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« on: January 23, 2013, 09:18 AM »
I
"There has been some debate here about political and related topics. And many at DC (including our host) feel this is not really an appropriate venue for it."
Thank you, 40hz, that explains a lot. On the other hand, this way, the owners (the owner and his "men") of this forum have to ask themselves, at what side of the table do we place ourselves by this stance?
Just today, there's press coverage of an adjacent subject I missed covering in my "essay" above, which is package identification and paying for some packages, payment by the sender (here Google) for the "infrastructure" of the web provider (here: Orange, in France), in order for the customer (= you and me) to receive the content in question.
It's obvious that these Google vids with their lots of traffic constitute a prob for those "providers", but then, in my country, you pay them 50 bucks a months for a "flatrate", and some of these "providers" don't offer a real "flatrate", but impose a limit of 50 GB / giga per month.
So the real problems here are, soon there will be a time where with one provider you'll get "everything", whilst with another, you'll get "anything but Google vids", and then, there is, "anything but a, b, c...z" in the end, and you cannot change your provider each month, you have minimum contract terms, and periods of notice. That's prob 1.
Prob 2 is, more and more it will become accepted to have inspected these packages, and eventually, they could even refuse to transport encrypted packages on the pretext these could contain not even illegal content, but simply non-contractual content.
Thus, I thought that DC was a "users'" forum, and does not represent the "industry".
( Ironic here, in "Die Zeit" site, today, they speak about a possible "perfume" or such that will enhance your natural body odour, and somebody leaves the commentary, well, this is new indeed, for the first time, they will sell you something you've already got by nature! Somebody else, a good work-out could enhance this natural body odour as well (the point in the article being that females would like to smell this odour in order to feel attracted (or not), a case of "biological matching", by "matching genetic material". Why I'm speaking about this? Because above, I said the "industry" sells academic papers, with horrible prices on top of that, to the general public who's already the owner of these academic findings, having financed them all to begin with. )
I acknowledge I shouldn't perhaps have posted these "political" things here, in "sw", but in the "general" part of the forum, but then, I also wanted to explain the mutual reverberations between scraping sw (Surfulater, WebResearch) and pim's, AND then the web in general and content in general - at the end of the day, we're speaking of external content here, and even when we speak about simple pim's here, we're speaking of their ability to handle content original belonging to third parties, so it's all some mix-up where everything I'm discussing belongs to something else within this lot.
II
"I think the "Of course Surfulater can also grab entire webpages was what lead to helmut85 saying it was for web collectors."
Thank you, Paul, that was my point in this respect. In fact, whenever you clip bits only, any such pim will be more or less apt (and certainly will with some external macro boosting, whilst those two "specialist" offerings are there in order to render whole page pages (much?) better than the task is executed by your ordinary pim. On the other hand, if it's not about whole web pages, I don't see the interest of these "specialists", since as pim's, both ain't as good as the best pims out there are.
This addresses to nevf = Neville, the developer, and I perfectly understand that you defend your product, but then, there have been lots of customers or (in my case, prospects) who eagerly awaited better pim functionality in your product but which never came, and fact today is, as a pim, it's not within the premier league, and that's why I call it a specialist for special cases, but I don't see much of these special cases, because for downloading web pages for legal reasons - I said this elsewhere -, neither your product nor your competitor, WebResearch, are able to serve for this special purpose either.
You've made a choice, Neville, whis is, have the best scraper functionality in pim's, together with WebResearch - it seems Surfulater is not as good as WR here, but then, as a pim-like, it seems to be much better than WR, so it might be the best compromise for people wanting to download losts of web pages in full, but as said, then you have two probs, not enough good pim functionality here (since it was your choice to not develop this range of functionlity to the fullest), and - I repeat my claim here, having asked for info about possible mistakes in what I say, but not having received such info yet -, for annotating these downloaded web pages, what would there be? (Just give me key words for me searching your help file for these, and the url of that help file, and hopefully there are some screenshots, too.)
As soon as you do clips both from web pages in the web, or from downloaded web pages, there's much very different functionality needed, and where some pim's are much better than others, and where any pim isn't that good in the end, but where you can add some functionality with external macros, especially when your pim offers links to items (which Surfulater does if I remember well, so it's not my claim that Surfulater can't be used for such a task, my claim being, lots of other pims are equally usable here, and they offer more pim functionality on top of this.
Paul, as for pains with pdf's, you should know that most sciences today have lots of their stuff in pdf format, and certainly more than 90 p.c. of their "web-available" / "available by electronic means" stuff in this format, hence the interest of pim's able to index pdf's, hence the plethora of alternative pdf "editors" and other pdf-handling sw, allowing for annotating, bookmarking, etc., so your claim (if I understand well) that pdf is a receding format, is not only totally unfounded, but the opposite is true.
Neville, this brings me to the idea that any "specialised sw", specialised in the very best possible rendering of web pages as-they-are (since, as said, it's uneconomical to download lots of web pages, just because, with your sw, it's "possible"), should go one step further and also do pdf M, by this blurring the discrimination between downloaded web pages, and downloaded pdf's - but then, it should also offer lots of, and easy = half-automated web pages annotation / bookmarking features, too.
Paul, with lots of your writings, I have a recurrent problem, and please believe me that my stance isn't a denigrating one, neither a condescending one: I mix up lots of aspects, but then try to have a minimum of discernment there, by numbering / grouping. In your texts, every idea stays mixed up with every else, and so, most of the time, for perhaps about 80 p.c. of your text bodies, I just simply don't get what you try to express, and as said, this is a recurrent problem I have with these texts of yours. I'm not a native speaker, as we all know, but then, I get your English words, but I don't get the possible meaning behind them, and very often, I have the impression (as a non-native speaker, as said) that your sentence construction is in the way, so perhaps, after posting, could you re-read your texts, and then partially revise (as I do, and be it just for typos, in my case)? I repeat myself here: My "criticising" your texts has the only objective to "get" better texts from yours I'd then better and more fully understand, since I suppose up to now I don't get many good ideas buried in them, and staying buried even when I try to read you, and that's a pity.
You must see that when Ath does apply condescendance to us both, giving us advice to write in blogs, insteads, i.e. telling us to be silent here, it's, for one, that most people in "chat rooms" prefer short postings between they then can jump as a bee or other insect would between many different flowers, and also because they don't want to think a lot: Here, it's spare time, it's not meant for getting new insights except when they come very easy - but it's also because the effort of reading some people doesn't seem rewarding enough - a question of formatting texts, of inserting sub-headers, of trying to offer "one-bit-at-a-time", and so on. And when, in your case, there's also a debatable sentence structure and ideas not developed one after another but thrown together, and then perhaps discussions by fractions of them, these discussions thrown together again, and introducing new sub-ideas, then "re-opened" many lines below... well, we can't blame people refusing to read us when we wouldn't like to read ourselves in the end, can we?
III
Some other off-topic theme that has got some connections, though:
STOP 'EM THINKING!
I don't have a television set anymore for ages: I couldn't bear them stealing my time anymore. I always thought - it's different with good films where you dive into the atmosphere of the film in question, instead of wanting it to hurry up, but there ain't many good film in European television's programming being left these days - that they slow down your time on purpose. They do some news, which costs you 10 minutes. Instead, they could have done it by presenting you a "magazine article" or something in which you could have read the same info in 3 or 4 minutes if not in 2, very often. Much worse even, anything that is "entertainment there": They always slow down what's going on there, it's absolutely terrible, and at the same, you might be interested in what will follow, so they force you to do "parallel thinking": You try to not spend these moments exclusively on the crap you're seeing, but at the same time, that very crap there is interrupting any other thinking you're doing, at any moment (since it IS continuing, but at a pace that virtually kills you).
Hence my thinking that tv is meant for stealing time, for making people not think, for filling up the spare time of people in a way that their thinking processes are slowed down to a max - they call this "suspense". Of course, you can remind me of tv "being for everybody", so it "has" to be somewhat "slow" - but to such a degree? Just a little bit slower yet, and our domestic animals could probably follow! This is intellectual terrorism.
Where's the connection? Well, my topic is fractionizing and then re-presentation of information / content, and this "tv way" of doing it, needing 1 minute for presentation of a fact that should need 8 or 13sec., at the opposite of what Paul seems doing, i.e. mixing up 5 different things in 5 sentence, then mixing 3 of them up in the following one, then mixing up again 2 from the first and 1 from the second with another 2 ones, is another apotheosis in information rape.
EDIT:
The French legislator has postponed the subject of a proposed a law on these "data expeditor having to pay, too" issues ad infinitum, meaning they want to see first how it all goes wrong in every which way, then perhaps they'll do something about it. Bear in mind that authorities, and especially the French ones, have historically highly been interested in data content, so they certainly rejoice of this move by Orange / France Télécom (or told them to do this move in the first place: acceptance is everything, so they have to play it cool, first).
Paul, I fully understood your very last post after 5 or 6 times reading now. As for the preceding one, I'm always trying. My prob here being, I didn't ever have similar probs with posts of somebody else, not here, not elsewhere. So it should partly be a prob in your writing, as in my writing conception, there's certainly some flaws, too.