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Yahoo's Geek Statue
Philipp Lenssen writes "Yahoo put up a life-size alpha geek statue in honor of the Yahoo Mail team, which they think beat the Gmail team. The statue's plaque says it's presented "in recognition of tremendous intellectual efforts put forth in order to defeat Gmail", and: "Not since the code breakers in Britain's Bletchley Park deciphered Germany's Enigma code during World War II has so much brainpower been focused on kicking an enemy's ass." Flickr has a photo." It's a nice little article on the difference between two of the net's superpowers.
They lost... I've got both a gmail account and a yahoo account and I must say I like the gmail one better. The interface is just much nicer in my opinion.
Also, how is it that they "defeated" Gmail? I have accounts with both and find Gmail superior.
I'm sure a handshake and a smile would have been more fitting but hey, it is a nice statue.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
- George Orwell
I have to say, that's pretty cool. But did they really defeat gmail? I haven't heard anything special about yahoo mail until now.
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
Hubris.
And someone needs to get over there and mod that statue pronto.
Oh no... it's the future.
And respect his m4d l33t h4X0r sk1llz.
Man, how I want one of those statues for myself!
Global warming is a cube.
Yahoo didn't break Godwin's law, they invoked it. We break it.
I wonder what Google will do in response to this...
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I hope that Yahoo releases something competitive, maybe this will finally make GMail team add an option to GMail preferences so that I can receive these attachments... Well, I'm not a big fan of sending stuff as e-mail attachments, but a lot of people prefer this way, and not everyone is aware of GMail's attachment killing habits...
Almost everyone says they're the winners, but of course that's from their prospective. It's just a way to boost morale. Googles interface is much simplier and they had the larger storage before anyone else. I tend to use my yahoo one for signup accoutns to avoid spam on the google one ;)
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I've heard so much about the new Yahoo Mail interface except I haven't heard a launch date. Am I missing something?
Sorry guys, but the work at Yahoo doesn't come close to the efforts made at Bletchley Park to defeat the Germans. The teams at Bletchley were the finest British minds of a generation assembled to beat an evil empire whilst lives were at stake. Comparing this to a phoney war between two email applications is kinda insulting.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
To win (in Yahooneese):
Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't exactly make me more inclined towards Yahoo. Quite the opposite - if I have the choice between a vendor who keeps on patting himself on the back and bragging about how great they are and one who actually focuses on making a good product, I'll always chose the latter. I just can't stand that kind of "w3 43r l33t!!!111" attitude.
And FWIW, it sure seems to me that Google does have the superior product, too. But of course, I may be biased (heck, I *definitely* am), so if you're not sure yourself, do give both a try. I think you'll come to the same conclusion that I've come to, though.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
no one ever remembers that it were polish scientists who cracked enigma...
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
It's like how the republicans do business. They first declare victory. Then they hire people to go to different places, at the same time, and call their opponants "Poor sports" and "losers" for disagreing with them. Through repitition through what appear to be different sources many are easily convienced that so many different people can't be wrong.
Did I miss something? Yahoo! had webmail for like a decade, then GMail put it to shame, then Yahoo! ... well did they really update their interface much? It looks and works the same to me.
And now they're giving out statues? Whatever.
I'm a 2000 man.
...that GMail is still better =/
Why would anyone use either. You get at least a couple account from your Internet Service Provider.
2. If any of the Yahoo! Mail team members is actually motivated by a 3D cartoon character with a plaque, they've already lost to GMail.
3. The plaque says the team's bravery, blah, blah... won't be forgotten until the next version of Yahoo! Mail is released. What happens then? We forget?
4. I just checked my Yahoo! Mail account (which I only use to give to stupid registration-required sites), and my inbox is full of spam. My GMail inbox has yet to receive a spam message.
5. They must be referring to a yet-to-be-released version. What good is a product that no one can use? How is that progress towards defeating GMail?. Hint: While Yahoo! celebrates, GMail gains more users.
Sheesh, of all the childish things. They don't even have the enemy beaten yet and they're already trumpeting their success. WTF? I'm not so sure they should be this cocky anyway, because Microsoft is doing the exact same thing for Hotmail.
Comparing the both is like comparing water and stone. This is a true joke. Betchley park had no idea of the cipher, Yahoo has the source to emulate. This is not code crakcing, it reimplementing..
Sorry -10/10
I'm the richest man in the world, I have all the great looking girls, all the sex I want, best food in the world and well respected worldwise. I'll tell you how to do the same, just send me $20.
hint: marketing
I don't think the comparison with the Bletchley Park cryptographers does justice to the codebreakers. They broke codes that good mathematicians assumed were unbreakable and produced the first digital electronic computers, all in a comparitavely short amount of time. They probably saved hundreds of lives by shortening the war. About 10,000 people worked there, selected for unusual skills in linguistics, mathematics or cryptography. They did incredible things like deducing the structure of a mechanical crytographic machine from the cyphertext intercepted from it, without ever seeing one.
Yahoo's engineers are only fairly small team of developers tying to make a more user-friendly mail interface. It's trivial but time-consuming, and they're not really doing anything new. Certainly not doing anything impossible.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
If they can a) back the claim to have beaten GMail and b) demonstrate an understanding of how to maintain their competitive advantage *after* GMail is out of Beta, _then_ I will be more interested in paying attention to either crying "We're #1!"
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
Uhm... You're dumb,haven't you seen the alpha releases of the new Yahoo client?
It practically replicates Thunderbird/Outlook. It was released in one of the slashdot posts a month ago.
Contrary to the others i find Yahoo! is way better than Google. I've got accounts with both and have yet to find a compelling reason to switch to Google.
Who gives a monkey's about storage of 2GB anyway. How many people have 2GB of email anyway. How many of you have read an email from over a year ago? You have to be completely anal to keep all that crap. Get over it and delete the stuff. You're NEVER going to read it again.
i get spam in my Yahoo! account but that is nicely filtered with it rather good filter that i can use to classify as spam or non-spam. Also if you can't stand the advertising, the solution is simple, filter it!
I suppose some people don't want to have to change email addresses when they find a cheaper ISP. In my case, Yahoo is my ISP, so when I signed up, I got a free yahoo account! woohoo! Some people prefer having something that's easy for their friends to remember (everyone knows yahoo.com). And maybe some people, windows users for instance, are scared of using pop mail programs like outlook, and they like the yahoo/google interface (compared to other choices).
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Yahoo have always been an "also ran", they're not even an attractive aquisition target. Most of the people I know with a yahoo account use it as a spam account for web signups and as a public (spammable) email address. Silly brand name, substandard offerings and statues, whatever!
Not since the code breakers in Britain's Bletchley Park deciphered Germany's Enigma code during World War II has so much brainpower been focused on kicking an enemy's ass
Are these people too busy inventing false victories to watch a film now and again? Everyone knows Britiain didn't have anything to do with breaking the Enigma code. Idiots. Oh and I think Bletchley park is in New York somewhere.
Gmail uses activex, with it's inherent security problems and therefore not allowed in a secure environment.
Gmail is missing important features that have been part of email programs for decades. 'aemail' (anyone remember THAT?) defeats gmail.
Gmail should've been a regular email design, rather than following Opera's M2 design, with a Google search shoved into it.
Not that there's anything wrong with Opera's M2, but M2 has more useful functions than Gmail, and a lot of M2 is still so far back it's ancient.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
we broke the enigma before the war begun
In short, Gmail is a superior service. For all your efforts and hard work, you ain't won jack.
/dev/random
To all the slashdotters getting offended with the Bletchely park comparison. It's called a sense of humour. Go gets some.
silly troll, dicks are for chicks
I don't think it uses ActiveX since it works flawlessly under Linux with Firefox, where ActiveX is not available. It happens to use some advanced Javascript technics that have a fancy sounding name that I don't remember.
Yeah you did. It is talking about the new Yahoo! Mail which is about to be released and has been subject to previewing for the last few months. It is not talking about the Yahoo! Mail that has been around for years.
Here is a screenshot.
Damn poles cracked it open w/ a hammer.
Beats them to what? Yahoo mail is nothing special; gmail is so good I've moved all my personal email to the gmail account. Yahoo has 1 GB, gmail has 2.6 (at last count.) Yahoo has obnoxious ads with lots of motion, colors, and occasionally (ick) noises. Gmail has a column of well-behaved test ads that actually occasionally have something interesting, and spam recipes in the spam folder.
I don't get it.
1. Who's teh Yahoo posted as CmdrTaco on TFA?
2. Is teh plaque right side up, or must read from AlphaGeek's perspective? (sit on his lap?) um, not?
3. If Y yahoos quit for google, who will throw teh chair?
4. Dude. Is Neal Stephenson pissed or what?
There's some kind of ironic artistic statement in there. Maybe it should get the Turner Prize.
Not on my computer it doesn't. In fact, a computer capable of running activex, with its inherent security problems, is not allowed around here.
Gmail uses activex, with it's inherent security problems and therefore not allowed in a secure environment.
Whatever you're smoking, can we all have some please?
As far I know gmail is an AJAX app, so maybe it uses ActiveX for the XML request in IE? It certainly works just fine in Firefox where there is no ActiveX.
So big whoop, Yahoo hasn't even released the new mail client yet.
Word on the street is that the new Gmail is going to kick their arse... the current Gmail already does.
Enjoy the party Yahoo boys, it'll be a brief one.
What I find funny is that one the top of /. it has the Yahoo! and Google topic pictures running into each other. Is Slashdot predicting a merger?
I like GMail because it supports AJAX, and Yahoo! Mail seems to be behind in this area. Then, I chanced upon a Firefox extension that adds AJAX support to Yahoo! Mail. It's pretty neat. :)
w00t
\Downloads RoundCube Webmail
\\Installs on web host
\\\Ups mail quota to 10GB
\\\\Turns on SpamAssassin
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Gmail > Ymail
Nice spelling-lame. Mission Accomplished. Victory is still immenent in Iraq I see. Have another glass of Kool-aid.
gmail : 2.5 gig and rising
yahoo : 1 gig and staying that way
gmail : paid for by text ads which generally don't show up because I'm not in the target group.
yahoo : paid for by pop up flashy irrelevant ads, and a SPAM trailer in the mails I send. Forget about using it for any serious mail.
gmail : k.i.s.s. interface, allowing for rich text
yahoo : no rich text possibilities found
gmail : no spam
yahoo : presents you with a botfilter with unreadable gibberish. Maybe you can't send spam, probably you receive lots
gmail : ssl pop & smtp
yahoo : had the features, removed them
gmail : threads
yahoo : no threads
Yahoo beats google ?????
You can sign up for the Beta here: http://whatsnew.mail.yahoo.com/
In April 2004, a Communist Party official told Chinese journalist Shi Tao how to report the upcoming 15th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre.
Shi Tao took notes at the meeting, wrote up what he had been told to write, and e-mailed a copy to a pro-democracy web site in New York.
Unfortunately, Shi Tao used Yahoo web mail to send his e-mail. When the Chinese government approached Yahoo and asked them to reveal the personal information of the person who had signed up for the account, they gladly did so.
Asked about this at a conference in China, Yahoo's Taiwanese co-founder Jerry Yang said:
"To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law."
Since then, people have pointed out that the journalist hadn't been convicted of any crime. A Chinese lawyer--as in, a lawyer who actually practices law in China--has said that Yahoo was under no legal obligation to reveal the journalist's name. It certainly seems that no legal action was taken against Yahoo to force them to rat out the guy.
It's a pity there's no Adolf Eichmann Award for Excellence in Only Following Orders, Jerry Yang would have a good chance of winning.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
if they Put forth so much brain power to kick the enemy's ass... that at leat their links would work... I cant get to the mail from the yahoo home page... and yes, I have JS enabled.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
gmail : k.i.s.s. interface, allowing for rich text
yahoo : no rich text possibilities found
Actually if you had used the Internet Explorer, you would be able to enable the rich text capability of Yahoo! Mail. Ahh I see, you must be on Linux.
w00t
Google has most usernames free and open to use.
[a-z]{1-7}@yahoo.com address is impossible to get. Yahoo claims all of these: sharp, shrp, shrpy, sharpy, sharpfang, shrpfng, sharpfng, shrpfang, sfg, sfng, shfng, shfg, sfang, sharpf are "busy". Imagine this, all of them. My answer: BULLSHIT YOU FUCKING LIARS! fuck you Yahoo, whoever wants a name like Mike674 or cutegirl_969696 go, use Yahoo. If you want to save digits, semigraphics etc for password and keep your nickname strictly alpha, gmail all the way.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Because they have more users - as they've been going longer than GMail, and hey you can't even sign up for GMail unless you're invited and live in the US!
#include <sig.h>
Ya-who?
Can anyone identify the artist and/or supply a pointer to the original image?
I'm interested in what ray tracer was used (POV-Ray?, what modeller (looks like maybe Blender?, and time and details about the rendering.
I also think the artist should get some credit.
It's called AJAX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
Since when ? It is like microsoft presenting an award to themselves that Windows is the most secure OS - Exactly.
Seriously, this is ridiculous. Google raised the bar. They showed the world that you can do amazing things inside the browser. Nobody can take that away from them. What Yahoo et al are doing right now is called catching up. It's true: within a year or so, all webmail systems are going to have that level of functionality. Yahoo has it. MSN has it. AOL is building it. Several open source projects (such as Roundcube, Citadel, and Zimbra) either have it or are in the process of adding it. So what's Google doing right now?
While everyone else is catching up, Google is toiling away at the next big thing.
Whenever I hear the words "beat GMail" I think of a snotty junior high school kid who seriously needs to have the crap beaten out of him.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
what the fuck? when did flickr become a news agency? flickr is just a fucking photo sharing site where people post photos. some dude has posted a photo. if i write a letter on a piece of paper made by kinko's would you say that kinko's has a letter? you would say we have a letter from X would you not? don't anthromorphize fucking websites you fuckwits.
Wow, what an angry crowd. You really need take this a little less seriously. It's just an internal messin' around at yahoo. They're trying have some fun and the same sort of thing goes on at google. For starters, they're obviously talking about they're next email encarnation, which is still in testing. It's been well publicized that they're working on a new version, so please stop posting silly "Yahoo mail be looking teh same for years". Secondly, NO, they don't seriously think they're new email is comparable to breaking enigma. There's just exagerting to make things funny. (Am I really explaining what humor is?) Finally, please do realize that you guys *don't* actually work a google. So stop pissing in a circle around Mountain View.
WTF are you walking about? I've got 60 MB of attachements in my ~2.7GB Gmail account. Text files, images, xls, doc, html, OpenOffice.
Am I the only one that recognizes this as being a joke?
About the text on the plaque: Do you people really take this literally?
The giant life sized plastic geek doesn't give it away to you?
It's just a harmless gag.
I eat bees -- they taste stingy.
And how is this comment appropriate?
I've met and talked with math researchers. I keep up with the things crypto. I've worked in industry as a web developer. I must say, there is no possibility that the yahoo people have more brain power than the code breakers.
I've been seeing this type of ludicrous statement more and more over the past years. I think it's just that these people know that they are losing and need to generate an over inflated sense of self to cover there inferiority.
Likening corp. competition to WWII?!?! Seriously...
... if Yahoo! would start to actually accept incoming mail. I keep getting these in my mail logs for a while already, for ever mail I send to Yahoo domains:
(host mx3.mail.yahoo.com[64.156.215.6] said: 451 mta236.mail.scd.
yahoo.com Resources temporarily unavailable. Please try again later [#4.16.3:-110]. (in reply to end of DATA command))
Takes a couple of hours to deliver a message...
I'm always suspicious of anyones' opinion when they can't spell lose properly.
How the hell are you gonna install Linux on THAT thing?
Yahoo are to fecal matter what King Midas was to gold.
If it wasn't for GMail, Yahoo would have still had the crappy webmail it always offered (with 5mb web space?). This is competition at it's best.
I win! It's like, even when I win,... he wins...
I can't even log into Yahoo Mail. It says I'm not accepting cookies or something. And the UK version puts me in an infinate redirect loop.
...because I have a couple of ways in which you could really, really improve your service. I might even consider switching back to you.
1. insane captcha when SENDING mails. There shouldn't be any captcha for sending emails, especially when I have the account for 5 years or so and I sent like 233 mails in total. But no, what if I'm spammer ? You know, when I click "send" I expect to be able to just walk away (and one time I did !) but the mail hasn't been sent because of this crazy captcha. AND I have to admit I failed the captcha at least two times. There's no IQ test, just that you have more than one option to "read" the damn thing.
2. crazy spam filter. I'm getting mail from people who use ONLY the web interface and send like 2 emails/month and it's marked as spam. Is it that hard to flag the mail sent internally as NOT-SPAM (that is if the sender is not reaching a threshold of emails/day/hour/whatever) ?
3. crazy, moving ads (sometimes offensive or sexual). Slashdot is getting there too
4. I understand I have to click thru' as much as possible to get more money in displayed ads but the emails are in yahoo "one click too far" compared to Google
5. please don't silently change my outgoing emails: don't change "medieval" to "medireview" for my own protection, don't add ads (or at least let me see the ads before), etc
6. lack of features (free features, that is): google has pop3, forwarding, 2+G and the ability to send email from any address (as long as you can receive email on that address).
Churchill had many faults but without him we would probably be speaking German.
In the 1930's, he was one of the few politicians speaking openly about the rise of Facism in Germany and Italy. In 1938 he gave a speech saying that the German involment in the spanish Civil War was a rehersal for battles to come. He was openly derided by many on the Left & Right of Britich (& International) Politics. But history has told us he was right to do so.
In WW2, Britian turned to him as being the one leader around at the time that could possible lead Britain and its Empire to vicroty over Facism. Try listening to his radio speached sometime. He was an effective speaker who could motivate and inspire people at a time when we needed it.
At the time of the general election in 1945, the war was effectively over and the people voted him out of office as they began to think of a post war country. Many (if not all) of the senior minister of the Labor Government of 1945 actually served under Churchill in his wartime cabinet especially Atlee & Bevin. They began formatting the ideas that lead to the creation of the NHS in 1942 at the behest of the PM himself.
Yes Churchill and Britian (along with many other countries) have episodes in their history they would rather forget and in hindsight, recognise that they have done wrong. We have put out hands up and in most cases ack'd this fact. There are other nations in existance today who should be vilified for not doing this. For example, the Japanese for their treatment of POW's.
Churchill was an accomplished Artist and Author( remarkable like one Adolf Hitler in that respect). He was after the war awarded the nobel prize for literature. He was an obstinate and often obnoxious bastard at times. He was the right person to lead Britian in her time of need.
If you want to criticise people in History please don't be so biggoted to only mention their bad faults. I suggest you try reading Churchill's "History of the English Speaking People". He does acknoweledge a lot of the bad things that was done on behalf of the Britiah Empire over the years.
That's because they announced cracking the Enigma code in the Enigma code and no one else was able to read it.
If this statue is really true for the Yahoo Devs, then it might be an internal team-work motivation for success. We all know that Gmail is far superior to Yahoo Mail, ( Just the spam filtering alone is enough ) although, who knows maybe the new version of Yahoo, is so great that there was an idea to place a internal statue to motivate completion.
Does anyone remember when IE 5 employees slapped that 10/12 foot giant "e" on the Netscape campus to proove that they "won" the browser wars...?
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-203835.html?legacy=c net/
It was just a dumb prank that prooved to be a self fullfilling prophesy for a good many years. Maybe this is just the kind of one-up-manship Yahoo needs to make it's employees at least, believe they are actually harder working or more dedicated to their craft.
In any case my allusion above should be enough to show how ridiculous anyone calling themselves the winner in these kinds of battles. IE is hardly superior to most of it's competition these days.
Google Mail listens to feedback and designs their webmail to most benifit the user, while Yahoo! Mail clearly has their motivation elsewhere. Also, Yahoo would not even be motivated to improve their webmail interface if it hadn't been for Google releasing their far superior webmail service.
Their sources of motivation is what seperates the good(Yahoo) from the great(Google).
http://83p.unitedti.org/
Hawaiian shirt day... PAR-TAY!!!
I also have a yahoo mail and Gmail account, and as much as I love Google, I still like yahoo mail better. My opinion could be tainted becasue I also use yahoo's notepad as much as Yahoo Mail, but I just think the interface is really professional.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Since Yahoo's bragging is apparently about OddPost, I decided to see what all the fuss is about. But from Mac/Firefox, the site is completely broken. No link to create a new account, and even when I try typing in the login text fields, nothing shows up. Despite all the AJAX and CSS tricks I've been digging up on the net recently, I've never encountered these problems. And trying to follow up in their about pages, etc., they all lack a scroll bar on otherwise very simple two column layout. This is anything to brag about?
But looking at the screenshots, it looks like it presents the standard three pane mail app interface. And no ads, yet. Of course there is no profit in that model so I doubt it will last even a year under yahoo's command.
Anm
It's all about publicity anymore...
Sure, publicity has a factor.. and some even thrive off of negative attention.
But, in the end, its quality that counts.. not the publicity. Word of mouth will spread faster than any statue, prank, or publicity.
If a company wants the word spread.. they should invest in quality and consider the user.. not publicity competitions
Why has nobody else picked up on this yet? It's obvious what Yahoo is doing. They're marketing to a demographic(maddox.xmission.com). It's trying to build an image for itself. Companies do this all the time. They figure out what their target demographic is (in this case, they think their desired audience is a bunch of fun-loving technically-inclined computer users) and they market to that demographic. In this case they're trying to hook on the kind of people which work hard to spread gmail and firefox just out of loyalty. They're just pathetically posturing and pandering to this audience, but they don't even know how to do it. All they can do is just jump around like an annoying 5 year old trying to get attention. And when I say jumping around trying to get attention, I mean something like this: "Hey check out cool we are! We're so hip and funny(slashdot) and in touch with today's teechnology and cool stuff(slashdot), forget gmail, look at us! Look how cool and funny and hip and fresh we are, and how we put a cool, fun spin on technology! Google's just a bunch of old fogeys. But everyone here is just a bunch of cool and smart dudez having a good time!" It's pathetic. They don't even have attention, because they've been so stagnant and moronic and lazy for the past, oh, I dunno, 4 years, that they've lost all loyalty form anyone who's even slightly technically inclined to bigger and better services (and remember, those are the people who really help a website get attention). But Yahoo is finally feeling that it can't just act like a lazy monopolistic conglomerate anymore, because it's realizing that its shares are slipping to the cooler, fresher, more in touch, and much more useful google. Yahoo realizes that if it doesn't get its ass in gear, its going to be losing its members to google soon. So, like the stupid, slow, lazy, and out of touch corporate conglomerate it is, it tries to get the attention that google has from being cool, fresh, and in touch. Yahoo tries to get this attention by making itself out to be cool, fresh, and in touch. By jumping up and down and saying "look how cool I am! I'm so cool!" The difference is, google looks cool without even trying. Google is cool not because it spends time trying to bolster its personal image (although it does focus on image some) of being a relaxed, good natured company. Google is cool because it is a relaxed, good natured company. It doesn't just pretend to have those plastic balls all around, or have that big, open, cafeteria. That 20% of all employees time which must go to projects of their liking isn't all just a hoax. Google is actually a company based on relaxed, good natured principles. But yahoo, which I'm sure is still based around a traditional business model, with CEOs and departments, and 8 levels of management and corporate beauracracy, a company whose goals are mostly sluggish and monopolistic paradigms (such as being the king of online TV(wired.com), which it has now failed miserably at due to iTunes jumping out of nowhere and kicking its ass.), is most obviously not cool and fresh and funny and funky. This is all just showy propaganda. Yahoo's upper management have just given the OK for the marketing department to play up this major 100+ employee corporation as being this cool, fresh, hip group of fun tech guys just cooperating for the heck of it to create good stuff. That is everything yahoo is not. I imagine we'll see more bullshit like this as yahoo makes more and more desperate attempts to get a hold on its slipping popularity, perhaps some of them may work. But all the make-up in the world won't hide the fact that yahoo is an ugly, decrepit, slow moving and out-of-shape hag of a corporation. Unless yahoo chan
"We fucking buried that GMail, We have done it before, and we will do it again. We fucking killed GMail!"
-Yahoo! on Gmail
Google is pushing other companies to give out free or better software and services to the internet community.
I'm not saying Yahoo is bad, but it stopped innovating many years ago. Who here didn't switch from Hotmail to Yahoo, not switch, but opened a new account there when they gave more hard disk space?
Hey, if it's free is for meRUPERT! I TOLD YOU TO WATCH THE BAGS! You were looking at the boys again, WEREN'T YOU.
Direct link to actual photo.
Is it me, or does that statue look like a nerd on a toilet seat struggled to unload a big one? :)
Where the CEO of Pepsi published a book talking about how Pepsi won the cola wars.
When all else fails, declare victory and erect a statue.
Let them celebrate. I like google/gmail a lot, but we also need yahoo and others around in case Google ever turns evil. We dont want to have google just dominate everything with absolutely no competition. Anything (good) yahoo does makes me smile. though i havent really used many of their services.
Yahoo seems to be claiming victory all over the place lately, without much to back it up. There is an article in the New York Times today that makes the claim Yahoo's search is the fastest and most relevant, but unless something happened overnight, I don't believe it.
It reminds me of another recent declaration of victory that didn't exactly end up so.
The only thing GMail requires is JavaScript and cookie support, and even that isn't required, you just get a "For a better Gmail experience, use a fully supported browser" message at the top of the screen.
To quote from their help page:
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm only replying to this because it's such an obvious troll, and has been marked "insightful"! Your last sentence beggars belief:
It scares me that there are people who think the systematic and sanctioned extermination of a race of people (the jews in this case, but the specifics don't really matter, the crime is the same) is not evil in every sense and nuance of the word. Germany at the time *was* an evil place to be, no inverted commas are required. More equitable. Right.
As for Churchill, I'm not religious, but there are many quotes in the bible that can be applied to everyday life. The one that applies here is "Let him without sin cast the first stone". Did you ever save the world ? Thought so.
There are many other quotes from Churchill's era that he's been remembered for, of course, the famous
[aside: I wish politicians were more like that these days - politics would be far more interesting!]
Churchill is venerated, not because he was some supernatural, godlike perfect being, but because cometh the hour, cometh the man, and he very definately *was* the man. He understood the deep loathing within the british populace for what was happening just a few hundred miles away, and his determination to stop it matched the will of the people. We couldn't have had a better war-leader. Of course, as soon as the war was over, he was ditched. With all honour, pomp and circumstance, but he wasn't a peacetime PM.
You also write about England as if you've never been there. Sure, there's an upper class (this means "have been rich for a long time" by the way), but these amount to 1% of the population, and the daily lives of most men and women make them irrelevant. America has the same thing - your upper class are your movie stars, TV personalities etc. When your country is more than a few hundred years old, and "old money" has had a chance to establish itself, I dare say the systems will be roughly equivalent.
As for your last points, I have never (ever) even *heard* of anyone taking the word 'common' as an insult apart from on soap operas in the middle of a screaming row, and I grew up in a Northern city. We weren't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination - my father worked on the docks, my mother in various office-jobs. I was hardly a poster-boy for a class-warrior, but I studied hard, got into a good (free) school, went to (free) university, and did a (free) doctoral degree. As someone who ought to be railing against the man (according to your model) I think you're just plain wrong. Any medical/dental care I ever needed was free, and I never considered myself 'beneath' anyone. There is no class-distinction in any of the above, and I've never felt myself to be a member of this lower-class of which you speak.
Of course there were always those wealthier than I in the UK, but hell, it's only money. There are people wealthier than I in
Physicists get Hadrons!
I just wanted to make clear that when I said "stood alone", I was including the commonwealth allies that we had, and excluding those who joined later (the USA, the USSR, and China) as well as the resistance movements in the already-vanquished. There was never a time when we were truly 'alone', and what I originally wrote made it seem that way. My apologies.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Not exactly. Gmail is an 'AJAX' webapp, and under IE the XMLHTTPRequest object is implemented as an ActiveX control. But it's not installing its own ActiveX control, just one that's provided standard with the browser install. The security hole that ActiveX creates is when web pages can install their own custom control(s), which runs as pretty much a normal user app (not in a sandbox), and that Windows users are so acustomed to clicking 'ok' without reading whenever a confirmation dialog pops up. So I wouldn't say Gmail is insecure just because it uses ActiveX (on IE). It just doesn't use it in an insecure way.
Can't take the fact that the plebian Yahoo! ground Google in the dust on this one, can you? You're just some kind of techno-elitist who no doubt thinks that "Linux" has beaten Windows. Have fun with your Mac laptop (iLaptop? eLapMac?) and GPL 3.0, you communist!
It's just a harmless gag.
Yeah, I know! This is ridiculous.
No, wait a minute. Maybe the joke is on us. Self-righteous outrage over a gag? That's the ultimate in geekiness. They're all just playing along. It's a counter-joke, right?
Uh... right?
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
It doesn't matter how sophisticated your webmail system is. Until you re-enable POP access for the free mail and stop stuffing megs of intrusive ads with every page you send, your webmail will be inferior.
Damn...April 1st already. And just yesterday it seemed like it was still November...
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Knew when to press enter.
You and your parent talk like Yahoo said that they were better than Britain's Bletchley Park, but if you read Yahoo's claim carefully and understand the meaning of the word "since", you'll discover that it's not the case.
P.
http://vjarmy.com/archives/2005/11/yahoo_invokes_g odwins_law_lose.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
"Godwin's law (also Godwin's rule of Nazi analogies) is an adage in Internet culture that was originated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states that:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
Although the law does not specifically mention it, there is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. This tradition is more widely known than the original law, and there is considerable confusion between the two."
They look better on guys, anyway.
Yahoo mail works with my cell phone. Gmail doesn't.
Yahoo wins.
It's just some stupid damned free email, people. What the hell difference does it make where you get your FREE email account with 8594 tera-giga-exa-petabytes of message storage and 2**1839238 address book entries ?
TFA has nothing whatever do with email service. It's a wanker gesture of self-congratulation. It's obnoxious. It's onanistic. It's brainlessly stupid.
So really, however you measure it, how could anyone, anywhere [1] give a shit even if Yahoo! were right, and [2] how could anyone give a shit whether is Yahoo! right ?
i think the point today is that people are free to use whatever they want to use. but with pics like this in this guys flicker account, i might we switching to yahoo!!
/ photostream/
/ photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbrew/16461649/in
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbrew/16461648/in
these management gimmicks (and the nazi-reference to Google) gives me distinct feeling that some guys in charge of Google believe they are so smart they can bullshit their company to the top place again.
Maybe they should think harder how to make products that people use and like. Annoying the customer for a quick return is bad in the long run - and they have not figured it when they started the search and e-mail service. For some time they had a fucking monopoly and they blew it. All this froth about crushing the competitors is un-pretty. They should think instead about how to not to be evil.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
I think this (from the same photo blog as the statue) highlights some of Yahoo's webdeveloping woes. (OK, so my keyboard looks the same...)
...making me the victor. </wimplo>
Good to know I can't attach important zip/rar archives in GMail. Maybe it filters .arj, .gz and .bz2 too??
Sounds like Gmail kinda sucks and is pretty useless. Guess i wont look into using it.
Thanks, very informative! /Patrik Arvhult
WTF will a statue do in "defeating" Gmail?
I liked your signature.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Delete is perfectly reversible. All they would need to do is make a second archive called "Trash". All "deleted" email goes into the trash, you can't empty the trash, but perhaps searching doesn't return hits if the mail is in the trash. Problem solved, and still in a GMail-like fashion. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Perhaps we should educate the rest of the Slashdot readership.
/. as the rest of us, right?
Yeah, good luck with that. You do read the same
I am dissapointed but not suprised with the complete lack of civility and professionalism displated by Yahoo's vulgar statements. And I certainly would not compare Yahoo's meager, minor, and insigniificant technical accomplishment of creating an email program with the mathematical genius of code-breaking, which saved countless millions of lives and stopped the spread of Nazi Facism and genocide. Get a grip.
Ahh, yes - thanks for the screenshot! It looks similar to the new (soon to be released) Hotmail interface. Looks like there's going to be some good competition bewtween the main webmail competitors..
I'm a 2000 man.
Personally, I think there are other reasons to delete old email, and don't buy the GMail paradigm. But the GMail people still deserve points for questioning "tried and true" assumptions. Somebody's got to do that once in a while, or we're stuck with obsolete assumptions forever. Now, when you question those assumptions, 99.9% of the time you just find out that they're tried and true for a reason. But that other 0.1% is still worth looking for.