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Comment "Reference" folder (Score 5, Interesting) 434

I once read a Best Practices manual for Microsoft Outlook by the Outlook team that changed how I deal with email. The premise is this:
  • Have only two folders: Inbox, and Reference.
  • When an email comes in and it does not need to be acted on, read it, then move it to Reference.
  • If an email needs to be acted upon, leave it in your inbox until the task is complete. This may be hours, days, weeks or months. But everything in your inbox is something that is waiting on someone.

I frequently had a habit of reading emails on my smartphone and forgetting about them. Now, I can either move them to Reference on my phone, or do it when I get back to my desk. But nothing slips through the cracks this way, which was a huge problem when I first got a smartphone.

Comment ICQ (Score 3, Interesting) 71

Can you really do group chat with no central server?

ICQ proved that it was possible over a decade ago. Simultaneously, they proved that it was not a good idea (as I remember friends saying, "Who are you talking to? I don't see him! Re-invite!").

Comment Re:here's the scale (Score 1) 439

Considering how small CDMA radios are, one should be able to make tiny CDMA receivers that get the time sync code from the cellular network.

Not a bad idea, but one must take into account the life span of CDMA networks - Verizon has said they plan on deprecating their 3G network for Voice-over-LTE by 2013. Perhaps 1XRTT will be around for years after that, but it's still a technology that won't be around for as long as GPS will be.

Comment Re:First large-scale LTE in the world? (Score 1) 137

Did you even read the article you linked to? No, it's not most of the land area, but hardly "just the Houston area initially."

Verizon announced today that it is bringing the world’s first large-scale 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network to the Houston area. The initial availability of a 4G LTE wireless network in Houston is part of the company’s major network launch in 38 major metropolitan areas by the end of the year. In addition, the company is launching 4G LTE in more than 60 commercial airports coast to coast

Comment Re:Pfff... (Score 1) 1213

I am not the typical idiot user. I'm the guy most people come to when they have a question.


I didn't realize that the circle with the Windows logo in upper left was a menu for almost a month.

Which is why they replaced it with "Backstage" in Office 2010.

Submission + - Scroogle has been blocked and may be retired (scroogle.org)

bloodandsoil writes: From Scroogle:

We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002.

This interface (here's a sample from years ago) was remarkably stable all that time. During those eight years there were only about five changes that required some programming adjustments. Also, this interface was available at every Google data center in exactly the same form, which allowed us to use 700 IP addresses for Google.

That interface was at www.google.com/ie but on May 10, 2010 they took it down and inserted a redirect to /toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html. It used to have a search box, and the results it showed were generic during that entire time. It didn't show the snippets unless you moused-over the links it produced (they were there for our program, so that was okay), and it has never had any ads. Our impression was that these results were from Google's basic algorithms, and that extra features and ads were added on top of these generic results. Three years ago Google launched "Universal Search," which meant that they added results from other Google services on their pages. But this simple interface we were using was not affected at all.

Now that interface is gone. It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google's main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible.

Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it.

Thank you for your support during these past five years. Check back in a week or so; if we don't hear from Google by next week, I think we can all assume that Google would rather have no Scroogle, and no privacy for searchers, at all.

— Daniel Brandt, Public Information Research, scroogle AT lavabit.com

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