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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.
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.
Also, how is it that they "defeated" Gmail? I have accounts with both and find Gmail superior.
Hey, atleast they got a statue!
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
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...
gmail is simple and it works. What amazes me is that Yahoo has not asked users which they prefer. This is almost akin to Borland saying that OWL is better than visual (IMHO, OWL was better), or Dr Dos declaring its DOS better than MS-DOS. In each case, the product may have been better, but the vast majority of users said otherwise.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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...
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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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.
Not just that, but gmail has indeed changed the way the game is played. When you sign up for gmail, they have a short intro which begins with "GMail is different". They key is that they are not gratuitously different. They are different because they analyzed the email processing process and saw a way to improve it. All the mail clients that I've used before had different ways of arranging things on the screen, but the function that they offered and the paradigm that they supported was the same. It took a little bit for me to get accustomed to the new way of doing things, but now that I'm acclimatized, I'm not going back.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
How about GMail bringing back the good old DELETE button that we're all accustomed to instead of have it hidden in a drop down list. Sometimes different isn't better... sometimes we really do just want to DELETE something.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
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.
If you install Greasemonkey, there's a script for it which will add a delete button to the page alongside the "archive" one Google seems to think you should use for even the most useless messages.
What amazes me is that Yahoo has not asked users which they prefer.
What amazes me is that they spent money on a statue instead.
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 ?????
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
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.
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...
...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).
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."
If you actually have any input: put a fscking delete button on there NOW, how f-ing hard is it? I can't believe adding "auto-save drafts" was more important then a delete button!
What is the big deal about deleting? Gmail is my primary email and I delete a lot of messages, it's never been a problem. Just move to trash and then every few days go to trash, click all, click delete forever and done. Geez, mellow out you 'one delete button' fanatics.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
If you look at standalone mail programs, they don't delete the mail, they send it to a "Trash" folder. That way, you can undo that action easily. When you need space, you have to explicitly empty that folder. The problem is that now you lose that "undelete" operation. You might say you don't need it, but the reason that they have it is that people use it. The problem with common approaches to the trash bin, in my opinion, is that it's not clear for the user _when_ you actually lose the "undelete" option, specially if you have filters that delete messages older than _X_ days.
With a new name for the trash folder ("archived"), Google keeps the functionality (one-button move-to-trash) but fixes it a bit (naming it "archive" helps understanding the importance of apparently unimportant mail.
So if Google feels that it's valuable to keep apparently unimportant mail, why not simply cease to expunge old messages from the trash?
The alternative they've chosen, as you say, is to use the archive folder as a trash can. Which makes it a rather strange place to keep messages I know I actually want to archive, since all the chaff interferes with search. Wouldn't three folders -- archive (never delete), trash (also never delete, and exclude from search by default), and spam (delete after n days, and exclude from search by default -- have been more elegant?
Personally, I don't have a need for the archive folder at all; my messages pretty much stick in my inbox forever, and it appears to have exactly the same properties as the archive (never delete, search by default). But I also have no objection, as the feature requires no extra clicks out of me, and I understand some people like keeping their inboxes small as a kind of to-do list.
That said, I do like basically everything else about GMail. Labels and rules work very well for me.