I’d rather pay $300 every 2 years and get working software (with more capabilities) than $100 every 6 months, only to put up with feature crippled, buggy software.

I think if companies want to do the “feature limited” cheap version of a professional program, than that program should at least be bug free, and not end up costing more to upgrade than the pro version.

If the company is not offering a pro/consumer distinction in its software, then maybe they shouldn’t be cranking out a new version each year just to get some more cash. Maybe they should be trying to add some bug fixes and minor feature additions in between major versions to make the consumer feel like he/she is getting something for their $100 that they dutifully pay each year.

At least this is better than the yearly subscription model of Eudora, a program that used to be very dear to me. Or maybe it’s not. At least they are up front about the yearly nature of the “deal.”

This is Rock and Roll.