Criticism
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FirstClass has been criticized in a number of areas:
- An insufficient method for users to individually archive emails and other content. This affects users who are leaving a FirstClass system and who wish to take their content with them. FirstClass attempts to produce an archive using a variety of standard formats (RTF, HTML, etc.) and ends up with something that is human-readable and searchable, but doesn't easily import into other groupware systems or mail clients. FirstClass cites a lack of standards in this area as the reason for this issue.
- The system's single-threaded server design has been criticized as dated and as causing undesirable side-effects such as 100% server processor usage, but this design (among other features) makes FirstClass more scalable than other groupwise systems because it causes fewer context switches. One server can therefore handle tens of thousands of simultaneous connections, a load that would require multi-server clustering with other systems. In FirstClass v10, the server is now 64-bit and multi-threaded, but the new version has in turn been criticized for high memory requirements (primarily due to the indexing required by the new "instant search" feature), and for not retaining 32-bit compatibility.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)