Friday, August 16, 2002

"All I want for Christmas is ... an e-mail program that works," revisited Rafe Colburn notes how accustomed to the Microsoft monopoly we've become that people don't expect more from the e-mail software that so many of us build our work lives around. Outlook has severe limitations. "The thing is, though, I don't even see people clamoring for something better. That's frustrating." Some of us have been clamoring for years! My Eudora is much more stable under Windows 2000 and able to handle massive message loads that brought Win98 to its knees, so maybe the problem was with the OS and not the software. Still, Microsoft's to blame either way. The main problem is that entire continents of end-user software get little attention, development or investment because Microsoft's tanks moved in and leveled the market. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] An obvious lack in all email clients I have used, including Eudora, Outlook, and Entourage, is a high-quality search engine. Most clients don't even maintain an efficient inverted index (Ximian's Evolution does), let alone Google-quality ranked search. It's preposterous that we can search better billions of Web pages than thousands of emails. 11:43:07 PM

Paul Graham discovers naïve Bayes classifiers. It must be gratifying for UAIers to see even old-line symbolic processing people get into probabilistic reasoning when it matters. Paul may want to explore now the extensive literature of probabilistic and other machine-learning approaches to spam detection. There's some evidence that one can do even better than naïve Bayes. 8:11:11 PM