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 greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“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)