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You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

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Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#51

Post by fpgeek »

score wrote: post #33

I'm almost completely off Google (started my exodus late last year) and it wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it'd be. I moved into the Microsoft ecosystem. It's all there. Bing is surprisingly good, SkyDrive surpasses even Dropbox and Office 365 w/ OneNote is the best office suite available. I even got a Windows Phone 8 (yeah, I can get carried away sometimes). The point is, there's a whole new world out there…

It's great that you're happy in the Microsoft ecosystem, but other than the "not Google" checkbox, what issues with being in the Google ecosystem does being in the Microsoft ecosystem solve?

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#52

Post by graue »

I don't see Google Maps mentioned here. That's proving the hardest to quit for me - by far. I moved to NYC a month ago and it would be like an order of magnitude harder to get around without GMaps' transit, walking and biking directions.

For biking, http://ridethecity.org actually gives great directions comparable to GMaps but the site isn't mobile friendly at all - have to memorize the route before you set out. I know there are alternatives for transit directions but I haven't tried them - suggestions? And I haven't seen walking directions offered anywhere.

Even for browsing maps on mobile I haven't found a good option yet. Of course there's http://openstreetmap.org/ on desktop, but it doesn't show your current location and isn't very mobile friendly. There's an "OSM Browser" app for Android, but it's solidly mediocre - no directions, doesn't show current location, and you can only scroll one screen at a time, like MapQuest circa 2002.

It's my hope that I'm simply ignorant and some smart HNers will reply with apps/sites I haven't heard of yet... Anyone?

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#55

Post by fusiongyro »

brianwillis wrote: post #4

I like to run my email on my server, but it’s a significant undertaking and I don’t recommend you do that. I agree with Ben on this point, but don't really understand why things are this way. In looking for a replacement for Google Reader I found a bunch of high quality self hosted options. Similarly, hosting a website on your own server (or one you rent from someone else) is a pretty trivial exercise for anyone that…

Email is hard because it is both architecturally insecure, and tremendously valuable to malicious attackers. It's hard because addressing its problems leads to buckets of different bad solutions rather than a single standard one. It's hard because the handful of big fish have decided that a reasonable way to combat its problems is to rely on interoperability with each other at the cost of you, the guy running mail.

That said, as someone who does run mail, from my perspective it's more like the rest of the internet got easier and mail is still where it was a decade ago. Everything used to suck this much. With mail, the old hassles got addressed (goodbye sendmail and your m4 configuration nightmare) but got replaced with new hassles fast enough that it's kind of the same difference. But nowadays running the rest of your web stack (DNS, HTTP server, etc) is not very hard, though the cost of a DNS screwup is still huge.

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#56

Post by metastrategy »

simonsarris wrote: post #18
nilkn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to DuckDuckGo, I tried your searches and did get useful results. "movies near me" took me to Yahoo! Movies, which showed me theaters near me. I could also search for something like "movies [zip code]". I tried it for a few different zip codes and it always got me the results I wanted, but not always through the same site. For one zip code, it brought up the Fandango page for that area, which had exactly wh…

The author touted DuckDuckGo returning different results as an advantage, so I've been looking for differences between DuckDuckGo and Google, not similarities, and semantic data pulled is the easiest way to show that Google results are more informative faster. After all, if we ignore all the sugar from Google results, and they merely return the same top result, why then would I use DuckDuckGo? I've been fooling with…

DuckDuckGo makes a decent point on a page of theirs[1]. Maybe, what you're missing is conformation bias in your results. I honestly don't know, and assumed a hell of a lot.

>After all, if we ignore all the sugar from Google results, and they merely return the same top result, why then would I use DuckDuckGo?

The question becomes, why wouldn't you? Personally, Google has screwed me over in the past & if I can get the same top 15 from DuckDuckGo & not worry about the data mining drill down on me, I'll take my search elsewhere.

[1]http://dontbubble.us/

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#58

Post by pbreit »

nilved wrote: post #27

Why is anyone under the impression that living sans Google is difficult or unrewarding? I haven't used a single Google product in months (and I use Android.)

> Why is anyone under the impression that living sans Google is difficult or unrewarding?

Because it plainly is. Let's just take search. I try to switch to Bing or DDG every 3-6 months and can't take it for more than a few days. It is very, very clearly difficult and unrewarding.

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#59

Post by brdrak »

jfoster wrote: post #25
brianwillis wrote: post #4

I like to run my email on my server, but it’s a significant undertaking and I don’t recommend you do that. I agree with Ben on this point, but don't really understand why things are this way. In looking for a replacement for Google Reader I found a bunch of high quality self hosted options. Similarly, hosting a website on your own server (or one you rent from someone else) is a pretty trivial exercise for anyone that…

Spam is one aspect of why email is hard, and having more than just a few email accounts on your host helps to tackle that problem. Take a look in your Gmail spam folder at how much they've managed to weed out.

I self host my personal email and have to use gmail at work. Spam is actually the one thing that I find gmail weaker at compared with self hosting.

My nearly stock Postfix setup with a few basic anti-spam settings, rejects about 80% of spam. Then stock SpamAssassin config (with a nightly sa-update cron job) gets accuracy somewhere into the 90s. The SpamAssassin Bayes plugin takes it to very close to 100% (maybe 2 or 3 Spams per year).

The best part is that I'm in control -- when someone continues to send annoying email even after being asked to stop (like our daughter's old childcare provider), I can add a Postfix rule to reject their mail at SMTP time and enjoy knowing that for every email they send, they'll get a Non-delivery report from their SMTP server complete with a personal message from me.

Another example: an acquaintance liked to send mass mailers to everyone in his address book of the quality on par with most people's facebook/twitter status updates, followed by a barrage of useless replies from people I don't know. After realizing I never want to see those kinds of messages from anyone, I added a regex to Postfix header_checks to reject messages with more that 15 @ symbols in To: or Cc:.

Another benefit of self hosting is unlimited temporary email aliases (e.g. temp123@example.com). Many places don't accept the standard myemail+temp123@example.com sub-address that gmail supports (and a spammer can easily identify), and it's nice to be able to tell when companies abuse my email.

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#60

Post by acabal »

brianwillis wrote: post #4

I like to run my email on my server, but it’s a significant undertaking and I don’t recommend you do that. I agree with Ben on this point, but don't really understand why things are this way. In looking for a replacement for Google Reader I found a bunch of high quality self hosted options. Similarly, hosting a website on your own server (or one you rent from someone else) is a pretty trivial exercise for anyone that…

I've actually been thinking a lot about this in the past month. I too am transitioning away from Google-everything for various reasons. I only use Gmail via IMAP in Thunderbird, so I've already migrated my address book and calendar to self-hosted webDAV, which was shockingly easy.

The last thing to switch over is Gmail. I used to run a mail server in the past so I know what a pain in the ass it is. I was thinking that something very useful would be some sort of big Bash script that would install and configure webDAV and a mail server using existing packages with smart defaults, specifically for individuals hosting their own personal mail. Kind of like an owncloud, but for address books/calendar/email and using existing packages.

I'll see if I can think of this further once I actually sit down and start running my own mail server again. Anyone with thoughts or suggestions is welcomed to drop me a line :)

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