From outlinerimpostors.com: "Posted by Stephen R. Diamond - Feb 16, 2015 at 02:47 AM - They’re being incredibly stingy with their “free” version: They still don’t allow it to open new notebooks except on OneDrive."

Being on XP (on which ON 2013 does not run), I cannot confirm, but this seems to be VERY important information.

I've got ON 2003, together with a pc, and ON 2003 is shit; deinstalled it almost immediately. On the other hand, more recent versions seem to have been MUCH better, at least in some respects: It's been told that ON's capabilities re audio/video and, more important for most users, re text recognition / ocr, are outstanding, or to be more precise, are comparable with those of EverNote only, with which (to a lesser degree in the case of ON) it shares the incredible "flatness" of possible IM.

Now you know there are dozens of traditional, so-called "2-pane" outliners, which all LACK these functionalities, and as for EN, at least, it's known that there are MILLIONS of paying users, ON being a program that will probably be paid for by 95 or more p.c. of its customers by buying some "Office" package in which ON is same part (whilst Outlook is not, indicating that MS seems to have given up trying to sell OL to the non-corporate clientele (since the price for OL alone is outrageous).

On the other hand, all those traditional 2-pane outliners combined are sold perhaps at some 20,000 or 30,000 pieces (make it 50,000 if you want, nobody knows, I'm extrapolating from the reach of their respective fora (or lack of such)), compared with the millions of sw copies MS and EN have brought to people in need of some "outlining" / basic IM for web snippets and all that.

Also, there is the aspect of some traditional outliners, and then ON, too (? - but not EN?), INDEXING EXTERNAL pdf's, Word files and such, which is obviously a VERY important aspect in all this (but which curiously does not bring THAT many customers to traditional outliner makes that offer that feature).

Now again, from the above, I had been musing in the past already to what degree a REALLY FREE ON would have impact on the outliner market as a whole: Judging from the success of EN, and from the above-mentioned superiority of both EN and ON in some respects over their more traditional competitors, the WORST is to be feared for traditional outliners, which will have simply be LEFT BEHIND by EN / ON, and the fact that neither of those offers "real hierarchy" (i.e. ON's hierarchical storage is awkward and rather flat, whilst any hierarchy in EN is simply inexistant (from what I've been explained)) does not have been a real obstacle to either EN (for which that's a proven fact) or ON (where it's always been fascinating to see that MS "has" (???) to give away ON for free, whilst they NEVER give anything for free whenever they are able to make some bucks with/out of it). (To TRY to explain this a little better, you could assume that EN is consistent in their abolition of hierarchical storage, where ON tries to "serve both worlds", i.e. flat, AND "deep" information structuring, and hence (and obviously, cf. their giving it away) much less convincing).

All this said, there's another factor playing here that cannot be underestimated: Whilst many people now judge ON sort of a "Trojan horse" or at least don't like the idea they don't have their things on their own hdd anymore, EN's success clearly shows that for any man or woman thinking along these lines, there are 200 or 500 letting go of it, and being quite happy with web-based-only/or-primarily* storage...

* = your working files in the web, with perhaps some backup even on your hdd

... which would better explain WHY MS just SEEMS to repeat their previous mistakes: Not making available ON-free-version, even by option, for exclusive-use-on-hdd, does NOT seem to cut them off from that many possible users indeed, in light of the above. (Note that most traditional outliners do NOT offer web / group functionality, which may have been deeply cutting into their sales figures for quite some time now.)

And yes, it's perfectly possible for MS to PUT AN END, ANYTIME, to ON-web being free. I'm not alleging they would then steal your data; in fact they would never do such a primitive thing. But they will get you into some sort of "subscription", even for ON, when time is ripe for them to do so, and be it "just" by linking ON to some "superior-value" subscription, i.e. ON not being contended within the lesser, "basic" ones - as for your data, it will forever stay available in "reading mode", and even will stay "exportable" (in some quite basic formats you'll be certain to not fall in love with, be assured); thus, ON-free users will subscribe the needed subscriptions in order for ON "actively" staying available.

Whatever, MS killed quite SOME superior sw makes, or then simply bought them, too (Visio), and traditional outliners seem to be quite doomed indeed... as I have said some time ago over at outlinerimpostors.com... but with MS' latest moves re ON, their willingness to overtake that outline market, too, has become even more evident than it had been before.

It'll be of quite some interest to see if they try to follow EN's concept of being totally flat (before trying to kill EN, that is, and that goes without saying), or if they offer some more depth than than they currently do, and then, in which way they will bring that to us (since they are smart enough in order to have "checked" that their current, hybrid outlining structure isn't that well received by anybody, and harms their overtaking the market).

(Over there at outlinerimpostors.com, they censor any try to look ahead or look beyond the obvious, thus I dare annoy fellow readers here on DC with such musings, but I promise I'll only do it here and there and in the appropriate threads, not willy-nilly. Also, a classic afterwit, but it's really spot-on, onto those and onto such people, see my new motto over here; no pun intended to fellow readers, or only some of them, speaking of a minimal minority here.)

superboyac,

Thank you for the confirmation. My first "expensive" (as said, 30 euro instead of the usual 5 or 6, not 200) hub was unreliable, BEFORE my stupid continuing by lightning and thunder, and my second one is unreliable, too

(just today, my mouse stopped working, worked again switched to the comp directly, stopped working when switched to the hub, works fine again since switched to the comp now: Now imagine this with usb sticks or worse, with external hdd's...),

but as said, with some lightning-and-thunder experience of my hardware, so I'm not really in my right to blame hardware for any hardware probs I might have.

As for your Datoptic recommendation, Continental Europa is treated like third world, and I often read reviews of hardware in the usual U.S. technics' review site, which is simply not available in Europe, and which will never even become available in Europe: Some (= several) hardware, of big interest for me, had fine reviews years ago, and now is defunct, respectively (= as said, several such occasions, not just one), i.e. not even available in the States anymore, and without ever having been imported into Europe in-between.

This is true for hardware with exotic functionality, i.e. special laptops, or special usb laptop screens (of which only some less interesting makes had made it to the Continent, before becoming unavailable, too), but especially, this is true for accessories of all sorts, and my personal conclusions from what I've seen in this respect is perhaps a little bit out-of-the-way but not entirely illogical:

In fact, I seriously assume that for accessories and such, it's the LESSER-quality things that get imported to Europe by preference (and no Datoptic hub, "of course"). At first sight, this would seem devoid of sense, but it is not: Importers ain't interested in quality, but in profit margin, and so it's quite natural even, on second thought, that crap "imports" much easier than quality stuff:

You've got some quality stuff which would cost the importer 15 euro (incl. VAT on importion; any further margin incl. about 20 p.c. of additional VAT on that margin (that's why it's called "value ADDED tax" as we all know), too). He resells it to some sellers, for 25 (= not enough margin if you ask him); they sell it for 35 (= not enough margin if you ask them); of course, for quality stuff, SOME users (me included) would be willing to pay 50 euro, but it's obvious that at 50 euro, sales numbers would fall to perhaps 30 p.c. (or even less) of what they are at 30 euro.

Now for some crap. Cost for the importer, vat included, 8 euro. We poor "end-users" then pay 30 euro plus postage for that crap, and importer and reseller have got their margins... AND their numbers.

And this explains a lot, as for what we have to live with, over here. (The irony being that more than just some of this stuff is not even built in the U.S., but in China... but even then, the same rule applies. Cf. Apple products / iPhone and their respective sale prices in the U.S. and in Europe: As said, we're treated like we liked to treat the Third World in the Fifties...)



wraith808 and mouser,

I'm not into unnecessary fights, and it's probably a big miunderstanding, not only about which user's post Ath's post was. Cf. current FF thread.

First, and because of my style, I've got enemies, over here, perhaps less so, but in particular over there, and some users read and/or post here and there. It's not only one user who I could identify, it's also some more user(s) writing here and there, and which I could NOT yet "identify" (= in the sense of knowing this avatar here is that avatar there), and such a situation triggers paranoid (over-) reaction to some point.

Most readers from there will also read here, whilst only a minority of here's readers will also read over there I suppose, that's why I take the liberty to explain in 1, 2 sentences: World-wide, there is nobody who writes about outliner theory as I do, and far from it; I'm not alleging by that that I'm some unique "outliner thinker" or such, but then, other "outliner theoreticians" have ceased to publish their findings or musings years ago, i.e. in some cases, their respective blogs always exist, but with newest entry in 2010 or even former.

Now instead of doing some inspiring discussing over there, on that ONLY available specialized outliner forum, or then, instead of reading-or-not-reading my posts, some fascist assholes (I say it like it this, since their speciality is acclaim others when they start the stoning-of-the-month, and that's exactly Middle Ages fascism) over there attack me again and again, on a purely meta-communication basis, i.e. never ever some argument re facts/argumentation, but always in the line of "forum owner, please silence that asshole for good"; it's very intriguing (or how could I say that better?) that some of the users over there claim to have highest-brow professions, e.g. they pretend to be university professors, a profession I take in high respect, but at the same time, their "contributions" over there are totally devoid of any intelligence whatsoever, i.e. in 5, 6 or 7 years such self-proclaimed "university professors" did not publish a single smart idea - not one, in so many years - over there ("wsp" being a blatant example, among others with albeit lesser pretensions re their professed background). (The same cannot be said of this forum, where there's a good mix of easy-going things and more valuable insight graciously being shared.)

The culmination point in this fact-free permanent slander has been reached just some 2 weeks ago when some asshole over there dared tell me I had "obviously not thought much about outliners" (citing from memory), whilst just my posts in that forum (except for them being deleted by that forum's owner, but that he didn't do yet) easily belie that person. Thus, not only my developments (borne, as said, from my own outliner in the Nineties, some 70k of code lines) are met with silence (no problem), but people openly declare them non-existent.

So this is the background of my hyper-sensitiveness when it comes to people saying - perhaps even inadvertently - a thread of mine is "OT", i.e. should not even have been published to begin with. (Cf. funny cat pics in a programmers' and sw users' forum - you know I accepted these being OT.) Perhaps even they did NOT say it, but it was just me that READ that INTO it:

As for the "OT", please read again, above:

"^ I was going to say quite off-topic *and* well worth a new thread, but the thread seems to be already fairly off-topic

+1, combined with the rewritten title and small-essay size post made me TL;DR; (again) huh"

As implied above, I'm beyond any acceptance of such "+1" when it comes to requests to silence me or sayings that I should not have mentioned some subject (length criticism being another story). But tomos is a non-native speaker, as I am, and it all was a language problem (again, with the above, totally unbearable outliner forum background and non-knowing who are those "doubly-writers" there and here):

In correct English, it should very probably have read, "but the thread seems to have gone [and not: to be] already fairly off-topic" - the "already" should have told me better, but in light of the above, I overlooked that in spite of re-reading it thrice - I'm verry sorry ; obviously, from my outliner forum experience and from some people furtively writing there and here, I now see "enemies" where there are none.


Now for the "bringing in traffic".

As said, I had understood you in the line of "your thread should not have been created in the first place". Then for the absence of advertizing. Now let's get serious, please.

The very first element to advertizing is traffic: done. Second point to consider: qualified traffic. Do we need to discuss this, for DC? There are not THAT many such fora in the web, just some "general pc help" fora, and then those "technics" sites, often offsprings from pc magazines: No pc experience sharing.

I don't know what percentage of readers here do also write here, to some notable extent, but I bet you've (/ dare I say, we've?) got a LOT of readers, and they certainly come back with some regularity, because of the non-irrelevancy of our posts.

So what? Can't we all grasp that all prerequisites for good advertizing revenue are present? Or is general traffic only so-so? But why then is DC very high in google's list for every subject that's treated here? mouser, why not start a thread giving some statistics out? Thus, I convene, you first would need some figures, then only we could start discussing if it's worthwile to try to up those numbers, and in case, how to do that. Your next step would be, identify competing ad prices: How much "coverage" sw developers and such would get here, by advertizing here, and at which cost? In other words: Is DC's reach to small so that advertisers would either to have too high ad prices, or that advertising revenues would stay minimal anyway (i.e. by applying prices in accordance with alleged "minimal" reach)?

Then, there are some sites getting money from bringing in contact developers and customers; some such sites do make TOO much money from this, so there should be some possibilities in that, too: There's some room for a site that would take its share if that's a more decent share.

You know, this reminds me of AHK's problem: Just some months ago, AHK_L top developer / admin said, "I've got better things to do than to work for free, upon your making money with AHK" (citing from memory again). Background was, for the xth time, AHK not allowing to scramble its code (just obfuscate it), and worse, AHK_L .exes now showing off the source code openly, without any de-"assembling" needed anymore.

Fact is, it would have been all so simple, and always could be: Have it free for own use and for everything you give away; collect some fee for anything that's sold... but make it as difficult as it possibly gets to steal your code. (I would have been happy to pay for AHK for some years now if I had had the chance to sell some macros; cf. many AHK programlets being given away by some fellow DC contributors: Selling or giving out should be your choice.)

Or this one: We all know developers leave a whopping 50 p.c. fee at bits, from the reduced price they have to grant in order to get impulse buys: original price 80 bucks, bit price 40 bucks, developer gets 20 bucks - well, he'll be happy to get 19 in fact (and more realistically, some 18.30 or something) since his payment processor will get some money, too.

Now, just thinking: Original price 80 bucks, DC price 52 bucks, payment processor gets 42 bucks (10 for DC), developer gets more than 40 bucks, which is quite some more money than 18.30 - win win for everybody (except for bits, which would get less developers piling up their programs for them).

In a word, DC seems to have real good "coverage" (tremendously good google results for as said almost everything), but as for now, it doesn't do anything about even just trying to "commercialize" this value, the irony being most people in the web being willing to do anything to get just a little fraction of DC's seo value.

Thus, the question should not be, what to do with unwanted traffic that just costs hosting fees, but obviously should be, how to capitalize on that traffic (and optimize it further, and so on).

And now, I'm going to delete my above post.

Thank you, Ath, I'm thankful for constructive comments.

Re XP: Yes, yes. I'm not saying you're wrong, but fact is that XP is a perfectly stable OS, and the ONLY reason everybody wants it gone, is that Bill can spread even more of our money to little cute black toddlers in sunny Africa.

This being said, what do I know about Avira free? Nothing. Thus it's perfectly possible that the interaction Avira-FF is doing 2/3 of the harm I currently endure from FF (which anyway is ridiculous in its 36th iteration's memory management). So I'm going to install Avast free again, and will report back in some 8 or 10 days; Avira vs. Avast being the non-"controlled" factor in my setup.

And of course, NoScript would always be an option in order to possibly kill UNWANTED js (but the unwanted variety only, and without any side-effects on regular js), were it not about its features/options being far from evident.

EDIT: Avast free from Avast > cnet = as we all know, to be avoided at all cost. google "avast free download" > filehippo.com (= 5th hit or so), never had any prob with them. And yes, it's the same, current version (I checked for that). That being said, I always download from filehippo wherever possible: for the time being, it's possibly the premier download site overall. (Knock on wood.)