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Speculating About Gmail
rjelks writes "The Register is running an article about Google's new email service that was mentioned earlier,
here. The story details the new privacy concerns about Gmail's privacy policy and Google's tracking habits. The policy states that Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account. 'The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.'" Reader cpfeifer writes "Rich Skrenta (founder of ODP, and Topix) speculates in his blog that the real product Google is creating isn't web search or email, but a massively scalable, distributed computing platform. 'It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.' If he's right, the question isn't what product will Google announce next, but what product will they not be able to announce?"
Yes.
hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.
Yes, it's real. The 1000 MB storage limit is listed at the GMail homepage here.
If you are ainterested in an account, you can give them you current e-mail here
and they will send information once GMail goes gold.
Also note that Firefox and Mozilla support is explicitly mentioned!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Anyone notice that SpyMac is already offering a free 1GB E-mail account? No keyword based ads (not that I have a problem with Google's use of them). It even gives pop3 access, which last I read, gmail won't (at first).
I'm starting to think this isn't the best place to promote my Anti-Sig Campaign.
Except Microsoft didn't start Hotmail - it was bought by them later on. That's where all the jokes about "even Microsoft runs FreeBSD" come from - the Hotmail servers ran FreeBSD before and for a good while after Microsoft bought them.
http://fury.com/article/1990.php
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FM Clan
If you offer 1gb to a lot of people, you can find ways to compress all that data. For example, when mail (example: spam) is sent to 100 people, keep 1 copy of the message and give everyone a link to that message. Also, text compresses pretty well, so using some CPU power they can save on hard drive space. And I doubt that most people will come close to the 1gb limit, so google might be able to offer this while only having to have a fraction of the storage space.
This guy pops up on The Register from time to time, and comes across as less balanced than average even by their standards.
Particularly he has a bee in his bonnet about Google. I've never found his shrill arguments very convincing.
I'm sure Google will go bad one day (perhaps when they've gone public, or when the founders leave), but for now they're relying on quality rather than marketing, which gets the thumbs up from me.
I'd trust them at least as much as Hotmail if I wanted such an account.
D.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
...but rather (all this according to the article) their own distributed, fault-tolerant Google Filesystem (GFS) [PDF]. Apparently each of their 1/2 depth 1U servers has only one or two drives. If a server fails (which happens routinely with 100k servers) then it's simply left in place and the data is automatically replicated onto another server from one of the redundant copies.