What's so big about Gmail, anyway? Is it the gigabyte of storage? The allure of using something offered by Google? The excitement of being admitted to a semi-exclusive online club?
Perhaps all three, but I think after using Gmail for a couple of months, the idea that I can quickly search the full content of everything I've received is nice; the threaded conversations are really cool; and the sharp user interface is pretty nice.
On the other hand, the filter model doesn't cut it for me. Tagging things with a label but leaving them in an "inbox" makes it hard to find the good stuff. Maybe if I could "star" incoming messages based on criteria as well?
GMail offers 1GB for free, compared to 2GB for $20/yr. Maybe $20/yr isn't too much, but I think the free model still has some juice left. Not to mention the nice threading model and top-notch searching.
My experiences with Gmail invitations
on
Gmail in the News
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I got a gmail account relatively early (early in April) from a friend
at Google. I use it mostly for mailing lists, not quite ready to put
all my personal mail on it, especially when until this article I had
no idea how to download Gmail for use when disconnected.
Initially
I got a couple of invitations I could give away, every couple of
weeks, and it was easy to find close friends to give them to. Then I
found I had seven invitations this week and had run out of obvious
candidates. I tried gmailswap, but the interesting ones (like a pound
of Kona coffee) went too quickly, and the others were uninteresting to
me. So I sent a note to my orkut friends, and quickly had well over a
dozen requests for accounts despite including a disclaimer pointing to
gmail-is-too-creepy.com:). I gave away the ones I had, and surprisingly got a few more the
very next day. I still have a queue of about 5 people I owe accounts
to.
PS. This was a really, really nice Slashdot article, with a
treasure trove of gmail information. Well done.
From the story, I'd say "uniquely conceited" is more appropriate. But then, posting this on slashdot ought to take him down a peg or two if he reads the responses....
At least in Computer Science, the conferences are the most prestigious venues, and the journals don't charge authors to publish. I don't think authors in CS would pay to publish, period.
I don't know about teaching class, though I suspect the answer's yes. However, I do recollect a panel at an operating systems conference way back in 1991 or so where Andy thought he was being funny predicting that one could get high bandwidth through sewer pipes... only to have this seriously discussed in recent years:)
There was a paper in USENIX 2003 about how things like email can be further reduced in size by delta-encoding similar files. It goes a step further than simply finding identical files or attachments.
It means that you get double spam, since the ad parsers will think you're interested in viagra and Nigerian despots. Wonderful!
I have an account now, but my initial thinking is to use it only for certain spamproofed addresses, like newsletters, and not for personal mail. I'll get lots of ads for thinkpads, SANs, virus software and such:)
I started with *.biz - the trailer park of domains
Very funny, but so true! I thought about wildcarding.biz but was afraid I'd catch something legit. So far, so bad, so I think I'll do the same now, with a whitelist should I ever find something legit.
I am continually adding certain domain names to my spam filter, if found in text. I'd love it for this tool to do it for me, as long as I can trust the low false positive rate.
Easy. Those ubiquitous road signs warning of traffic, amber alerts, and so on could display a picture of the car(s) in question. Just need higher resolution screens and bigger batteries and we're all set.
With enough monitoring, they could tell when the road is otherwise deserted or every car is speeding. I agree that a slower car following the speeder shouldn't suffer.
I know I'll get flamed for this, but I see no reason why lights can't be changed to red to slow down flagrant
offenders.
Still, one thing to be really clear about is (a) don't set it up so that if you really
speed you make it through the yellow, but (b) don't make it so far away that you catch someone ahead
of the speeder with the red light!
By the way, I've had lights change to red on me for no apparent reason, and wondered if this policy was
already implemented. It was in the Bay Area, but not Pleasanton.
By the way, NPR had a piece today on how the IRS is asking for more money for enforcement. Seems Congress is more willing to give them money to enforce things and collect taxes than to raise taxes. So maybe this doesn't mean our taxes go down, it means they go up less?
I was working on the Sprite project at Berkeley at the time the worm hit. Sprite was largely UNIX-compatible, but at the source level, not binaries. So we saw evidence that one aspect of the system had been compatible enough to be attacked, with a certain file in/tmp that was evidence of worm activity, but it never actually got in because other things were different enough. Let's hear it for genetic mutations....
While others were cheering that it hadn't been compatible enough to be effectively attacked, I was the one who'd done most of the UNIX compatibility, and my thought was "wow, we were compatible enough for it to get in and write tmp files! Cool!":)
I'm curious about Spaf's comment that the prevalence of worms on Windows is due to architectural differences rather than market share. Is there proof of this? Certainly people write worms/virii for Windows because it's easier, but also because it's so much easier to hit critical mass.
It's also worth noting that of the 3 UNIX worms he mentions, one, the RTM worm, hit long before it was fashionable to spread things in Windows. The architecture not only permitted it, the holes had been around for ages.
Interesting that Spaf said RTM should be jailed for unleashing that worm. If he had been, would he be an MIT professor now?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps all three, but I think after using Gmail for a couple of months, the idea that I can quickly search the full content of everything I've received is nice; the threaded conversations are really cool; and the sharp user interface is pretty nice.
On the other hand, the filter model doesn't cut it for me. Tagging things with a label but leaving them in an "inbox" makes it hard to find the good stuff. Maybe if I could "star" incoming messages based on criteria as well?
GMail offers 1GB for free, compared to 2GB for $20/yr. Maybe $20/yr isn't too much, but I think the free model still has some juice left. Not to mention the nice threading model and top-notch searching.
Initially I got a couple of invitations I could give away, every couple of weeks, and it was easy to find close friends to give them to. Then I found I had seven invitations this week and had run out of obvious candidates. I tried gmailswap, but the interesting ones (like a pound of Kona coffee) went too quickly, and the others were uninteresting to me. So I sent a note to my orkut friends, and quickly had well over a dozen requests for accounts despite including a disclaimer pointing to gmail-is-too-creepy.com :). I gave away the ones I had, and surprisingly got a few more the
very next day. I still have a queue of about 5 people I owe accounts
to.
PS. This was a really, really nice Slashdot article, with a treasure trove of gmail information. Well done.
From the story, I'd say "uniquely conceited" is more appropriate. But then, posting this on slashdot ought to take him down a peg or two if he reads the responses....
At least in Computer Science, the conferences are the most prestigious venues, and the journals don't charge authors to publish. I don't think authors in CS would pay to publish, period.
I don't know about teaching class, though I suspect the answer's yes. However, I do recollect a panel at an operating systems conference way back in 1991 or so where Andy thought he was being funny predicting that one could get high bandwidth through sewer pipes ... only to have this seriously discussed in recent years :)
Yup, and check out the banner ads on the pages criticizing Brown.....
Seriously, if you're a well-read author and a fellow of this, that, and the other thing, you can toot your horn too.
If you like the subject matter, you may want to check out a novel by mostly the same title, by Harry Turtledove under a pseudonym. It was wonderful!
Yes to heritage, no to "more rounded workforce" unless you can substantiate that comment. I don't see that whatsoever.
I'm with you there. Just think about what happened to Randal Schwartz at Intel a few years ago!
There was a paper in USENIX 2003 about how things like email can be further reduced in size by delta-encoding similar files. It goes a step further than simply finding identical files or attachments.
Maybe it's the email itself that's not unique: how much duplicated (or really similar) mail will Google come across and avoid saving multiple times?
It means that you get double spam, since the ad parsers will think you're interested in viagra and Nigerian despots. Wonderful! I have an account now, but my initial thinking is to use it only for certain spamproofed addresses, like newsletters, and not for personal mail. I'll get lots of ads for thinkpads, SANs, virus software and such :)
Indeed, that's why I thought it was pure blacklist. I don't care how many white URLs there are if any are to known spammer/virus sites!
Very funny, but so true! I thought about wildcarding .biz but was afraid I'd catch something legit. So far, so bad, so I think I'll do the same now, with a whitelist should I ever find something legit.
Viva procmail!
I am continually adding certain domain names to my spam filter, if found in text. I'd love it for this tool to do it for me, as long as I can trust the low false positive rate.
Looks like a blacklist, not a whitelist. Bzzz! Next contestant?
Easy. Those ubiquitous road signs warning of traffic, amber alerts, and so on could display a picture of the car(s) in question. Just need higher resolution screens and bigger batteries and we're all set.
With enough monitoring, they could tell when the road is otherwise deserted or every car is speeding. I agree that a slower car following the speeder shouldn't suffer.
Still, one thing to be really clear about is (a) don't set it up so that if you really speed you make it through the yellow, but (b) don't make it so far away that you catch someone ahead of the speeder with the red light!
By the way, I've had lights change to red on me for no apparent reason, and wondered if this policy was already implemented. It was in the Bay Area, but not Pleasanton.
By the way, NPR had a piece today on how the IRS is asking for more money for enforcement. Seems Congress is more willing to give them money to enforce things and collect taxes than to raise taxes. So maybe this doesn't mean our taxes go down, it means they go up less?
I was working on the Sprite project at Berkeley at the time the worm hit. Sprite was largely UNIX-compatible, but at the source level, not binaries. So we saw evidence that one aspect of the system had been compatible enough to be attacked, with a certain file in /tmp that was evidence of worm activity, but it never actually got in because other things were different enough. Let's hear it for genetic mutations....
While others were cheering that it hadn't been compatible enough to be effectively attacked, I was the one who'd done most of the UNIX compatibility, and my thought was "wow, we were compatible enough for it to get in and write tmp files! Cool!" :)
It's also worth noting that of the 3 UNIX worms he mentions, one, the RTM worm, hit long before it was fashionable to spread things in Windows. The architecture not only permitted it, the holes had been around for ages.
Interesting that Spaf said RTM should be jailed for unleashing that worm. If he had been, would he be an MIT professor now?
I didn't say we wouldn't have a deficit, I said that we could use all the help we can get.