...by the inmates...for the inmates...
Saturday, November 02, 2002One More For The Road
Copyright is no doubt crucial to innovation and growth, but it's a protection that can be taken too far. Let's end the copyright race, says Lawrence Lessig....
Another Nail?
Another nail in the coffin or continued hope for the future?
Freenet Project 0.5. Here is an interesting concept; a peer-to-peer publishing system, where anyone can publish anonymously and all of the content is hosted by everyone involved. Content is distributed and cached based on its popularity. However, the system is dynamic, so content that does not get called often enough eventually gets removed.... [Lockergnome's Bits and Bytes]
An Uncertain Future
Intellectual property is a changing landscape, as always. Those who count on a static playing field have not been paying attention.
Digital property - more lawyers should read stuff like this, especially lawyers who deal with intellectual property. I suppose it is arrogance to say that a Copernican revolution is taking place. Let's just leave it at "we don't know how it will turn out." It doesn't matter where we are, especially if things are changing? Where are we going? That's the question to ask. But don't ask someone who has a vested interest in a map that might become obsolete.
[ernie/the/attorney]
Cute blank CDs
Retro vinyl chic CD blanks.Verbatim's new CD-R blanks looks like old 45s. Link Discuss (Thanks, Chas!)
[Boing Boing Blog]
Find: Not Ready
I disagree with John. I only needed to test Find for about 20 minutes to dislike it enough to quickly uninstall it. Bear in mind, this is a beta product, and should improve with age.
- Like: Very fast. 10 points for Find.
- Dislike: Like other search products that claim to index email, it does not do so in any useful way for laptop users. A useful product must index Outlook OST files, allowing you to search and access files off-line. A useful product must index and search multiple Outlook PST files simultaneously. Find does not. During installation, working off-line with all OST and PST files mounted, I asked Find to index my email. It claimed it could not open the storage file. 0 points for Find.
- Dislike: After installing and testing the basic file search feature, I told Find to try indexing my mail again. It claimed it must restart itself in order to index again. It appeared to shut itself down, but would not restart, claiming it could not restart until a prior running copy ended. I even rebooted the system. No luck. Find would not index email, and kept starting up full-screen every time I rebooted the system, though the preferences had not been set for this. 2 points for Find basic file search feature.
- Dislike: For file search, Find claims to sort the retrieved file list by clicking on the column headings. Doing a simple ascending sort by file date does not put the files in order. It lists the oldest file first, but all other files are not in date order. Switching to a descending order does not even put the newest file first and, again, the rest of the files are not in date order. 0 points for basic 'list sort' functionality.
- Dislike: No sense making a huge laundry list here. This is, after all, just a beta release. Just one more item: getting rid of the beta product.
- Dislike: The uninstall routine does a very poor job. After uninstalling, a dialog box says the remaining files will be uninstalled when you restart Windows. So... I restarted Windows. The Find directory is still there, with about 20 files. All the registry entries are still there. I don't consider that "uninstalled", do you? 1 point for at least deleting some files and shortcuts.
I want a search product that works with Outlook email. Something that really works, both on-line and off-line, with OST files and multiple PST files simultaneously. I've tried several; none were worth the effort.
Innovation in search. I have been using Find search on my desktop (beta) for a couple of weeks. Here is what I like about it:
- It's extremely fast. Subsecond performance for everything.
- It provides you with a preview pane so you don't have to leave the search results to get to the result. This speeds up my search workflow.
- It combines external search (pick a search engine) with desktop search (all files, including e-mail).
Here is what I don't like about it:
- It doesn't let me restrict my search to specific file types.
- The interface is still a little rough (too busy).
- I would also like to be able to index sites that interest me.
A little more on that last point. I know that this feature would quickly get out of hand from a scalability standpoint, but it would enable me to compensate for the gaps in the indexes at the major search engines (for the site's that I like). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]