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.
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
Hubris.
And someone needs to get over there and mod that statue pronto.
Oh no... it's the future.
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...
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Oh wow.
- Because jeffersonsw@tampabay.rr.com is a terrible email address
- Because I want to be able to change my ISP and not lose my email address
- Because most ISPs' webmail interfaces are terrible (actually, are any even decent?)
- Because ISPs will never even attempt to catch up to the feature/storage/ease/coolness of the webmail superpowers
- Because a Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail (to mention the three big ones) account also gives you numerous other services
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
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
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
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.
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.
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...
How the hell are you gonna install Linux on THAT thing?
...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).
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/
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
Direct link to actual photo.
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."
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.
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