Linux

It was supposed to be the Next Big Thing but I don't think anyone ever figured out what it was useful for.

That's the thing, they were pushing a product w/o a need. Features that nobody thinks they can use now. Thing is though, I used wave a bit and it really did have serious potential. It re-worked they way people could have used e-mail to communicate. It re-defined e-mail. Add a person into an existing conversation and they get the ability to read/view the convo from the begining, including any attatchments.

VERY useful features for biz; esp. when working on a project and add'l people are brought in to work on it, either from outside (consulting) or inside the corporation.

Well, they did publish the protocol, and a bunch of code. If it had taken off there would have been a lot of software able to host it. I had observed that if it became huge, we would have built Wave support into Citadel. Even the folks at Lotuss and Microsoft could have played.

I can see a problem with add-somebody-to-a-conversation-later features.
I realize its the same thing as adding somebody to a reply all chain, but if that became the standard way of doing things, it make make it so much of a habit that people would add the wrong person not having seeing the bad comment made in their direction.

Aug 8 2010 11:02pm from fleeb @uncnsrd
Of course, that problem exists now.

Right, except that with Google Wave, all of the attachments that were part of a "wave became accessible to new participants of the wave. Oh, and you
could also have public and private waves, and wavelets. I got a little confused as to what constituted a wave versus a wavelet but the whole thing was just cool.

There was one point where I shared a video with people, when Wave first started coming out. And instead of having to eat up bandwidth and take up more storage space in my webmail account by forwarding the same file to new people as they entered the convo, they were able to view the video (and all comments from the beginning) just by joining the wave. That just had a coolness factor of like a Googolplex!

That's great, but it seems that Wave doesn't do that any better than any traditional message board, or even a blog. The added functionality of seeing everyone update the conversation in real time has coolness factor, but does it really add any value?

You actually were able to "replay" the entire conversation from the beginning, and watch as people joined & contributed to the conversation.

again, cool but valueless...

Not only valueless, but it may actually be a liability. I would compare it to the problems that began to surface when it became common to send word processing documents as email attachments, and unwittingly created situations where the entire undo history was viewable. ooooops.

compare it to the problems that began to surface when it became common

to send word processing documents as email attachments, and unwittingly

created situations where the entire undo history was viewable.
ooooops.

Does not compute, and here's why:


The situation you mention, with which I'm more than well-aware and familiar applies only to MS-Word documents (still does, actually) and it's a design "feature" of the MS-Word document file format. You start off with a base file and all edits are stored as "metadata." This is why law firms created, in-house at first (until some smart geek took the program he created for the firm and marketed it on his own) and then finally just using the tool either as a stand-alone product or as part of the law-firm packaging that most firms purchase to go along with their MS-Office installation (the law-firm packagin is separate and apart from the MS-Office insall, and is NOT offered by MS but by various consulting companies).

Thing is, MS never told anyone about all this hidden data that they were storing in their files. The way that people found out about it, was that the IT department of a law firm was going through e-mails as part of discovery for some lawsuit, and realized that they could recover all of the edits in the documents that were sent over because of the way that the files were structured (they weren't examining the documents themselves but rather the PST or whatever files that the opposition had sent over in compliance with a demand for discovery -- you know, the archived e-mail file that OUTLOOK uses).

Sooner or later, this was bound to happen but let me tell you -- the law firms were all up in arms over this, especially as there was no disclosure forthcoming from MS that that's what they were doing.

Coincidentally, this was never an issue with WordPerfect or OOO, b/c their file formats don't contain such "metadata."

With Wave, and the ability to re-play an entire conversation from the beginning, Google is letting you know up-front that that's a feature of the product (although honestly I can't recall if "replaying" a wave shows the original text being edited or just the edited text being plopped in; I'd have to log in & find a wave where I knew text had been edited after being placed into the wave).

So long story short, this isn't a liability b/c Google's Wave discloses such behaviour, whereas MS-Office did NOT.

And because Google is letting you know up-front that this is a feature of the product, anyone who cares about it will decide up-front that it's the wrong tool for anyone who will ever need to perform CYA (which, in business, is just about everyone).

Still, it's better to know it's there than to find out the hard way.

Or, people who use it for business would be better suited to not include anything they wouldn't later want anyone seeing at some point. It's sort of the same philosophy of tailoring one's writing on-line for public view, since privacy is a phallacy anyway. Not to mention, since 99.9% of e-mail that is sent of the Internet is NOT encrypted in any way, shape, or form, DESPITE there being perfectly good, low-to-no-cost solutions for doing so, I place the blame squarely on the writer of such content. Even "sensitive" e-mails that I send out don't contain all of the pertinent information; usually, I include a request for a telephone call to discuss anything I wouldn't want to become public. :p

Although all of the above is true, it sounds a lot like you're trying to make the job fit the tool. People don't change the way they work without a whole lot of brand new value added to the toolset.

Still, it's better to know it's there than to find out the hard way.

On the other hand, don't you enjoy those eureka moments? I do. Usually I'm scrambling because of some horrible problem affecting lots of users, since I'm suffering anyway, at least there is a satisfying eureka moment to take away from the whole thing.
Google takes all the fun out of it. Evil airbag deflaters is what they are.

Can't blame the writer actually. Being low-to-no-cost doesn't equate to easy to use or, automatic.

My neighbor is constantly reminding me of this: the other day I hacked his itv, didn't even know apple had an ITV, but I hacked it, and was able to scp files from it to his laptop, which is what he wanted my help with.
He's a smart guy, but no computer experience, and I'm sure he could have figured it out by himself, but he was skimming over the instructions on how to hack and he said "this is all over my head, you do it."

So unless everybody starts putting in encryption in email clients (which they'd all have to do at the same time, and that'll never happen) so that the user doesn't have to do anything, it's never going to happen, and it's not the user's fault.

And while we're replacing everybody's mail client, we can fix the spam problem too.

What is the diff in Ext4? Benefits? Negatives?

It's mostly just the removal of 64-bit storage limits, so you can have filesystems up to 1 EB and files up to 16 TB. They did a bunch of performance enhancements and other behind-the-scenes changes as well. Unless you're running a gigantic storage system, you won't miss it if you don't upgrade.

And if you do have a gigantic storage system, btrfs is potentially more interesting.