We usually host a hack night every second thursday in Toronto, and we're going to move it to Sunday for this. If you're interested in attending (or could host people on Saturday), you're more than welcome - http://www.meetup.com/torontoruby/events/25743841/
To lend some credence to the "it's easy to tell who's writing what", we recently used Rypple as a team review aid for team members to anonymously ask for feedback from the rest of the team.
It was immediately obvious who was writing what. Granted, we had a relatively low population of people writing feedback (5), but I'd imagine it wouldn't change much until you had at least twice as many people.
You could apply the same argument to webpages. I think HTML e-mail is a complete mess right now, but allowing some degree of e-mail styling does go a long way in helping users understand what the e-mail is trying to convey.
Something as simple as laying out tabluar data in a table is extremely hard to pull off effectively with a plain-text e-mail.
Exactly. For my Hacker Newsletter project I have a real hard time putting in all the links (one to the article, one to the comments) in text mode, but HTML makes this easy for users to scan and use.
A few bad apples were? Image based e-mail tracking is de rigeur to this day for nearly any marketing e-mail you receive, and has been since e-mail marketing has been a thing.
Any e-mail marketing provider worth their salt will include these without even asking the person sending the batch.
And if it's actually important or you're curious or you can't read it and want to know what it says, you'll click the "show images" button. Email tracking is hardly a bad thing, it provides useful data. Some address never reading emails/never showing pictures? Stop sending them stuff.
The thing is, these complaints usually come from people who WANT linux to succeed on the desktop. I'm certainly one of those people - one of those poor unfortunate souls doing RoR development on a PC.
Windows isn't a great option for me because the development ecosystem around Ruby on Windows is still fairly immature. Linux would be a perfect solution, if I could get more than a hour of battery life out of my laptop, my touchpad worked even remotely as well as it does in Windows, and selecting the wrong update didn't completely trash my system.
Give up or don't give up, but agonizing about it accomplishes nothing. 6 months ago I received a new laptop that "just didn't work on Linux." I did a lot of research, tried different distros, hacked on it a lot, and now it is a dream to use, gets excellent battery life, and even suspend/resume work beautifully. Hackers don't agonize over this kind of shit, they get to work. If you don't want to invest the time, your choice is investing your $$$ in a Mac. Personally I am so happy with my laptop now that if someone offered me a brand new Macbook Whatever, for free, I'd say "No, thanks." Seriously.
Well, you also have the bias of wasting several weeks of your life trying to set up a laptop.
Yeah, I said waste. Most people will counter by saying "but I learned linux!" No, you didn't, you learned to futz around with a bunch of conf files. I remember trying to make Pulseaudio work with my USB soundcard. Several hours of dicking about with asoundrc later and I
a. still had a nonfunctional sound card
b. still don't know how pulseaudio works
Not that it isn't an accomplishment. Just, while it may be a source of personal satisfaction, don't expect people with less time than you do to feel the same way!
In my case messing around with conf files improved my understanding of those specific components (acpi, xkb, alsa, modprobe, etc) and the system. By your logic what learning experience isn't a waste?
I feel you on pulseaudio though. Been there, done that, pacman -Rcs gnome gnome-extra. That took me minutes, not weeks. Because I had already learned to configure alsa, and knew it worked fine.
The overall point is people without time to learn probably shouldn't use complex systems? OK.
Is location really the key piece of data differentiating "pictures from Bob's wedding" from "the universe of pictures", though? I would think some concept of tagging that went beyond mere location would be far more useful.
80% of the time (walking down the street, sitting in my office, etc.), I don't care about pictures that were taken around me. For the 1% of the time that I DO care, I can probably easily name the thing that I want to see pictures of. Location is perhaps a handy filter for "tags that might be important to me", but it's hardly the sole determiner, or even a major factor, in whether any given picture will be one that's interesting to me.
And what is the chance that random stranger is using Color? 0.000001%. So why don't you just walk over there and ask him to send you a copy? Social networking at its finest, in real time, at a conference.
