Slashback: Munich, Harlan, Alacrity

Read on below for tonight's edition of Slashback, with followups to several previous Slashdot stories, including the Linux-in-Munich saga, Harlan Ellison's feud with AOL, Hotmail's response to the growing space for webmail, and more. Read on for the details.

Please don't link "here": case in point. Kent Brewster writes "As previously mentioned here(1), here(2), and here(3), national treasure Harlan Ellison has been fighting a drawn-out battle with AOL over alt.binaries.e-book. Looks like a settlement has been reached; details (such as they are) are on AOL."

Papa Legba adds a link to an informative page on the suit's progress, with lots of informative links.

The basement dwellers burrow deeper. kevin_conaway writes "Accoring to this article on Tech Target, the DNS outage at Akamai was caused by a massive DDOS attack on Akamai's servers. Akamai Technologies Inc. said a 'sophisticated, large-scale distributed denial of service attack' on its domain name service bogged down several of its clients' Web sites yesterday morning, and that it's investigating the incident with federal authorities."

Time to quit your Winin' marmoset writes "As a followup to this story, Dave Winer has posted information about transitioning weblogs.com sites. Rogers Cadenhead and Steve Kirks pitched in to help. The plan includes a 90-day free evaluation period, during which the affected users will be able to make local copies of their data, sign up for paid hosting, or move to another hosting solution."

Pay up, Pal. ack154 writes "Following up from a previous slashdot story, PayPal may have reached a preliminary settlement in the class action lawsuit brought against them in 2002. The lawsuit was regarding the freezing of suspected fraud accounts and communication of limits on accounts. Limited details are available right now, but the eBay announcement states that anyone who signed up for a PayPal account between Oct 1999 and Jan 2004 may be eligible."

Forkenbrock points to this USAToday today article which says that "Ebay's Paypal will pay a total of 9.25 million dollars to its users (businesses and individuals)."

What about Java vs. T++? Stefan de Bruijn was one of several readers who reacted to the benchmarks cited in the Slashdot post titled 'Java faster than C++'.

He writes "I took the liberty to re-write a major piece of the C++ part of the benchmark. Furthermore, the Intel compiler has been tested as well. The Java code was assumed 'correct.'

The results are quite different than the former posting. Here, C++ appears to be a winner for the vast majority of programs; where Java scored better with (recursive) algorithms and the use of file IO (where it must be remarked that the C++ code uses iostreams)." joekaylor writes "I did a similar study 6-months ago to the study sited recently here on Slashdot, and I did it with java jdk 1.4.x. Java performance has been underestimated for QUITE some time. It's not the best tool every time, but it is not considered often enough and for the wrong reasons."

And an anonymous reader writes "This article by USC graphics researchers surveys a number of good (mostly numeric) benchmarks and then explains the theory of why maybe java should be faster than C++. It also raises the (unanswered) question of why geeks (ostensibly intelligent and scientifically-minded people) continue to believe some ideas (for example, 'garbage collection is slow') despite strong evidence to the contrary that has been available for many years."

Well, it's sort of like a gigabyte. helloanand writes "So, a day after yahoo relaunched their email service with 100 MB space, hotmail also expanded their offering to 25 MB. Just logged into my hotmail account and saw the space bumped up. The thing that I noticed is that MSN/Hotmail didn't make a big splash about it. Its actually a good thing for the users. Gmail started this trend by coming up with 1 GB (yes! gigabyte) worth of space. Then yahoo joined the party with their own 100 MB version and now the latest to join in bill gates & co (aka MSN Hotmail). Lets see what other changes does Gmail stimulate to the email service. Also the thing to note is that Google's gmail is being closely observed by the established players like MSN and Yahoo."

Each city represents a star system; players alternate by country. Wudbaer writes "The Munich city council has finally OK'ed the multi-step 30 Million Euro project to migrate the Munich city council to Linux, as heise news reports (German text). The planned high-profile migration of the administration of one of the largest cities in Germany has already created a lot of interest both in pro and anti-OSS camps, and was rumored to have run into substantial problems at the beginning of the year which might have endangered the council's final OK for the project. But now apparently the road is open for the project. Go Tux !"

Marcus links to this announcement on the city government's web page, and suggests that you put it through Google.

securitas writes "Hot on the heels of Munich's decision to go with Linux, the City of Bergen, Norway will replace its Unix and Windows core infrastructure with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8. The second part of the implementation will migrate the city's educational network - with 100 schools and 32,000 users - from 100 Windows application servers to 20 Linux IBM eServer BladeCenters. Bergen is Norway's second-largest city. ZDNet UK's Michael Parsons discusses the choice in an interview with Bergen CTO Ole Bjoern Tuftedal."

Making less of a mess. HishamMuhammad writes "The GoboLinux story featured recently on /. got the project some publicity, but again a number of misconceptions showed up, from people who think we are "just another user-friendly distro", because of our verbose pathnames like /System/Settings. Here is an article I wrote in order to explain the principles behind the design of GoboLinux (also in PDF), which tells our side of the story."

Comments

Hotmail? That's a lie!

[AEton]

My Hotmail account still only has 2MB of storage - and every time I leave it alone for more than two days, it fills up with spam. I checked the site pretty carefully for any expansion offers, but it looks like either the poster lied or was one of a select few to get an offer that's unavailable (for free).

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[JPriest]

I just checked my MSN account and I also only still have 3 meg. I clicked the get extra storage link, pricing for a 10 meg account is $19.95/year, and 25 meg accounts are $29.95/year.

For $19.99/year with Yahoo, I can get a 2 Gig account.

I'm glad Yahoo upgraded to 100 megs, I've had the same yahoo alias for several years and never gotten spam to it, I use yahoo notepad all the time.

With hotmail, I have created uncommon aliases and gotten spam to them before even having a chance to give out the address.

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[stevesliva]

Yup, I still have Hotmail's 2MB limit going. Sure is nice watching bounce-notice 40KB viral .pif attachments with my address spoofed as the sender bump my quota up in 2% increments about 5-10 times/day, to say nothing of the dozens of other messages that aren't so large. But I hear that a full Junk Mail folder cannot actually stop incoming mail.

I do however feel like mailing MS a floppy so that they can double my storage. Cheapskates... the postage would cost more.

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[Peter McC]

That's the beauty of hotmail - a full account never stops incoming mail! It just bumps out old stuff! You know, the stuff that you actually wanted to keep. Obviously that's much less useful than some brand-new spam.

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[theyre watching you]

well... i just logged into my free hotmail account and it says i have 10MB. how strange. maybe this confusion is just another part of their Scheme to Take Over the World

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[quale]

For downloading from Hotmail without Outlook try out Hotpop - http://www.boolean.ca/hotpop/

Its a pop3 to hotmail proxy that works just fine for me.

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[steveha]

No, Hotmail is owned by Microsoft. They have a Visual Basic to Take Over the World. Scheme is only used by people who talk with a LISP.

(define kidding 1)

steveha

Hotmail now 25 MB

[k4_pacific]

Of course, the reason that Hotmail is 25 MB, and Yahoo is 100 MB, is because Hotmail runs on Windows server, which needs the rest of the space for its system files.

I figured Microsoft would try to turn Hotmail into a category killer by making it UNLIMITED!!! (Actually, they would promise it, but never deliver) They would of course pay for this with the OEM tax on new computers.

Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[macrom]

I just checked and Hotmail is still showing 2 MB for me. This link still shows a fee of $29.95 a year for 25 MB.

I always thought it ludicrous to pay MSN for more space for one simple reason : the only cause of me exceeding my space limit was all of the spam that I got from having a Hotmail account, and Microsoft is still the only company (that I know of) that counts your junk mail folder against your quota. Why should I give them money to house more crap when it's their insecure system that's the cause of all of my spam?

Re:Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[k4_pacific]

Well, surely the Microsoft brand name is worth paying for. No?

Re:Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[aixou]

Everytime i open a new hotmail account, it is filled with spam the next day. My yahoo accounts on the other hand get very little even though I use them daily (I don't put them on sign-up forms, but I send and receive email daily) . What's up with this crap? Have spammers hacked Hotmails customer database or what?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Harlan Ellison

[Angry Toad]

Ellison said: "Through this litigation, I have come to realize that AOL respects the rights of authors and artists, and has a comprehensive system for addressing the complaints of copyright holders.

Wow - I'm genuinely impressed that they managed to get that much out of him. I'd at least expect that he would have gotten pissed off, thrown a tantrum, and then insist that they refer to him by a silly name in the press release.

Harlan is just pissed no one posts his books

[Black Art]

Harlan's books are rarely posted to alt.binaries.ebooks. The only times i have seen it happen is after he has one of his legendary tanrums.

If he really wants to do justice to the authors whos work does get posted to that group, he should work to see that their work remains in print and available in local bookshops.

Media tie-ins and "books in the world of famous author by someone you never heard of" do more harm to real authors than e-books ever will. The less you can find real authors in your local bookstore, the more people will turn to e-books.

Re:Harlan is just pissed no one posts his books

[1u3hr]

Media tie-ins and "books in the world of famous author by someone you never heard of" do more harm to real authors than e-books ever will.

I've downloaded a few of these. It was interesting and occasionally useful to have the searchable text of a book I was reading (legal printed edition) to find things. But I can't imagine reading a novel that way. Even if I printed it out, it's much less nice to read than in printed and bound form. With online used books (Amazon has them, many others) you can get most books, except for the very newest, for a couple of dollars, less than it would cost me to print it out, even if my time is free. And my public library has its catalogue online, I can search and find books in any branch, reserve them and pick them up a few days later.

Of course, Baen has been putting the full text of a lot of novels online. It's apparently borne out the belief that it would only encourage the hard copy sales.

One of the bigger untold stories

[Anonymous Coward]

Hotmail users have been finding that gmail invites are getting routed to their spam filters, even when they have the spam filter disabled. What's up with that?

Yahoo e-mail

[richwmn]

My yahoo e-mail went to the 100mb limit the other day, but, in addition for the last few months neither the bulk mail (spam) or the trash folder have counted against the limit

Nothing in this hat but the same old rabbit.

[theirpuppet]

Perhaps it's just a gimmick. All jokes aside, Hotmail is still part of MickeySoft and them increasing it to 25MB is still a joke in the face of what the other big boys are doing.

But, we should still make consideration for the face that hotmail has tons of users. Gmail is new, although there are good minds behind it. Yahoo is looking for any way to make the press. MickeySoft doesn't necessarily need to attract users so much as retain and build upon that retention.

That sounds a bit like Windows Dominance and all the /. stories lately.

Re:Nothing in this hat but the same old rabbit.

[aardvarkjoe]

That sounds a bit like Windows Dominance and all the /. stories lately.

If the limit had been raised to ten gigabytes, everyone would be complaining about how they're using their vast cash reserves to drive everyone else out of the webmail market. If they had left the limit at two megs, the complaint would be that they're just using their market dominance and not innovating. If they got rid of hotmail completely, everyone would be whining about how their five-year-old address was disappearing, and if they sold the hotmail domain to Google, the conspiracy theorists would have a field day.

No matter what the situation, you guys always seem to know Microsoft is at fault. It's just the reason why that changes.

Re:Paypal/Email Response

[hypermike]

A side note:

Ive only used blogger for about 3 weeks and even I got an invite. Thats the way to go...

Hooray for Hotmail

[heptapod]

Now I can get 23 more megabytes of penis enlargement, Paris Hilton and weight loss in 30 days messages and I'll still be over quota!

Re:Hooray for Hotmail

[wagemonkey]

Funniest thing I've had from a yahoo groups list was somebody asking what a Paris Hilton was...

Please don't post your answers here, but you can imagine the replies he got!

Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[miu]

A couple of the referenced links on java note that GC is likely to increase memory locality, but I have never seen non-trivial (greater than 20k lines) C or C++ code that did not use a memory arena or customer allocators. Even smaller programs benefit from simple techniques like using std::vector to emulate a std::map for increased memory locality

I think the fact that new/delete are a huge part of the overhead of complicated programs is pretty obvious to anyone who has every profiled their code. Once you throw threads into the mix you will see another massive hit to time spent in allocation.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Markus Registrada]

The original report (anonymously) parrots common propaganda in favor of garbage collection. In fact, people who think Java is slow think so because when they run real Java programs, they find that real Java programs really do run slowly. The question why has lots of good, easily articulated answers, having to do with virtual memory locality, and cache locality, and cache poisoning, and even hard-to-avoid misconfiguration. (Do you know how much memory to tell your Java runtime to allow each of your programs to use?)

Nobody complains that C++ programs are slow, because they aren't. Nobody is obliged to notice they are C++ programs, because they are easy to install, and they just work. They don't call much attention to themselves, because they rarely suffer from the security flaws common to C programs. (Some people think C++ iostreams are slow, but gcc-3.4's iostreams are as fast as, and often much faster than, libc equivalents; the slowness turned out to be just a bad implementation, now fixed.)

In principle a really good garbage collector might not be slow, for certain common kinds of jobs, However, Java runtimes generally can't use those garbage collectors; they have to use the slow ones instead. Haskell is supposed to be (uniquely) very good at helping its GC maintain locality, but that doesn't matter much because Haskell is slow anyway.

The presence of garbage collection actually prevents the language from offering the kind of automated, encapsulated resource management uniquely possible in C++, leaving coders to use essentially C-like management for resources other than memory. Does garbage collection really carry its weight? It has been years since I last coded a "delete" statement. What could GC possibly do for me, to make up for eliminating the most useful library idioms I have?

GC propaganda is common in academic Computer Science departments, but real programs are built by engineers who are not fooled. LISP has failed to take the world by storm, decade after decade, for sound reasons, just like so many more-modern languages also crippled by GC and LISP apologia. GC doesn't just automate memory management; dependence on it automatically confines the language to niche uses.

You can tell a bad benchmark because it seems to show that languages you already know are slow aren't.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[LoocSiMit]

In fact, people who think Java is slow think so because when they run real Java programs, they find that real Java programs really do run slowly.

In my experience people find that the GUIs on Java programs run slow. Which they do. That makes the whole thing feel slow. It's a real concern, but not directly related to the language, VM, garbage collection, level of abstraction or the rest.

Gnome is noticably slower on my PC than Win 2000. That does not mean the Linux kernel is slower than the NT5 kernel.

All those benchmarks have shown me is that unless I am writing a huge computationally intensive application then performance should not be one of the criteria on which I decide whether to use C++ or Java.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Decaff]

they find that real Java programs really do run slowly.

Not true. Most people who run Java programs have no idea that they are running Java programs.

Nobody complains that C++ programs are slow, because they aren't. Nobody is obliged to notice they are C++ programs, because they are easy to install, and they just work. They don't call much attention to themselves, because they rarely suffer from the security flaws common to C programs.

This is so wrong, its hard to know where to start.

First, installation. Java apps can be packaged as a single JAR or WAR file that can be run just by clicking on it, or putting into the right directory of an app server. Alternatively, you can set up networked installs via WebStart. The thing is you can prepare a single binary for all platforms.

With C++ you need to get the right compiled binary for the processor, and the right versions of system libraries: just look at the trials of installing something via rpms.

As for speed - you must have a short memory. In the 80s and early 90s there were serious worries about C++ performance, with many complaints that it was far too slow when compared with C or assembler. Remember the complaints about the speed of early versions of Mozilla? It was so bad that many of us assumed it was some interpreted system. No - it was C++!

As for 'just working' and 'security flaws' this is directly contrary to evidence. Unless you code using bounds-checked collection libraries (which can be intrinsically slow) there is absolutely no difference between C++ and C in terms of memory access, and an equal possibility of buffer overruns.

As for garbage collection: The comment about niche uses is just nonsense. Not by any rational definition could languages such as Java and C# be defined as 'niche'.

Alas, But Hotmail sucks even more now

[sovtekmidget]

i don't pay anything for yahoo, and they give you ten times what hotmail will give you for free- while microsoft tries to charge you 20 bucks fo a tenth of the space! Also, to no matter what I do, my inbox is filled with atrocious amounts of spam ARRGH!

Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[roror]

Yes, I am talking about gmail demise. We all love google and hate yahoo ads, but, with the release date of gmail still uncertain, privacy rumours in everyones mind, the chance of gmail taking a lead might be really slim. It might verywell be a email_SE (read special edition) for the geeks. Nothing more. I wonder how many would trade the superior spam filtering of yahoo for the 900MB extra storage of gmail. (And we all know how to use adblock don't we ? so the yahoo ad problem is not that much of a problem.) There is atleast 6 months before gmail goes public. Yahoo could make a killing in this period. I don't see many yahooligans moving to gmail - i.e. when they get a chance to. Yahoo has done its homework this time. Just a little bit of storage hammer can keep the gmail away.

Re:Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[dubiousmike]

unfortunately, many of us still feel that Yahoo isn't far enough removed from their shady past (spamming me once they bought Launch, and changed their privacy policy qhich automatically opted me into a bunch of third party mailings).

I do agree that Yahoo is cleaner than Hotmail, but I will certainly move over to try Google once it is available to me. Google has never struck me as dishonest while Yahoo has.

Re:Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[tfoss]

Yes, I am talking about gmail demise.

Oh c'mon, you just wanted the first "Gmail is dying" post, didn't you?

We all love google and hate yahoo ads, but, with the release date of gmail still uncertain, privacy rumours in everyones mind, the chance of gmail taking a lead might be really slim. It might verywell be a email_SE (read special edition) for the geeks. Nothing more

Or maybe it'll do to Yahoo mail what Google did to Yahoo search.

I wonder how many would trade the superior spam filtering of yahoo for the 900MB extra storage of gmail.

Superior? To what? The still beta Gmail filter about which very little is really known? Doesn't it seem likely that a company as into research as Google would be able to create a damn fine filter technology? (Beyond which, I wouldn't even call yahoo's spam filter that good...)

There is atleast 6 months before gmail goes public. Yahoo could make a killing in this period.

Make a killing off of all those users of its free email system?

Yahoo has done its homework this time. Just a little bit of storage hammer can keep the gmail away.

I don't buy it, but more to the point, Gmail is still in beta. Still will be for a while, and making any predictions of how things will go is just kind of silly.

-Ted

Gmail -- it's not really about the space

[Ryu2]

It's not really Gmail's storage space that most people (myself included) find compelling about Gmail. Other free services like Spymac (http://www.spymac.net/) offer comparable storage amounts also.

Rather, it's the clean user interface, the automatic threading of messages, and the fast searching that most users (myself included) like.

Only if Yahoo, MS, SBC, et al. can replicate that part of the user experience, will Gmail have a viable competitor.

Re:Thoughts

[Total_Wimp]

I subscribe to two different yahoo mail services and I have to say I'm pretty confused about what they heck they're doing. I get Yahoo mail plus which just gave me 2 Gigabytes (yes, gigabytes) for only $20 a year. No free, but a very nice price.

The confusing part is that I also subscribe to Yahoo's business email (don't ask why I do both... It's either complicated, or I'm stupid or both) Anyway, their business mail, which goes for $10 per month, is still only getting 25MB. Note, this is 1/4 the space of what the free email people get and, well, a whole, whole lot less than the mail plus people, but at a much higher price.

As a very long time yahoo mail user I very much applaud the new offerings of Yahoo, but their offerings are very unevenly applied. It's a little frustrating and I'd love to have someone explain it to me.

TW

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Alien54]

I'm waiting to grab myself an address at GMail, though, and then... bye bye Hotmail!

Try Spymac.com which allows anyone to signup for a free 1 gig account

aventuremail.com also is in beta, but allows 2 gig online storage

No wonder...

[Ianoo]

he thing that I noticed is that MSN/Hotmail didn't make a big splash about it. Its actually a good thing for the users. Gmail started this trend by coming up with 1 GB (yes! gigabyte) worth of space. Then yahoo joined the party with their own 100 MB version and now the latest to join in bill gates & co (aka MSN Hotmail).

No wonder MSN Hotmail isn't making a "big splash about it" considering their service has managed to cough up one fourtieth of Gmail's space and one quarter of Yahoo's space. I'd hardly call that "joining the party" - more like a desperate move. Let's hope that Gmail and a "new wave" of similar services drives these ad-ridden insecure proprietary badly-run messes under once and for all. Who on earth would want to use MSN Hotmail when Gmail goes to full public access?

Re:Thoughts

[cpt kangarooski]

Regarding Ellison, he's actually done somewhat less than you think. He came up with story ideas on two, count 'em two episodes (admittedly from 1998) but didn't even do the scripts for either.

Frankly, he's been a jerk about this whole deal -- but then, when has he _not_ been jerk?

The Logic of Ellison

[geekwench]

Harlan Ellison is a decent writer. However, he's also a fantastic grandstander. His temper tantrums and aggressive behavior at writers' conventions are nothing short of legendary. The quality of his writing aside (I like most of his short stories), a good portion of his popularity is tied directly in to his notoriety. He knows, much to the chagrin of many people, that his antics keep his books on the shelves where less - colorful - authors disappear from print.
It doesn't surprise me that AOL settled. Having seen the man on one of his torrential rants (not, thankfully, as the focus of his ire), I almost feel sorry for the execs of AOL/Time/Warner, imagining what sort of invective must have been leveled against them.

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[cei]

He knows, much to the chagrin of many people, that his antics keep his books on the shelves where less - colorful - authors disappear from print.

But the sad fact is that I don't believe any of his novels are currently in print, and of his 30+ short story collections, I think only 3 or 4 are readily available.

I really had high hopes for Borealis publishing's Edgeworks series, but they only managed to get 4 volumes out. I'd love to see Memos from Purgatory and Web of the City published in one volume with an updated introduction to the two...

Geek-machismo..

[k98sven]

It also raises the (unanswered) question of why geeks (ostensibly intelligent and scientifically-minded people) continue to believe some ideas (for example, 'garbage collection is slow') despite strong evidence to the contrary that has been available for many years.

It's not an unanswered question, it was answered quite long ago, in satirical form:
Real programmers don't use Pascal.

The same attitude prevails today, albeit the programming languages are different.

Personally, I've been around long enough to have heard "C is slow, you should be writing that in assembly language". And now the mantra is "Java is slow, you should use C/C++".

That is the first category of machismo anyway: speed-freaks who are quick to recommend C, yet seem surprized when their favorite program turns out to have a buffer-overflow exploit.

The second category appears to be the CS-geek-machismo which is more academic.. These are the guys who are talking about how it all should be Lisp, no matter what. And Java sucks because of its typing, etc. Practical use of the language seems to be of less concern than the design of the language itself for these guys.

Then there are those who believe in using the right tool for the right job. Sadly, you don't hear as much from these guys, probably because macho-geeks are loud and obnoxious by definition.

Anyway, I used to teach a beginners' course in programming, and often got the question on what the 'best' programming language was. I usually answered by asking: "What's the best tool, a screwdriver or a hammer?"

Re:Geek-machismo..

[Too Much Noise]

"What's the best tool, a screwdriver or a hammer?"

how big a hole do you need to punch?

Re:Geek-machismo..

[Decaff]

Then there are those who believe in using the right tool for the right job.

The idea that developers should switch easily between development languages is one of the great myths of IT. Languages aren't tools: they are entire workshops. Switching may be possible if you work on many very small and entirely independent projects, but for most developers its just not practical or sensible.

For each language that is used in an organisation there has to be an investment in training and the building up of repositories of re-usable code. The last thing you want is to have two developers who both picked what they thought was the best tool for their part of a job trying to combine bits of PERL and Java, or be unable to use large Java class libraries developed over years because someone decided that it would be neat to code a new project in Lisp.

The only sensible approach is to spend a lot of time researching the benefits of different languages and development tools and then standardise on these.

Re:Thoughts

[mfarah]

Harlan Ellison hasn't written anything significant since Babylon 5

Actually, Harlan worked there as creative consultant, not as a writer. Sure, he does share story (not script!) credits in a couple episodes, but I still think it's too much to call him a writer in B5.

Straczynski, on the other hand...

[Raises hand]

[Atario]

Me too. Completely took me by surprise -- I logged in Monday morning and BAM, everything's different. (No warning! How did Yahoo! manage to do this without tipping off Slashdot??) New look, 2GB storage, no graphical ads, more filters, more address blocks, disposable addresses, trainable spam filter, and so on and so on. Ever since Yahoo! bought Rocketmail and turned it into Yahoo! Mail, I've had to have a .sig explaining that the following lines were an ad and not from me. Well, I've finally taken it off. No more in-mail ads!!

Thank you, Google!

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[adpowers]

There is more to Gmail than just the space, though. There is also the amazing, sleak interface (that runs almost like a client app) and wonderful Google searching of your messages. Plus, it is so damn fast.

That said, I just got five more invitiations today and all my friends already have Gmail. If anyone wants an invite (preferably Hotmail users), then shoot me an e-mail at adpowers@gmail.com. I'll save a spot for Arlen, other than that, it is first come first serve.

Re:Thoughts

[orthogonal]

The confusing part is that I also subscribe to Yahoo's business email (don't ask why I do both... It's either complicated, or I'm stupid or both) Anyway, their business mail, which goes for $10 per month, is still only getting 25MB. Note, this is 1/4 the space of what the free email people get and, well, a whole, whole lot less than the mail plus people, but at a much higher price.

Yahoo's not pricing what's "fair", they're pricing what the market can bear.

They've figured (probably correctly) that business users can and will pay more -- and probably also would find it more disruptive and expensive, in terms of lost business --, to change addresses.

Since businesses can, and will, and have more to lose if they won't, pay more, Yahoo is more than willing to charge business users more.

Re:Thoughts

[sloanster]

1) RE: Linux in Munich

I think Linux is great for government. As long as you standardize on something, that's all that counts, whether it's made by professionals at Microsoft or 16-year olds with a SourceForge page.

LOL, just curious, how did this silly mickeysoft fanboy crap get modded as interesting?

As far as I can see, Munich will be dealing with IBM and/or Novell/SuSE - I don't believe any of those firms employ 16 year olds...

As to the oft repeated silliness to the effect that linux vendors and developers are teenagers, I actually looked into it and found that the average linux kernel programmer is a 30-something, fully-employed engineer with a technical degree.

So much for stereotypes - sorry to ruin the fun...

The fastest language is .... Perl

[acomj]

They gave a bunch of programmers some tasks to do. The fastest language was...

perl then java then c then C++.

It had more to do with the perl programmers use of hashes than anything else. Thats the way perl programmer think.

Basically the more difficult you make it to use more efficent data structures the less likely programmers are to use them. C++ even with the STL is non-trivial.

The company I worked for was having trouble with STL three years ago, and only one guy there really knew it well. We were parsing lots of text. Java was easy to use with well documented libraries and surprising fast. And everyone picked up the java programming language quickly.

Will highly optimized C/C++ toast all other languages? Yes, but writting the code is significantly more difficult and time consuming. For many tasks computers are fast enough now where it doesn't matter for many tasks..

Re:The fastest language is .... Perl

[teval]

How I think of it is this:

If I want a speed demon or something that's going to get really big (a large game that has OpenGL support + shaders for example), I'll use C++.

If I want something just so I can perfom a few quick tasks, and that I can carry around or just for showing people proof that a certain thing works, I'll use perl.

If I want something that works, I want it now, quick and dirty I'll do it in lisp. I say dirty because most people get lost with lisp so they can't read it at all.

It all depends on what I have to do, it's why I don't use java, I don't see a point or something lacking in what I do.

I have no case and I must scream....

[billstewart]

Somebody really needs to put Harlan and RMS in the same room for a while. Maybe with ESR to moderate.

AOL didn't put enough work into blowing off Harlan and his lawyer when they first complained. The DMCA is an awful mess, and people besides Harlan have found even worse things to do with it than he did, but he really does not appear to have understood Usenet or ISPs or the Internet particularly well, except as a medium for evil nassttyy fffffile ssssharrerrrssss to steal hisss preciousssss. Now, piracy is not unknown on Usenet, and while it's not quite mandatory in many of the alt.binaries newsgroups, that's only because spam fills up the rest of the spare bits. But that not only doesn't mean that he can reasonably expect ISPs to pay copyright lawyers to read through every terabyte of slowly-moving-self-parody that comes in on the newsgroups to determine what might or might not be pirated, it also doesn't mean that it's reasonable for him to demand that they block access to material or sites that their subscribers might try to access, any more than he can reasonably demand that Xerox not sell devices that facilitate book piracy.

gmail is amazing

[rbright]

I simply don't see how anyone who has actually used GMail could honestly think it has any competition at all.

And I don't mean from Yahoo!, Hotmail, or the latest 2GB provider. I mean any mail client period. Web-based or otherwise.

Yes the 1GB storage capacity is awesome, but it's just icing on the cake to an amazing interface. GMail is a pleasure to use.

It's not just faster than any other web-based mail client. It's faster than any other website period. Assuming a decent amount of bandwidth, it's faster than most locally running GUI clients, except for possibly KMail or mutt.

The interface is revolutionary. It makes hot new clients like Thunderbird look backward. Expect to see GUI client knockoffs as soon it gets out of beta.

GMail kicks ass, pure and simple. It will be a very, very difficult for anyone else to catch up. The only thing Yahoo! and Hotmail have going for them right now is existing userbase and name recognition. But Google has that too and I bet that can transfer a lot of that over to GMail if they try hard enough.

Re:Thoughts

[ConceptJunkie]

That's the problem. Ellison is always incoherently pissed off at something, you can never know when it's actually legitimate.

A friend of mine met him at an American Bookseller's Association meeting years ago and commented that it's a shame you can't find his books easier. Harlan's response? "F--- you."

Re:Thoughts

[miu]

Harlan Ellison hasn't written anything significant since Babylon 5, and that was over 10 years ago in 1994

But lots of his old stuff is gold. He may be something of a dick (although I think the legend may be bigger than reality there), but the man has wrote some of the best short fiction of the 20th century.

Also, as a couple people have mentioned already Harlan was a story consultant (wrote the series bible) and that was about it for B5.

Yahoo has upgraded existing paying customers

[Gregoyle]

I found out along with everyone else a couple days ago that Yahoo had upgraded their mail services, but the post doesn't mention the upgrade they made to those of us paying for services through them.

About a year ago I upgraded my Yahoo account to 25MB of storage for something like $20 a year. It was worth it to me because that was the email address I had used for years, and i wanted to be able to access every important message I had gotten in a few years from anywhere (I'm in the military). Yahoo had bumped up my inbox size a couple times before (I think new users got 4 MB but mine had gone up to 8 by that time). But I was running out of room and wanted to keep my messages.

So anyway, I logged on a couple days ago, and my mailbox had been upgraded to 2 GB. Damn.

It also turned out that they had implemented almost every feature I had wanted, and a few that I didn't know I wanted. I almost never get a spam mail, partly through discipline and partly through Yahoo's pretty decent spam filtering. The one feature I really wanted was the ability to search through all my mail. They put this in, and along with a few other features (like filtering rules and better spam protection), put in a feature which i had never actually wanted before, but that was only because I had never thought of it.

I think it's called something like "Address Guard", and it's a lot like what American Express is doing with its credit cards for online purchases. They realized that you can never stop ALL the spam, so they made it so you can make throwaway email addresses that link to your actual address. You give out your throwaway, and if you start getting spammed at it you can just delete it, and ::poof::, all the spam starts bouncing. I think you can make as many as you'd like, one for each site where you feel it's necessary. That is way cool. (I know you can do this with your own private server as well, but that would cost a lot more and be less accessable).

The enormous mailbox limit has given rise to a new feature request. Now i wish they had a remote disk function, where I could back up part of my hard drive on their servers. A 200 MB PGP disk could hold just about all my sensitive files (including scans of all my military records) and make them accessable from anywhere. I know there are services (like .mac) that do this, but with a 2 GB space I could even keep multiple versions of the backup. As it is they have a 10 MB message size limit.

Gobo Linux...

[evilviper]

After reading the doc, I think I can answer all questions rather quickly...

Q: Why change the directory names/structure?
A: Because he can. No other reason.

Q: Why aren't user and superuser programs seperate?
A: He just does not understand the numerous benefits of doing so. I really mean that.

Q: How can I boot into a skeleton (single-user, root / only) system?
A: You can't. He's decided that you must use bootable media, and no other way. I leave it to you to discuss the problems with that...

Q: How about remote mounts and/or seperate partitions?
A: You have one choice... Union mounts. He believes doing it the normal Unix way is morally wrong, or something like that.

Q: Why is the name of root changed?
A: This is a multi-part answer:

1. He dreams of a no-root system, where everything is peaches and cream, but since it doesn't work well in the real world, there is still a root.
2. He feels more secure in the cloud of obscurity that comes when root isn't named "root".
3. He likes people to ask, so he can take the opportunity to rant about how a Unix user/root system is wrong, and terrible. He's not trying to work on the new (theoretically superior) system, he just wants to complain.

I think that covers it pretty well.

stagnant

[twitter]

But, we should still make consideration for the fact that hotmail has tons of users.

It's sheer software fanaticism coupled with greed that has stagnated Hotmail. I can consider Hotmail's user load for about half a second. Then I remember Hotmail's history and know that Microsoft has taken a cool thing and run it into the ground.

Microsoft has wasted tons of money and time converting Hotmail over to their own OS. The effort failed more than once and they had to increase the number of machines just to keep up with stagnant or declining demand. Their own consultants use the Hotmail example of Unix virtues. Is it any wonder that the only improvements have been cosmetic and trivial?

The list of improvements is slim. Microsoft has added some spam filtering, "folders". They have also improved the attachment dialogs so that it's easier to fill your 2500KB. You also get more adds. Singles adds my wife finds cheesy and offensive.

The service has been unusable for a couple of years. My wife seems happy with it, but she's also happy with clear channel and other advert heavy broadcasts. Watching her try to get things done with it is sort of like watching someone try to eat well buttered, American rice with chopsticks. It's impossible for her and family members to exchange files over 2K despite cable modems at both ends.

Oh well.

Java? Bah! Bow to the mighty Ruby!

[murr]

The biggest problem in the Java vs. C++ benchmark is that it benchmarks mostly toy problems and library fuinction. The toy problems are extremely sensitive to algorithmic changes.

Here's my implementation of the Ackermann function in Ruby:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

def ack(m,n)
case m
when 0
return n+1
when 1
return n+2
when 2
return 2*n+3
else
return ack(m-1, n>0 ? ack(m,n-1) : 1)
end
end

n = ARGV.length > 0 ? ARGV[0].to_i : 1
puts "ack(3,#{n}): #{ack(3,n)}"

Not only is this massively faster (in an interpreted language) than either Java or C++, but it also handles much bigger input arguments, because ruby supports bignums (on my machine, it calculated ack(3,400) pretty much instantaneously.

Paypal's geographic settlement limits

[tcoady]

The link to the paypal announcement leads to an invite to mail them for more information, which I did, and discovered these are the limits to their largesse: If you opened a PayPal account between October 1, 1999 and January 31, 2004, you are a member of the class unless you fit into one of the following exclusions. Excluded from the class are: any judicial officer to whom the lawsuit is assigned; any current or former employee, officer, or director of PayPal; anyone who resides in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, or United Kingdom; and all persons who timely and validly request exclusion from the class.

Re:GoboLinux - Lookin' goooooood!

[julesh]

One thing I've always come to expect with Windows is that when I install some software, if I go with the default install it will go into C:/Program Files and there I will find almost all the programs installed on my computer. Linux, up until Gobo, has been harder to predict in this sense.

Are you taking the piss, or what? When you install programs on Linux, they go under /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, unless they're a core system program in which case they go in /bin. Administrative programs go in the equivalent .../sbin directories. Library files go in the equivalent .../lib directories. Application data goes into a /usr/share/ directory, if it has been written to modern standard, or possibly /usr/lib/ if it is older. For programs that might need to be started at boot time, a script goes into /etc/rc.d/init.d to do it.

This is nearly as simple as the Windows equivalent, and has the advantage that programs are by default installed on the path. (Yes, some of us wish Windows would have a more sensible system for this)