Slashdot Mirror

The submitter thinks a mediocre JavaScript e-mail client, a mediocre JavaScript word processor, and a mediocre JavaScript spreadsheet program comprise an "on-line operating system." This operating system, unlike most released in the last 20 years, relies on the Internet being reliable and fast, which it rarely is.

Believe it or not, companies really do read their snail mail. I have gotten more for my $0.39 than I ever could have gotten through e-mail or even telephone calls. If you feel passionately about this, e-mail me. I am interested in starting a group to pressure people to stop advirtising this way.

I have also coded through TelNet (AHHHHHH!!!!!), worked through Citrix on a real thin client, and now I am on my current RDP setup. I have found that all of them are lacking compared to the experience of using a decent (read: 1ghz, 512 megs ram) computer. Granted, thin clients and remote desktops can be superior if you are trying to find the millionth digit of Pi, but I fail to see the use for most day-to-day applications. I already use Google products to write letters and spreadsheets and I can store several gigabytes of data through GMail. What else do I need to be able to do that an online operating system can do?

WilliamSChips (full.infinity@gmail.com) said:

Not sure about all morons, but you certainly don't deserve to get paid!

You'd better get off of Slashdot before Neil J. Bauman reports you to Human Resources!

jollyroger1210 (jollyroger1210@gmail.com) said:

Dexy and the Midnight Runners "Come on Eileen" Do a search on Youtube, there are tons of remakes....

i know, offtopic sort of

On the contrary. Your post is right on topic. Except instead of giving life to old 80's tunes, remakes and punk covers are torturing and killing the music in a way that would make the baby-eating Chinese government ask the U.N. to intervene.

Someone has to do something to stop punk bands from covering 80's music. The sheer lack of originality does not compensate for the shitty instrumentals or the chalkboard-screeching vocals. I mean, holy fucking shit.

yagu (yayagu@gmail.com) said:

And, as many posters pointed out, my rant appeared to mix iTunes and iPod. That was intentional. It is the culture and behavior Apple cultivates -- most iPod owners I know go the route of iTunes, and I find for most the distinction truly is blurred.

Culture? Did you mean, advertising? I hate to burst your liberal bubble here, but advertising is how companies get their products to be known by consumers. Not all humans have telepathic powers to magically determine what products exist.

I'd love to see you try to make an MP3 player with the same features, capacity, and ease-of-use of the iPod, at a competitive price, and without massive amounts of advertising and business deals with recording companies.

Feel free to join the REAL WORLD, yagu.

yagu (yayagu@gmail.com) said:

And, as many posters pointed out, my rant appeared to mix iTunes and iPod. That was intentional. It is the culture and behavior Apple cultivates -- most iPod owners I know go the route of iTunes, and I find for most the distinction truly is blurred.

Culture? Did you mean, advertising? I hate to burst your liberal bubble here, but advertising is how companies get their products to be known by consumers. Not all humans have telepathic powers to magically determine what products exist.

I'd love to see you try to make an MP3 player with the same features, capacity, and ease-of-use of the iPod, at a competitive price, and without massive amounts of advertising and business deals with recording companies.

Feel free to join the REAL WORLD, yagu.

People, especially in the poor couuntries, are running pirated software because they otherwise would run no software at all. And, if with this pirated software, they manage to bootstrap their own situation, or that of their business out of the netherlands they become much more likely to buy and pay prices for non-pirated software.

Secondly, as Mr. Krakow points out, it's a Beta. Do we all know the concept of that word?

I take it that you don't work for google? As far as all the linked services go, I don't ever seem to have your typical "beta problems" like crashing every 10 minutes. My point? Beta depends on who you talk to and the "concept" no longer means what it used to mean. Especially as google extends its grasp on the world.

How much software of today is "beta"? Why spend developer time debugging when you can make your clients do it for you.

http://m.gmail.com/ has been around for some time, as well.

Like gmail: http://m.gmail.com/

1. First, It looks like Google is just using their .mobi domain to point to a subdirectory under their google.com domain. So why have the damn domain in the first place.
2. Second, look at the URL for Mobile Gmail (m.gmail.com). Instead of a four-letter TLD (.mobi), wouldn't it have been much easier to create a single-letter TLD (.m)? Does ICANN have more than two collective brain cells at all?!?!

azuretek azuretek@gmail.com said:

I'd love to mod you down, it's obvious he means call him using skype to his regular phone. Thus no extra charges. Sorry for being a jerk but I'm tired of people correcting eachother for senseless bullshit like this, somebody always has to be right on ./

Oh, I don't fear you as a mod, azuretek, because if you're eating the troll bait I doubt you'd have too many posts worthy enough to raise your karma.

Install KDE in Kiosk mode so if they fiddle about with it and stuff things up, just logging out and in again will restore the settings. As part of the install supply KPDF and Kate, Festival, Mbrola, and kttsd. Together these projects provide a very effective text to speech system which reads text pretty well to folks who are either dyslexic, or have tired eyes. KMail is not yet speech enabled, so you will have to use Konqueror and Gmail instead.

When Gmail was blocked in DaTong, I was still able to use https://gmail.com/ through a Korean proxy. The amount of data I transferred was almost identical to using an online bank or ebay.

Also I set it up in maybe 5 minutes on a computer in an internet cafe that I paid for in cash and had no security cameras. Just for reference.

this article is slashdotted, and I have to attend an IB information session.
can someone please email me a copy when it comes back up? thankyou

crispeeb@gmail.com
I am waiting to hear from you now!

Karl Cocknozzle writes: ...common lack of knowledge of what a 'beta' release really is: Not ready for prime-time.

I take it Karl doesn't work for google?

What URL do you use?

I do https://gmail.com/ after the login, it always switches to http.

While I agree that would suck, your "Gmail all the way." direction might need some thought. You're ditching a free email account with a company that deleted historical emails and switching to one that deleted their own blog and has access to not only your emails but search patterns, photos, probably PC files, and who knows what else.

Just get your own domain name and hosting account and do it yourself.

Gmail

You, mean, spammers can harvest this stuff?

spydermann@gmail.com

Ok, I agree with his wishing he could nuke the slashes, they serve no real purpose. But sorry, he didn't invent DNS so he never had the choice of how to specify the hostname portion of a URL. Any attempt to use anything other than a DNS hostname would have resulted in his invention either being fixed or discarded by the Internet community.

Imagine the chaos! http://com.gmail.com/ for access to your username@gmail.com account? Put ftp://com.bigrepository.ftp into a web browser or ftp.bigrepository.com in a standalone ftp (or command line based) client? What a load of crap.

Don't forget -- claims MUST BE submitted by December 31, 2006. If you want to be excluded from the settlement, you MUST FILE before May 1, 2006. If you do not exclude yourself, you can attend the fairness hearing, at your own expense, and be heard by yourself or through your attorney.

I run the SonySuit.com website an plan to start collecting messages about the settlement to submit to the court as exhibits to my statement at the fairness hearing. If you have a comment about the settlement, send it to sonysuit@gmail.com.

Why don't you write your email address in a less error prone way, e.g xxx@gmail.com or mailto:xxx@gmail.com . That way Sun can just click on it when they decide to send you your Free /V1agra Server!!!

The parent couldn't be more right.

I have a completely encrypted drive in my laptop for sensitive information in case I lose it or it is stolen. This is just wise in my humble opinion and can be easily achieved by many tools, like truecrypt. For everything else, there is Gmail! =)

Companies like Google and DoubleClick track you around their large advertising networks using fewer than 400 cookies. Doesn't make them any better, by the metric of "cookies == spyware" that you appear to have bought into. In fact, people seem to be tolerant of advertising as long as it keeps cool new products free.

You have the right idea tapping into this site as a resource pool, but perhaps you should look for talent here as well? Give everyone a job who scores 5/5 on this Slashdot thread. Start with me, and work your way down the list. I will provide a resume and credentials upon request.

I have seen so many trolls in this thread, and they almost sound like they have valid arguments. However, if you know facts, then they are easily busted.

1. Vonage does not require contracts. I have had Vonage for well over a year now, and I have referred people to Vonage with in the past month. No one I know who has Vonage has even heard of a service contract.

2. Myth: Vonage has lost of dropped calls or calls that do not connect. This is false. If you do experience these problems, then it is likly cause by a problem with A: Your network set up. B: Your cable line. I had Vonage with no problems, and then all the sudden I experienced degraded call quality and dropped calls, however my Xbox Live was dropping connection too. Turned out, the cable company did an "up grade" at a terminal close to my house and it had a bad connection in place. Cable company fixed it, no more problems with Vonage, and no more problems with Xbox Live. If anything, I would say VOIP has helped me resolve problems with my connection more than it has hurt me.

3. Myth: The call quality is horrible. Again, I have had Vonage for over a year. People cannot tell I use VOIP. Now, I can't use a ton of upstream while I'm on the phone because it CAN cause degraded call quality, but I have not had much problem with that. I am regularly playing a game on Xbox Live while talking on my vonage line with no problems, and Xbox live does use a pretty hefty amount of upstream.

I love my Vonage. If you want to try it for yourself, just email me, and I can send you a referral link. Granted, you can get 1 month free just by signing up through thier site, but going through my link would help a fellow slashdotter out. wagaman@gmail.com

It's your lucky day. I'm a programmer analyst who would love to get a paying job. Email me! But only if you're ready to spend millions of dollars on this project and give me all the credit.

I opt into all mailing list.

Google have a mobile version now at http://m.gmail.com.

Actually, what you said about Google enabling SSL using https://gmail.com/ is false! The only GMail URLs I know of which will use a secure connection once logged in are:

• https://mail.google.com/
• https://gmail.google.com/

Be sure to check out "continue" argument in the URLs. It uses plain HTTP for at least these URLs:

• http://gmail.com
• https://gmail.com
• http://www.gmail.com
• https://www.gmail.com
• http://google.com/mail

Don't forget to use SSL if you use GMail RSS feed as well!

I'd like to point out that Steve Gibson (the guy claiming WMF was a backdoor) covered this in his Security Now! podcast episode #19 (search for GMail in transcript transcript). Maybe he isn't that bad after all... and what were the guys at Google thinking?

Total overkill. Here is how to get a 250 Gb Raid 10 storange free of charge 1: Get 125 Gmail accounts 2: Get Google filestem 3: Job done

And no, I doubt gmail was designed with mobile phones in mind.
They have a version for cell phones which was obviously "designed with mobile phones in mind."

Perhaps you could visit the GMail home page and tell us where on that page you found an indication that it was under test?

If I asked my many non-techie friends who have GMail accounts what the significance of the word "beta" under the main logo was, how many of them do you think would know? If the answer isn't "all of them" then Google's marketing has misled someone, or at best they haven't corrected a false impression given by someone else. That is not the mark of a public test programme.

I don't have all the answers; there may be ways to do this that cost significantly less. Others have suggested that, rather than starting out throwing money at attorneys, we should instead begin when one person expresses interest (no donation, just interest) in removing a law, and write a letter to our congressperson and see what reaction we get.

Then, as more people "sign" the petition for that law's removal, we will forward those "signatures" to the legistator. There should be some (previously-defined) amount of time that, if we do not receive an adequate response, then we start throwing money at attorneys.

My interest right now is in creating the framework. My skills are heavy in Perl but light in Python and Ruby, so I'd prefer a Rails-type project that works under Perl. I've found Maypole, POE (Perl Object Environment) and a few others that I haven't investigated fully (Behavior, Rico, Prototype, script.aculo.us, others).

Getting back to your question, I think there might be interest from the EFF, ACLU, and similar organizations in removing ridiculous laws like these. And the government might even get into the game, since "Useless laws weaken the necessary laws" (Charles De Montesquieu). (Not that I expect that last to happen; government's job is, generally, creating more government.)

Separately, we'll have nanotechnology within 20 years and we'll all be able to escape the gravity well (we'll also probably break up the planets so that there are no more energy-stealing gravity wells), so I'm not sure whether my efforts would be better rewarded starting this project, or simply continuing my education regarding nanotechnology (or just masturbating for 20 years, since the machines will be able to out-think me once we get to nano so why not enjoy the now?).

That said, right now this interests me and I've got 2 weeks to see what I can do to get started. If you'd like to help, shoot me an email. Cheers!

The basic idea is this: a web site where people can donate, and direct their donations towards a certain effort.

That's too general. Specifically, it will be donations towards the removal of laws. We would negotiate with attorneys and determine (ballpark) how much it would cost to challenge and remove a specific law (a law that the audience expressed interest in). Then we'd post that goal (20% higher, perhaps, in case of overruns) on the website, allowing the audience to send money towards the goal.

Once the goal has been reached, the attorneys will be paid and directed to initiate the challenge.

We would start with the simpler, more ridiculous laws, like bees can't fly less than 6' over city streets (a law obviously written because they had a bee-keeper they wanted out of town, and changing the zoning laws was a much larger effort--but now they're stuck with bugs in their code!). And another, about not being able to walk your pet alligator down some Florida street without a leash.

Using these victories as a base, I hope to be able to ultimately challenge the society-destroying laws: laws which criminalize behaviors that are consentual.

Eliminating the DMCA would be a good bid as well, and would probably garner many donations from the Slashdot crowd.

I'm on vacation now, so I can spend the next two weeks actively working on this idea. Let me know if you're interested in collaborating.

>Or who have no choice with regards to ISPs because there is only one active in their area?

If a person is stuck with a SPEWS-listed ISP as their only realistic option to get connectivity, they do still have the option of setting up mail access elsewhere. For example, I hear that Gmail is the "in" thing these days.

FIRST POST hey kewl cats, crispeeb@gmail.com

First, let me say that I had been using Gmail Lite (free service) for a few months now. It worked decently on my phone (Sharp 903SH), but I had to log in every time I wanted to use it. I started using http://m.gmail.com/ and it works like a charm. Extremely fast (even on T-Mobile's $5.99/mo unlimited web plan!), and practical to use (maintains my login). I tend to like products with a small but well thought-out feature set (simplicity leads to fewer problems and inconveniences down the road), but I would like to see one feature added to this: attachments. My phone has a particularly good camera, and it would be terrific to be able to (1)Send photos I take directly from my phone (my JP firmware doesn't have POP mail built-in) and (2)View photos attached to messages. Maybe I'm seeing something wrong in the settings here, but I haven't been able to view/send attachments yet.

Thanks, G.

Thanks, G.

Weird, with my Blackberry 7520 WAP browser, when I go to http://m.gmail.com/ I get HTTP Error 406: Not Acceptable - The page you were trying to load is not supported by the browser.

I been using my gmail account from my phone for a while. Its the normal gmail.com not the m.gmail.com version. It is just like using a non-java browser works very well and uses very little data ~1M per month.

I been using my gmail account from my phone for a while. Its the normal gmail.com not the m.gmail.com version. It is just like using a non-java browser works very well and uses very little data ~1M per month.

I tried it on my mobile but it is unable to open it. Try opening http://m.gmail.com/ in opera.
XML parsing failed: mismatched tag (Line: 27, Character: 439)

I do not think the mayor shift is in the OS. I think that all our precious applications are moving online to the browser. Our email is handled perfectly by http://gmail.com/, http://writely.com/ handles our documents, http://del.icio.us/ stores our bookmarks, http://openomy.com/ stores our files... We can even access project management tools online (and for free) ...the OS main purpose is/will be to launch and handle multiple instances of our browsers.

I have had issues with getting Gmail to work through my university's proxy (and no, it's not a javascript problem), but accessing gmail through the address https://mail.google.com/ (as opposed to http://www.gmail.com/ always works (through that proxy, anyway).

We're talking about accessing Gmail using an encrypted http session. Normally the URL for gmail is http://www.gmail.com./ You tell me where I can alter that to read "https"? Is there more than one place? Or is it obvious?

I love you my dedicated servant!

Bill Gates


--- Posted using GMail Beta by Google