As someone in Europe (UK) it is depressing.
As well as privacy destruction (yet to come ID cards - that are essentially compulsory as you will need to get one when you renew driving licence, passport etc).
A ludicrous ban on protest anywhere near rge centre of government.
See map:
http://www.met.police.uk/publicorder/images/Sectio n_132_7_boundary.jpg
(scale in metres - 1000 m approx 5/8 of a mile for those unfamilar with metric)
This includes:
New Scotland Yard, Westminster Abbey, London Eye, County Hall, Shell Centre,
Downing Street, Cenotaph, Ministry of Defence, Horse Guards Parade, Thames
House (MI5), Treasury, Foreign Office, DTI, Parliament.
The definition of protest is extreme.
The cenotaph is a war memorial.
A woman was recently arrested for reciting the names of UK soldiers who had died in Iraq at the cenotaph - an act legitimately in keeping with a war memorial you would think - but no, an illegal protest.
As the "proper" pirates are the ones who burn copies of DVD, CD etc, produce suitable artwork and then sell it for profit.
Yet there seems a singular lack of success in going after these people (who in many cases do it on a vast scale). Yet excessive time and effort seems to be spent on "little people" and with very little evidence that the accused have actually done anything wrong.
Priorities a bit wrong I would have thought.
And there was me thinking Christmas was primarily just the convenient hijacking of a celebratory time of year used by older traditions e.g. Solstice observation / Saturnalia;-)
I love how so many Christian festivals just happen to dovetail with old "pagan" dates - but as anyone with knowledge of Christian history should know, its not accidental what dates were picked for Christian celebrations.
Wish I could revisit several millennia hence (assuming humanity still exists then of course) and see what (if anything) is celebrated around the time of the Winter solstice then.
However, on topic....
My "active set" has changes a lot - things such as Unix and Java books that were heavily hammered a few years ago gathering dust, whereas.NET / C# books thumbed regularly.
Tend to split into "general reminder / lookup" style books - e.g. algorithms, best practice / tips and techniques for a particular language / OS through to very technical stuff e.g. JPEG : Still Image Data Compression Standard (Pennebaker and Mitchell) relating to a specific task that I'm involved with.
A lot of it boils down to preference - many of the books are redundant in so much as I could probably web search to find the information, but its just handy (excuse pun, and easier on the eye) to have a real physical book available whereas some colleagues web search for everything and only tend too have books for arcane stuff that's not readily / freely available on the web.
Most things on my (working) bookshelf get there due to necessity rather than enjoyment (and indeed lose their place when no longer needed).
I would only consider an IT related book for someone if I knew they actually wanted it, be it for need or enjoyment (some people enjoy reading e.g. programming books for the sake of it, others only read them if they need to).
Agree fully, especially as lots of home use consumers will position this near the TV (obviously!). They may already have a bit of furniture holding some / all of DVD, VCR, TIVO etc. These are all consumer items taht connect to TVs and work OK with poor ventilation, they will expect to cram their xbox 360 into a similar small, poorly ventilated space and just have it work without hassles.
Have to agree,
I prefer pdf or html where I know I have software that can render it. I used to have an old version of word "for emergencies" but over time I noticed that corporate docs always seem to be sent in one of the latest versions rather than the company using a lowest common denominator.doc format.
Increasingly I use OpenOffice to open.doc files - odd formatting quirks aside at least it means I can read information - if anyone wants to guarantee a certain look and feel then pdf is the only viable option imho.
Except the idea of something like Flock is that features stay working - I have lost track of the number of times I have upgraded FireFox (admittedly to new betas etc so asking for a bit of trouble) and had a slew of extensions no longer work and some have told me updates are available but some have not. Of those that have not I have, with a web search found updates for some quickly
only gives formatting info, XML tag describes content - a subtle difference.
With XSLT applied to XML I can produce XHTML!!!
As for XML useless, not if people know what the tags mean - thats what schemas and comments are for.
RSS is an easily understood XML format, last time I looked it was quite a success....
7 days is farcical
It could take the best part of that to download something for many people.
e.g they go to work and only have PC turned on when they are in the house, turn PC off overnight, so downloads restricted primarily to weekends, a few hours each evening.
Although UK broadband connectivity is getting better a lot of people still at the end of slow ADSL lines.
Viable if your PC is on 24/7 (or appropriate good amount of time) or you can get very fast downloads, but otherwise 7 days is a killer (unless 7 days starts when download ends, which, on my reading, is not what the article implied).
As this is a limited trial I think we can assume no idea of "real world" download speeds and so have to assume downloading HD prog will not be swift.
As for DRM - a farce as a UK licence fee paying resident... and I'm not even going to comment on Windows / IE only aspect. -- Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
I knew someone would say that before I had chance! the first reaction of a (recent series) Dr. Who viewer on seeing that page. -- Regards Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Lets look at some of the things you quoted - apache, php.
Both relatively large, complex pieces of software and open to external (and internal) attack.
Your comment of "Saying "it's okay" to write software with security holes, because shucks, some kind soul will fix it for you." Is rather misguided.
I doubt anyone on those projects is deliberately writing bad code, they will be trying as hard as they can. On something large and complex it is inevitable there will be bugs, some of those will turn out to be security related. People are not perfect, there will always be something that a single individual will miss: I'm sure, if you wrote a large piece of software then I or other./ers could find some faults (just as you may be able to with software I wrote). No matter how good you may think you are at programming you *will* make a mistake (I'm assuming a degree of arrogance given the "since maybe 95% of the coders out there can't code properly." comment). Shame I have never had the chance to interview you, would be amusing you see you sit some of the programming tests I have had to devise and administer over the years.
As for "Working for someone else without getting paid." In terms of reporting a bug.
I assume from other comments you work involves OSS systems in some way, so OSS existence in effect helps to pay you.
Lets assume you work for a company, say you do not report a bug you find... say that letter a nasty exploit comes out, using that bug, and causes lots of damage (not to your system obv. but to others worldwide). Reputation of that particular bit of OSS plummets. Your company CEO, despite the fact you ensured his system was fine, decides to bring in a different product, for arguments sake not OSS..., your job goes.
So end result is lost job, overall reputation of OSS software damaged to some extent, great result for a bit of arrogance.
A key thing is the attitude of people once you report a problem; OSS development people will (generally) be glad of your help in spotting a problem, after all it is about community involvement, just because someone is not involved in day to day coding does not stop them contributing by code audit, testing the code, documenting the software etc. A bug report is not a criticism, its an aid to improving the software.
The response for "commercial" / "closed" software is likely (not guaranteed) to be slightly different - more bureaucracy, coders might not even be told of the bug or not be allowed to investigate it
Maybe you should read your comment and see how arrogant it came over. It exuded the sort of "I'm all right Jack" approach. By your reasoning its an "oh shucks" thing that lots of people died in New Orleans because they were too poor to own their own transport and so could not evacuate. Remember life is not just about you, its about people working together, things might seem to be OK for a while with a selfish tack, but sooner or later generosity to your fellow man is needed. Regard placing a OSS bug report as just one minor little selfless act you can do. Its not a big life saving thing, but its all part of doing the right thing.
-- Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey -- Cheers Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Problem is, it's not about thousands of threads - if it was that would not be too badits about a small number of threads. Read the article...
Basic multithreading, in so much as a handful of concurrent threads work OK without huge performance hit, is still important on "desktops".
-- Cheers Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Given that openoffice is essentially zipped xml....
I doubt unzip utilities will vanish in 5 years.
Once unzipped, the XML is human readable and its trivial to use a bit of XSL(T) to export it to teh format you like (again I doubt XSL(T) transformation technology will vanish in 5 years).
That would be my preference over PDF which is far more effort to port to a human readable state using "standard" tools.
-- Regards Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
I use a nice configurable non IE browser, amongst the near endless tweaks is the ability to set to background download (or not) links from a site, so if I choose to go to taht link its "instant" as already downloaded.
Say I had this feature set on a site where I knew I would be browing a lot of the pages, forgot to turn it off and went to another site that happened to have a link to a torrent....
By the MPAA logic I am guilty, whereas all I have done is forgot to turn off a bandwidth sucking feature of my browser, and have downloaded a torrent "tracker" file but never used it in any way.
-- Regards Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
A bit of light comedy hurts the government how?
Look at the dearth of critical news / documentaries.
Hutton had the bonus of the public seeing "evidence" published online, as such we could see that the judgement made was dubious, given that although there might have been a few errors, general thrust of Gilligans accusation was correct.
Total capitulation of BBC news afterwards, and subsequent steering away from contentious issues is striking.
For recent evidence, compare minimal and biased G8 protest coverage with what actually happened (speak to someone who was there, or look at the likes of indymedia for reports from observers).
-- Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
You over rate the public... as long as theres a strong diet of soaps and similar dross lots of people are happy.
Millions on the streets on stop the war protests a couple of years ago had zero effect on the govt stance on Iraq.
As a UK citizen I can say that, in recent years, the influence of govt on the BBC appears to have increased.
Effect does not have to be direct, quite easy to envisage a line of least resistance culture developing in the BBC where its easiest not to strongly push stuff that may get a frosty response from govt and effect future funding.
-- Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
The BBC has recently altered very badly, with rare exceptions, much of its news coverage is just government mouthpiece level.
Note, for US citizens you may think the UK goverment is "liberal" but to anyone in the UK who may fit the "liberal" description it perceived as right wing.
It should be noted that those at the top have far more of an effect on bias than individual presenters, journalists.
Look at the pattern with R Murdoch various media interests - they all show a distinct (in UK eyes) right wing bias.
Which is why non mainstream news information is so useful, be it blogs (e.g. those with an interest in the Iraq conflict will recognise "Riverbend") to individuals / small groups acting as independent journalists but via collating portals that allow them to reach a large audience (e.g. indymedia about the only way to get uncensored footage of police violence / provocation in anti government protests).
Accept all reports have a bias, be aware of the bias, read / see a few different reporte of the same situation and then you are in a better position to make your own conclusions.
-- Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Far too many years ago I remember using Helios "parallel C" on a transputer network (in this case actually a network of PCs, each PC modeling one transputer).
1. The language "enhancements" available encouraged more parallelism than normal with only tiny changes to coding approach (a lot of work done by the compiler obviously)
2. A lot of work on parallelising, was done by the "controller" that parceled off work to the "transputers" (apols for bad terminoloy , this was around 15 years ago and my memory of those days is hazy).
I'm sure these days similar minor "addons" to common languages to encourage high level parallelism, coupled with some beefy analysis at compiler level to enable extra parallelism and coupled to a dynamic run time analysis tool, which could spot parallelism opportunities (as all programmers will know, some optimizations are not obvious at code analysis stage, only become apparent when code executes) when application running.
I'm currently working on projects that would massively benefit from multi threaded CPU's - currently work is farmed out from central server to multiple processing clients, being able to have multi threaded CPUS would help this enormously.
-- Dave Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Depends on your needs.
hosts is good solution if multiple users of PC or multiple browsers.
If you are the only user and mainly use one browser then maybe a different approach. e.g. my primary browser is FireFox and I use AdBlock plugins to control what ads I see. This lets me control down to individual files or directory level, so I can allow "good" images but block images from "ads" folders in cases where urls have common "root" but ads are then in a separate folder from useful image data, but for the likes of doubleclick.net etc allows me to do high level blocking.
Indeed, I did not get the web clip link but firefox came up with live bookmark auto detect when I was on my gmail page, although live bookmark add failed: So I parsed the page to find the link, copied it and pasted it into an atom reader (firefox sage plugin) and all was fine - though its a bit limited in the info and to do anything useful with long / threaded mails you need to go to gmail web page anyway. Still its a nice way to check mail status without bothering with a gmail notifying app, and hopefully it will get better.
Slashdot Mirror
A bit more scary http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/2004/04 /04/your_right_to_erase_bad_memories.php
- google around the topic of Roger Pitman and research on drugs that erase memory
As someone in Europe (UK) it is depressing. As well as privacy destruction (yet to come ID cards - that are essentially compulsory as you will need to get one when you renew driving licence, passport etc). A ludicrous ban on protest anywhere near rge centre of government. See map: http://www.met.police.uk/publicorder/images/Sectio n_132_7_boundary.jpg
(scale in metres - 1000 m approx 5/8 of a mile for those unfamilar with metric)
This includes:
New Scotland Yard, Westminster Abbey, London Eye, County Hall, Shell Centre,
Downing Street, Cenotaph, Ministry of Defence, Horse Guards Parade, Thames
House (MI5), Treasury, Foreign Office, DTI, Parliament.
The definition of protest is extreme.
The cenotaph is a war memorial.
A woman was recently arrested for reciting the names of UK soldiers who had died in Iraq at the cenotaph - an act legitimately in keeping with a war memorial you would think - but no, an illegal protest.
As the "proper" pirates are the ones who burn copies of DVD, CD etc, produce suitable artwork and then sell it for profit. Yet there seems a singular lack of success in going after these people (who in many cases do it on a vast scale). Yet excessive time and effort seems to be spent on "little people" and with very little evidence that the accused have actually done anything wrong. Priorities a bit wrong I would have thought.
And there was me thinking Christmas was primarily just the convenient hijacking of a celebratory time of year used by older traditions e.g. Solstice observation / Saturnalia ;-)
I love how so many Christian festivals just happen to dovetail with old "pagan" dates - but as anyone with knowledge of Christian history should know, its not accidental what dates were picked for Christian celebrations.
Wish I could revisit several millennia hence (assuming humanity still exists then of course) and see what (if anything) is celebrated around the time of the Winter solstice then.
However, on topic....
My "active set" has changes a lot - things such as Unix and Java books that were heavily hammered a few years ago gathering dust, whereas .NET / C# books thumbed regularly.
Tend to split into "general reminder / lookup" style books - e.g. algorithms, best practice / tips and techniques for a particular language / OS through to very technical stuff e.g. JPEG : Still Image Data Compression Standard (Pennebaker and Mitchell) relating to a specific task that I'm involved with.
A lot of it boils down to preference - many of the books are redundant in so much as I could probably web search to find the information, but its just handy (excuse pun, and easier on the eye) to have a real physical book available whereas some colleagues web search for everything and only tend too have books for arcane stuff that's not readily / freely available on the web.
Most things on my (working) bookshelf get there due to necessity rather than enjoyment (and indeed lose their place when no longer needed).
I would only consider an IT related book for someone if I knew they actually wanted it, be it for need or enjoyment (some people enjoy reading e.g. programming books for the sake of it, others only read them if they need to).
Agree fully, especially as lots of home use consumers will position this near the TV (obviously!). They may already have a bit of furniture holding some / all of DVD, VCR, TIVO etc. These are all consumer items taht connect to TVs and work OK with poor ventilation, they will expect to cram their xbox 360 into a similar small, poorly ventilated space and just have it work without hassles.
Have to agree, I prefer pdf or html where I know I have software that can render it. I used to have an old version of word "for emergencies" but over time I noticed that corporate docs always seem to be sent in one of the latest versions rather than the company using a lowest common denominator .doc format.
Increasingly I use OpenOffice to open .doc files - odd formatting quirks aside at least it means I can read information - if anyone wants to guarantee a certain look and feel then pdf is the only viable option imho.
Except the idea of something like Flock is that features stay working - I have lost track of the number of times I have upgraded FireFox (admittedly to new betas etc so asking for a bit of trouble) and had a slew of extensions no longer work and some have told me updates are available but some have not. Of those that have not I have, with a web search found updates for some quickly
only gives formatting info, XML tag describes content - a subtle difference. With XSLT applied to XML I can produce XHTML!!! As for XML useless, not if people know what the tags mean - thats what schemas and comments are for. RSS is an easily understood XML format, last time I looked it was quite a success....
Damn right, look at the good ol Bush family, happy traders with the Nazis in WWII.
--
Regards Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
7 days is farcical It could take the best part of that to download something for many people. e.g they go to work and only have PC turned on when they are in the house, turn PC off overnight, so downloads restricted primarily to weekends, a few hours each evening. Although UK broadband connectivity is getting better a lot of people still at the end of slow ADSL lines. Viable if your PC is on 24 /7 (or appropriate good amount of time) or you can get very fast downloads, but otherwise 7 days is a killer (unless 7 days starts when download ends, which, on my reading, is not what the article implied).
As this is a limited trial I think we can assume no idea of "real world" download speeds and so have to assume downloading HD prog will not be swift.
As for DRM - a farce as a UK licence fee paying resident... and I'm not even going to comment on Windows / IE only aspect.
--
Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Can't comment on Spotlight (not having used it as I either run Linux or doze for work). ....but you can write your own extensions for google desktop.
http://desktop.google.com/developer.html
--
Cheers Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
I knew someone would say that before I had chance! the first reaction of a (recent series) Dr. Who viewer on seeing that page.
--
Regards Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Lets look at some of the things you quoted - apache, php. Both relatively large, complex pieces of software and open to external (and internal) attack. Your comment of "Saying "it's okay" to write software with security holes, because shucks, some kind soul will fix it for you." Is rather misguided. I doubt anyone on those projects is deliberately writing bad code, they will be trying as hard as they can. On something large and complex it is inevitable there will be bugs, some of those will turn out to be security related. People are not perfect, there will always be something that a single individual will miss: I'm sure, if you wrote a large piece of software then I or other ./ers could find some faults (just as you may be able to with software I wrote). No matter how good you may think you are at programming you *will* make a mistake (I'm assuming a degree of arrogance given the "since maybe 95% of the coders out there can't code properly." comment). Shame I have never had the chance to interview you, would be amusing you see you sit some of the programming tests I have had to devise and administer over the years.
As for "Working for someone else without getting paid." In terms of reporting a bug.
I assume from other comments you work involves OSS systems in some way, so OSS existence in effect helps to pay you.
Lets assume you work for a company, say you do not report a bug you find... say that letter a nasty exploit comes out, using that bug, and causes lots of damage (not to your system obv. but to others worldwide). Reputation of that particular bit of OSS plummets. Your company CEO, despite the fact you ensured his system was fine, decides to bring in a different product, for arguments sake not OSS..., your job goes.
So end result is lost job, overall reputation of OSS software damaged to some extent, great result for a bit of arrogance.
A key thing is the attitude of people once you report a problem; OSS development people will (generally) be glad of your help in spotting a problem, after all it is about community involvement, just because someone is not involved in day to day coding does not stop them contributing by code audit, testing the code, documenting the software etc. A bug report is not a criticism, its an aid to improving the software.
The response for "commercial" / "closed" software is likely (not guaranteed) to be slightly different - more bureaucracy, coders might not even be told of the bug or not be allowed to investigate it
Maybe you should read your comment and see how arrogant it came over. It exuded the sort of "I'm all right Jack" approach. By your reasoning its an "oh shucks" thing that lots of people died in New Orleans because they were too poor to own their own transport and so could not evacuate. Remember life is not just about you, its about people working together, things might seem to be OK for a while with a selfish tack, but sooner or later generosity to your fellow man is needed. Regard placing a OSS bug report as just one minor little selfless act you can do. Its not a big life saving thing, but its all part of doing the right thing.
--
Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
--
Cheers Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Problem is, it's not about thousands of threads - if it was that would not be too badits about a small number of threads. Read the article... Basic multithreading, in so much as a handful of concurrent threads work OK without huge performance hit, is still important on "desktops".
--
Cheers Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Given that openoffice is essentially zipped xml.... I doubt unzip utilities will vanish in 5 years. Once unzipped, the XML is human readable and its trivial to use a bit of XSL(T) to export it to teh format you like (again I doubt XSL(T) transformation technology will vanish in 5 years). That would be my preference over PDF which is far more effort to port to a human readable state using "standard" tools.
--
Regards Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
I use a nice configurable non IE browser, amongst the near endless tweaks is the ability to set to background download (or not) links from a site, so if I choose to go to taht link its "instant" as already downloaded. Say I had this feature set on a site where I knew I would be browing a lot of the pages, forgot to turn it off and went to another site that happened to have a link to a torrent.... By the MPAA logic I am guilty, whereas all I have done is forgot to turn off a bandwidth sucking feature of my browser, and have downloaded a torrent "tracker" file but never used it in any way.
--
Regards Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
A bit of light comedy hurts the government how? Look at the dearth of critical news / documentaries. Hutton had the bonus of the public seeing "evidence" published online, as such we could see that the judgement made was dubious, given that although there might have been a few errors, general thrust of Gilligans accusation was correct. Total capitulation of BBC news afterwards, and subsequent steering away from contentious issues is striking. For recent evidence, compare minimal and biased G8 protest coverage with what actually happened (speak to someone who was there, or look at the likes of indymedia for reports from observers).
--
Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
You over rate the public... as long as theres a strong diet of soaps and similar dross lots of people are happy. Millions on the streets on stop the war protests a couple of years ago had zero effect on the govt stance on Iraq. As a UK citizen I can say that, in recent years, the influence of govt on the BBC appears to have increased. Effect does not have to be direct, quite easy to envisage a line of least resistance culture developing in the BBC where its easiest not to strongly push stuff that may get a frosty response from govt and effect future funding.
--
Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
The BBC has recently altered very badly, with rare exceptions, much of its news coverage is just government mouthpiece level. Note, for US citizens you may think the UK goverment is "liberal" but to anyone in the UK who may fit the "liberal" description it perceived as right wing. It should be noted that those at the top have far more of an effect on bias than individual presenters, journalists. Look at the pattern with R Murdoch various media interests - they all show a distinct (in UK eyes) right wing bias. Which is why non mainstream news information is so useful, be it blogs (e.g. those with an interest in the Iraq conflict will recognise "Riverbend") to individuals / small groups acting as independent journalists but via collating portals that allow them to reach a large audience (e.g. indymedia about the only way to get uncensored footage of police violence / provocation in anti government protests). Accept all reports have a bias, be aware of the bias, read / see a few different reporte of the same situation and then you are in a better position to make your own conclusions.
--
Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Far too many years ago I remember using Helios "parallel C" on a transputer network (in this case actually a network of PCs, each PC modeling one transputer). 1. The language "enhancements" available encouraged more parallelism than normal with only tiny changes to coding approach (a lot of work done by the compiler obviously) 2. A lot of work on parallelising, was done by the "controller" that parceled off work to the "transputers" (apols for bad terminoloy , this was around 15 years ago and my memory of those days is hazy). I'm sure these days similar minor "addons" to common languages to encourage high level parallelism, coupled with some beefy analysis at compiler level to enable extra parallelism and coupled to a dynamic run time analysis tool, which could spot parallelism opportunities (as all programmers will know, some optimizations are not obvious at code analysis stage, only become apparent when code executes) when application running. I'm currently working on projects that would massively benefit from multi threaded CPU's - currently work is farmed out from central server to multiple processing clients, being able to have multi threaded CPUS would help this enormously.
--
Dave
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
Depends on your needs. hosts is good solution if multiple users of PC or multiple browsers. If you are the only user and mainly use one browser then maybe a different approach. e.g. my primary browser is FireFox and I use AdBlock plugins to control what ads I see. This lets me control down to individual files or directory level, so I can allow "good" images but block images from "ads" folders in cases where urls have common "root" but ads are then in a separate folder from useful image data, but for the likes of doubleclick.net etc allows me to do high level blocking.
Extremetech have a review of AMD opteron dual core http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1788685 ,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532
Indeed, I did not get the web clip link but firefox came up with live bookmark auto detect when I was on my gmail page, although live bookmark add failed: So I parsed the page to find the link, copied it and pasted it into an atom reader (firefox sage plugin) and all was fine - though its a bit limited in the info and to do anything useful with long / threaded mails you need to go to gmail web page anyway. Still its a nice way to check mail status without bothering with a gmail notifying app, and hopefully it will get better.