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Pooh-Bah
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Now, one of our members has helpfully suggested that it's crazy to count keystrokes or complain about the time spent waiting for some function or other to execute, or compose macros to perform tedious input. But all that time Bill causes you to waste sitting back watching the monitor update or retyping a sentence because you had accidentally hits the Caps Lock (cleverly situated just above the Shift), can really mount up
In this connection, without my permission, Bill or one of his cohorts has gratuitously added to one of my taskbars a button called "This is Spam." Pushing it causes a selected item from your inbox to be transferred to the Norton Antispam Folder, which you can empty later any time with a single keystroke. Wonderful, I thought, until I discovered that unlike the instantaneous delete button, it takes up to five seconds for the new button to perform the transfer
Well you ask, what's five seconds. Well, I reply, some folks of my acquaintance receive hundreds of spam every day, each one requiring one keystroke to transfer, entailing over a period of only ten years, easily one million keystrokes occupying five million seconds of your valuable screen-sucking time
The interested reader may wish to calculate that in minutes, hours, or days spent repeatedly hitting the button and then sitting back waiting for action
dalehileman
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enthusiast
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May I suggest that, since the message is sent to your Norton Anti-Spam Folder this feature is provided to you by Peter Norton (aka Symnatec) and not Bill Gates? 
"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world" -Michael Crichton
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Pooh-Bah
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Sorry Par. I use "Bill Gates" as an avatar for everything wrong with the digital world
dalehileman
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If the "This is spam" button saves you from seeing more spam of the same type, how much of your time is it worth to have it do its thing. I submit that the routine that you initiate by tagging a given email as spam is analyzing it and uses the results of that analysis to filter out more spam so you don't ever have to look at it.
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and as a point of history, the standard qwerty keyboard lay out dated back to the beginning of the last century, when keys layout was intentional scrabbled, to slow typist down.
Bill Gates wasn't even a gleam in his father's eye when the shift key and cap lock keys were first put into there current positions on the keyboard.
(keyboard then were less flat, and perhaps it was harder to mistake a shift key for a caplocks, key, but flatter keyboards started appearing with the first electric (not electronic) keyboards, (i remember them from the late 1950's, but they could be earlier than that)
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keys layout was intentional scrabbled, to slow typist down Really?? Why, do you know?
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it's not uncommon knowledge!
typewriters at first came in countless designs, (before 1 or 2 styles began to dominate.)
at first, (like computer operating systems) you needed to find a typist (and actualy at first, 'typewriter' was the operater, not the machine) who was proficient on the style of machine you owned (but some typist would provide their own machines!) (just as in the beginning of computers there were Lainer Os, Wang Os, DOS, and (senior moment--the 3 letter one used on main frames and adapted for PC's?)
and eventually things settled down (thought there are still more OS's than most users think, (linux, Mac, MSDos, (and its spawn))
Still, (getting back to typewriters) all of these mechanical devices , with springs and levers and tie rods, would jam if you typed too fast.
so manufacturers made them harder to use (to slow typist down) and provided free training on how to use them.
and over time the qwerty (named for top row of left hand keys) became the standard lay out (since electronic devices, and computer have been around, there are more logical layout available, but since most of use know how to type with a querty board, it remains dominant. (you can readily find other layouts if you want--they often are premiumly prices, and require you to relearn how to type.)
the qwerty board, has the the vowels intentionally hard to to type. it has the vowels under awkward fingers. (a under left pinky, e is worked with left middle finger, i and o under middle and ring finger of right hand, but these require movemtent to reach.. U (the least used vowel) is the easiest to type, (a movement to reach it, but it is typed with right index finger )
i am sure wiki or other sites (perhaps IBM) have info on the history of the typewriters and keyboard lay outs.
some other lay outs are available as software download, (and you just learn to ignore the letters printed on the keys!)
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formerly known as etaoin...
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Pooh-Bah
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Fal: '"This is spam" button saves you from seeing more spam of the same type,...'
***Forgive if I wasn't clear. I don't think it's even feasible to write an algorithm that can reliably distinguish spam, as compared with the human mind which can do so within a second. It is the subsequent five seconds of his life that are wasted
Helen: ‘...the standard lay out (since electronic devices, and computer have been around,...’
***Owing I must assume to digital constraints several key locations have in fact been shifted around since I used the typewriter (eg, some punctuation and symbols, with margin release replaced by one corner of Enter, while “1” must now occupy a separate key). But Bill's crew just haven't seemed to realize how many trillions of keystrokes and days if not years of humanity's time have been wasted thanks to the proximity of the Shift and Caps Lock
***...though I readily conceded that the better typists probably don't experience this problem as frequently as do the lazy (me)
J: 'keys layout was intentional scrabbled, to slow typist down Really?? ...'
***At first I too thought Helen was joking, but she seems to know her stuff. I had read that its inventors started with the keys in alphabetical order then somewhat clumsily scrambled them in an effort to assign the most-used keys to the most easily-accessed positions. This latter part of the account could be apocryphal but could account for the most used, etaionshrdlu, being situated mainly toward the top with Q, W, Z, X and P assigned to the most awkward positions
***Though another theory, according to Wiki, asserts they’re arranged ‘...so that successive keystrokes would alternate between sides of the keyboard so as to avoid jams'
***Meantime as Helen points out, faster keyboards have been devised but too late
dalehileman
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> etaionshrdlu that be the LinotypeI would know.
formerly known as etaoin...
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from the wiki article on QWERTY:
The QWERTY arrangement solved the jamming problem not by forcing typists to slow down, but by separating common sequences of letters in English. Pairs of keys that are frequently struck in succession were placed as far from each other as possible, so that the hammers that were likely to be used in quick succession were less likely to interfere with each other. [EA]
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one of my friend who is professional secretary, finds on keyboard vs typewriters, (even electron typewriters)she can type faster.
her top speed on a typewriting is about 90wpm, on keyboard typing tests, (for job interview) she has hit 108wpm!
with out any mechanical systems, she can do it faster.
--me? i am lucky if i type 40wpm!
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Quote:
Fal: '"This is spam" button saves you from seeing more spam of the same type,...'
***Forgive if I wasn't clear. I don't think it's even feasible to write an algorithm that can reliably distinguish spam, as compared with the human mind which can do so within a second. It is the subsequent five seconds of his life that are wasted
Certainly the human mind can (but isn't always) much better than any algorithm but there are some pretty good spam filters out there. We have one on our email service where I work that cut my spam load from about 50-100 a day before we went to the service to no more than 5 after we went to it.
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Pooh-Bah
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Really! If it's no trouble, and if possible, can you briefly explain how it works as I'm sure others of us would be equally interested--thanks--Dale
dalehileman
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Quote:
Really! If it's no trouble, and if possible, can you briefly explain how it works as I'm sure others of us would be equally interested--thanks--Dale
How it works? Pretty good, I'd say.
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Pooh-Bah
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Fal: Sorry my q wasn't clear as so often happens. What I meant was, how does the algorithm distinguish between the characteristics of a spam and those of other communiques without inadvertently deleting an occasional instance of the latter
dalehileman
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enthusiast
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I believe the operation is much simpler than you surmized.
Pressing the "This is Spam" button:
1. moves the currently selected message to the Anti-Virus Quarantine
2. records the sender in order to 'capture' future messages automatically
There is no magic. And I would offer, to the original comment about the time it takes when you "press the button". That is an investment. Every future message, from that sender, will be automatically removed. Consider the time as 'training' your software.
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Pooh-Bah
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Parkin: 1. moves the currently selected message to the Anti-Virus Quarantine
***Sorry for once again not being clear. I realize that's what happens to it, but my complaint involves the duration of the move
2. records the sender in order to 'capture' future messages automatically
***I wasn't aware of that and thanks for the tip. However, that feature doesn't do much good because with 99.9 per cent of spam the sender changes at each transmission
dalehileman
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Quote:
Fal: Sorry my q wasn't clear as so often happens. What I meant was, how does the algorithm distinguish between the characteristics of a spam and those of other communiques without inadvertently deleting an occasional instance of the latter
It doesn't. They're called false positives. Hopefully it doesn't delete the messages that it has identified as spam, but puts them in a folder that you can go through regularly. You can then let the email handler know that a specific message is not spam.
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Pooh-Bah
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Fal: Thank you once again for the clarification. However, the principal advantage of the spam folder is precisely that you can delete the entire contents of the folder without having to browse the listing
Nonetheless I very much appreciate your help in these matters
dalehileman
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Thanks, Helen and tsuwm. eta--the article said pronounced "et-ee-oin shurd-loo") : where the heck did it get that ee sound?? (I don't think I'll post how I've been mentally pronouncing it--I've embarrassed myself enough, recently!)
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Quote:
Fal: Thank you once again for the clarification. However, the principal advantage of the spam folder is precisely that you can delete the entire contents of the folder without having to browse the listing
Nonetheless I very much appreciate your help in these matters
Emptying the spam folder withou first looking at its contents is a sure way to delete any false positives. If this is not a problem for you then by all means go ahead and do it, but don't come complaining to me when you find you've missed your grand-daughter's wedding because you deleted the announcement without looking at it.
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Pooh-Bah
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Fal: Emptying the spam folder without first looking at its contents is a sure way to delete any false positives. ***Forgive me all to pieces but again I must not have been perfectly clear. I readily concede that I often curtail my followups so as to avoid excessive verbiage, whereupon I am misunderstood, and so I herewith apologize most profusely ***I hoped you had inferred from my last response that I would draw that very conclusion and so obviously I'd have to tolerate the drawback, though I'm immensely grateful for your warning because as a result, now before deleting I shall occasionally browse the listing before deletion en masse; whereupon if I spot a misplaced address I can forthwith drag it to another more suitable folder and then in the future make a special point to avoid inadvertently labeling such as spam, thereby permitting me to reinstate the jolly habit of emptying it all at once without necessarily scanning it in toto ..., but don't come complaining to me... ***Heavens no, why should I do that, I'm such a congenial fellow; while I want to again thank you profusely for all your enlightening, scholarly and tactful replies ***...although protocol now requires us to confine such discussions to a forum which although misnamed was kindly created by Admin especially for this purpose and is situated obscurely just after the main index entries ***Alternately, if you wish to contact me directly I am dalehileman@verizon.net and don't care who knows it
dalehileman
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Quote:
although protocol now requires us to confine such discussions to a forum which although misnamed was kindly created by Admin especially for this purpose and is situated obscurely just after the main index entries
oh, don't be crediting Admin for this -- next you'll be putting it on Bill Gates head. 
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Alternately, if you wish to contact me directly I am dalehileman@verizon.net and don't care who knows it That explains your spam problem... 
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"if I spot a misplaced address I can forthwith drag it to another more suitable folder"
Many email handlers allow you to mark a particular message Not Spam, but only if you open it in the suspected spam folder. Just moving it to another folder won't do the job.
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Can we leave Dvorák out of this discussion now?
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Pooh-Bah
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mus: Surprisingly, to the contrary I get only two or three spam per day
dalehileman
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old hand
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Most contemporary spam filters use a heuristic form of analysis to determine content, Usually looking for markers in headers.
However,cunning has a way of developing its own methods. The spammers current modus operandi is to trick the servers by hiding a message inside a picture. Similar to ambush marketing in modern movies.
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Quote:
Similar to ambush marketing in modern movies.
Is that the term to describe the trend of placing advertiser's products prominently in the hands of the major characters in movies and Television?
"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world" -Michael Crichton
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dalehileman
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Dvorak,
An early computer geek, he proposed a new layout for the computer keyboard (from memory, I believe it was in the 80's). This was before the Internet and when 'Personal' computers were very rare.
His design was based on the frequency of letters used in the English language and made a whole lot of sense. Although a superior design it was unable to overcome the "human factor". That is, the majority of 'touch typists' who were unable (or unwilling) to relearn in order to improve efficiency.
"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world" -Michael Crichton
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You're confusing John Dvorak with August Dvorak. The first is (still) a computer columnists, and the latter patented the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard in 1936.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Pooh-Bah
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Thank you, guys, for responding in spite of my evident laziness
dalehileman
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is the Dvorák in question
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old hand
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Is that the term to describe the trend of placing advertiser's products prominently in the hands of the major characters in movies and Television?
Sometimes it is not so obvious. Remember the Coca cola sign in Bladerunner?
Spammers will integrate text into a picture and distort it so it can't be identified by filters.
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Pooh-Bah
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Fal:'...missed your grand-daughter's wedding because you deleted the announcement without looking at it'
That's probably more than 21 years in the future, at which time I will be 98
dalehileman
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Quote:
Fal:'...missed your grand-daughter's wedding because you deleted the announcement without looking at it'
That's probably more than 21 years in the future, at which time I will be 98
They do funny things with dates on spam sometimes.
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Pooh-Bah
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Forgive me bak, but why do I call what spam
dalehileman
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