Slashdot Mirror
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.
You're misinformed, I'm afraid. Most of the Polish techniques relied on exploiting weak indicator systems used by the sender to convey the start positions of the Enigma rotors to the recipient. The indicator system was changed in May 1940, obsoleting the Polish techniques. British codebreakers responded with other methods, primarily the Turing-Welchman bombe, which required a short "crib" of known plaintext (most of the Polish techniques were ciphertext-only attacks).
I would also question whether the Polish mathematicians (Marian Rejewski, you're thinking of) actually introduced new theorems into mathematics. I believe that the theorem which is sometimes called "the theorem that won World War II" was already known. Rejewski's insight was that this branch of abstract mathematics could have an application in cryptanalysis -- something that nobody had ever thought of before.
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
...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).