Eudora was my primary e-mail program for about a decade, and my wife still uses it as hers. I switched to Thunderbird a couple of years ago shortly after I switched to Mac OS X. Eudora had fallen behind the curve, and could no longer reasonably display a lot of the messages I was receiving. The transition was painful. I never did get all my archived messages into Thunderbird, and still have to open up Eudora when I want to review a message more than a couple of years old.

Eudora used to be free-as-in-beer, and then eventually Qualcomm bought it from the University of Illinois and took it commercial. I never could figure out why Qualcomm of all companies did that. I guess they were a different company back then. In any case, they apparently noticed that Eudora wasn’t really part of their core business, and they’ve decided to spin it out to the open source community.

To me, Eudora 8 looks like a mixture of both Thunderbird and Eudora. I can clearly see the heritage of both. Indeed you can’t run Thunderbird and Eudora at the same time, because Thunderbird recognizes Eudora as another instance of itself, and apparently they share some preference and data files. However, the menu structure is very definitely Eudora. In particular it has an improved filing system (though I’m more focused on labels these days than folders).

I haven’t had time to do more than launch Eudora 8 and look at a couple of messages, but it did seamlessly pick up my Thunderbird settings and show me all my mail. I’ll have to figure out if it can import my old Eudora mail too. It didn’t crash, and feels quite responsive.

There are a few glitches. There is a redirect command Redirect command in the menus, something Thunderbird has been missing for years; but it doesn’t seem to actually do anything yet. Furthermore one of my favorite Eudora power-features–Reply with Template–is M.I.A. There are also some blank spaces in the Tools menu. Maybe they’re placeholders for features yet to come?

Finally, AppleScript support seems completely non-existent. Even Thunderbird has more AppleScriptability than this. Possibly, it’s just a missing dictionary. I hope so.

However, these are minor problems, and to be expected in a first beta. With a little more work on these and other details, Eudora could well do for Thunderbird what Firefox did for Mozilla: paint an attractive interface on top of a solid but ugly back end. It would be really nice to see Thunderbird/Eudora start cutting into the marketshare of weaker products like Outlook and GMail.

It’s obviously difficult to tell whether back-room marketing deals or just dumb luck were responsible for the results we saw, but it appears that we can safely lend credence to the suspicions of myriad iPod users around the world. When it comes to choosing songs, ‘random’ clearly is relative.

Actually folks, it’s totally possible to figure out whether your results are random luck or not. For one thing, try repeating the experiment. But what you really need are better statistics. In particular try calculating the chance your results would occur by pure randomness. You haven’t published the raw data, so I can’t do it for you; but this should be well within the reach of anyone whose taken a couple of undergraduate courses in statistics. In fact, it would make a very nice final project for a statistics course. I don’t think it quite rises to the level of an undergraduate thesis though.

Determining statistical significance is the bread and butter of practical statistics in medicine, economics, and a dozen other fields. One would hope basic statistics would be a prerequisite for a journalism degree or a career at a serious news organization. However, if math is not your strong point, call up a statistics prof at your alma mater or hire a professional statistician to help you out. The questions you’re asking are exactly the sorts of questions that statistics was invented to answer. The data you’re working with and the experiments you’re doing are far simpler and more repeatable than most of the systems statisticians analyze. There’s no excuse other than ignorance for not doing the math that’s needed to get the real answer.

The complexity is the real killer. Although it claims to do bidirectional sync, I’ve never felt comfortable letting it do that. There just seems like far too much risk that I’ll accidentally nuke a file or folder because I haven’t set up Chronosync quite right. Software like this needs to be simple enough to understand and use without worry. Chronosync just isn’t.

There were some good suggestions for alternative in the comments on the last post. I plan to try Unison and FileSynchronization. Perhaps one of them will get the job done. However, I think there’s a real market opportunity here for a product that’s got the right combination of speed, ease of use, and reliability. So far I don’t think such a product exists. :-(

The first thing you need to do understand is that all the athletes who make it to the finals are truly excellent, world class athletes. There aren’t going to be any blowouts. This isn’t like Basketball or Ice Hockey or some other sports where one country can just completely dominate everyone else. Almost every one of the 24 women in the finals could beat the other 23 on the right day. They are all very near the limits of human performance, and they have to compete under that assumption.

In the Icecapades, a skater is only trying to please the audience. As long as what they do is pretty enough and impressive enough, it doesn’t have to be the best possible. It is more important not to screw up than it is to try for the best possible result. No way is an Icecapades performer going to take a jump they only have a one in three chance of landing. However the calculus of results is completely different for the Olympics.

In competitive skating at this level, you’re competing against 23 other people, all of whom have a one in three chance of landing that same (or equivalent) difficult jump. Odds are four of them are going to make it and eight are going to fall on their asses. But all three medals are going to the four who make it. To even have a chance at a medal, a skater has to attempt moves that might very well fail. They can’t hold back and only perform safe moves they know they can execute without disaster.

Now you can play with the numbers here. Maybe the moves have a 1 in 2 or 2 in 3 chance of succeeding. Perhaps the top half dozen skaters have a one in two chance of pulling off the difficult moves and the bottom six have only a one in four. Maybe even the top skater has a 52% chance of executing a tough jump perfectly, and the second place skater has a 49% chance. Of course you have to combine the chances of failure across several different moves. On any given day, the odds may not play out quite as expected. For instance, Thursday night a few more skaters had major stumbles and falls than I would expect. Some days, it’s a few less. But the basic rule remains the same.

I suspect an economist or game theorist could put some exact numbers on this. It might even be possible that when all 23 other skaters are taking big risks to aim for the gold, it might be a sensible strategy to pull back a little, not screw up, and hope the other 23 do. This may in fact be what happened Thursday night. (Has there been another major event where both silver and bronze went to skaters with big falls?) However, my gut feeling is that holding back is not an optimal strategy here, and the skaters and their coaches know it. The best way to win is to take a real chance of losing badly.

P.P.S. Of course this is completely dependent on the nature of the event. In figure skating anyone who gets less than bronze might as well not have shown up; and the difference between the three top spots is huge. It also matters that although each person skates individually, they are effectively competing against 23 others simultaneously. Not all games operate under these rules. In particular business is rarely a zero sum game, and being in the middle can be quite profitable. A solid shot at the middle is usually a better choice than a small chance at winning everything and large chance of losing everything. If figure skating were more directly competitive like curling or hockey where there’s a winner and a loser in each round, I don’t think this analysis would work either. But in figure skating and similarly judged sports like gymnastics, I think it explains a lot.