More gmail
tirsdag, april 27, 2004
I read that gmail is facing trademark battles, many are calling themselves or their products gmail already.
In Norway, a company selling sunglasses are calling them (or him)selves google.no. I just found that a company calling themselves Gallager & Robertson is selling its e-mail product gmail under the domain www.gmail.no
I wonder if google will loose their legal battle against them too... They lost in trial trying to get the google.no domain from SMSfun
Yay, I've got G-mail
tirsdag, april 27, 2004
As a blogspot user, I was invited to try out gmail: yay! And it works pretty fine. But only in IE and k-meleon. Argh. Not Opera 7.5 beta1. It loads in Opera, but after getting all the HTML, it is just white. - No matter what settings I use :( It appears that google uses some activex, which Opera doesn't support) Sigh. I'll have to use my 'Open link in k-meleon' menu item then...
Its funny though, in my first mail (the one from gmail), one of the ads was for, tada, Opera's search function! OK, so the first mail was laden with info about gmail's search functions and in general about all the ways that make exectly Opera such an incredibly good browser. But its too bad that gmail doesn't support Opera anyway. It officially supports almost every other browser, meaning IE5+ and the Gecko family (which includes k-meleon)
I'm not going to rant about gmail's privacy issues (yet), I haven't even read the privacy statement properly yet. Maybe later. Now I'll send myself some mail I need to store in public but don't have room for elsewhere...
Scary commentary
søndag, april 25, 2004
Commentarys tend to be the most insightful and entertaining articles in most magazines and newspapers. They give the writer more room to elaborate and think things through than does the first serve, most money - breaking news..
Today however, I read a zdnet commentary by Grover Norquist, talking about the EU case against microsoft. He argues that the case disturbes the american economy by taking away the very foundings of competition.
I thought it was the other way around, that monopolys held up by anticompetitive actions such as withholding vital information for a competitior to actually compete, was the real threat to the economy. Oh no - he says Microsoft has gotten where it is right now squarely because of their hard work, innovative products and good marketing.
No arguing about the latter, but I think Grover Norquist needs a reality-check.
And more:"Americans must be concerned about these latest developments because they spell trouble for our own economy. To the extent that our companies are forced to compete in foreign markets with one arm--or more--tied behind their backs, their overall competitiveness will suffer. The time spent waging legal battles, customizing products for punitive rules and regulations overseas, and monitoring an ever-changing sea of obstacles erected by foreign governments takes away from the ability of American companies to innovate."
I dont get this. Earlier in the article he says "To be truly successful, businesses must be willing to work internationally." - Is he arguing that because an international company is based in the US, it shouldn't have to worry about the rest of the world's laws and moral?
Paper DVD
lørdag, april 17, 2004
Sony and TOPPAN has developed a 25 GB blu-ray DVD disc consisting of 51% paper (moulded with some plastic I suppose).
Benefits? Cheaper production, more rigid (believe it or not), and finally it allows for higher quality label printing. As a bonus you can probably use your paper schredder to destroy your sensitive data...
I'm looking forward to better-looking, more natural-feeling DVD's
Its already possible!
lørdag, april 10, 2004
I read at bbc that..
"By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind."
Why, its already possible, very very possible! By using a)A descriptive file-name, and/or b)metadata for the article you're publishing into the Gnutella and Gnutella2 networks, you can publish anything you want, anything. - And anyone can find what info they want, without cencorship. Today.
Of course, the Gnutella network doesn't provide you with the propagation things like RSS give you, gnutella is still limited by your own so-called 'horizon'. The gnutella horizon is your virtual near vacinity, your neighbours, of other users of gnutellla software.
The following table from leuf.com shows your horizon for any given TTL, a querys Time To Live (x), and the number of computers you are directly connected to (y), which is what determines your horizon size.
| TTL=2 | TTL=3 | TTL=4 | TTL=5 | TTL=6 | TTL=7 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| n=2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 |
| n=3 | 9 | 21 | 45 | 93 | 189 | 381 |
| n=4 | 16 | 52 | 160 | 484 | 1456 | 4372 |
| n=5 | 25 | 105 | 425 | 1705 | 6825 | 27305 |
| n=6 | 36 | 186 | 936 | 4686 | 23436 | 117186 |
| n=7 | 49 | 301 | 1813 | 10885 | 65317 | 391909 |
| n=8 | 64 | 456 | 3200 | 22408 | 156864 | 1098056 |
Note that this table doesn't take into concideration a relatively new addition to the gnutella protocol called ultra-peers, which have between 70 and several hundreds of connections called leafs. Ultra-peers themselves normally connect to 5-10 or more ultra-peers, while leafs connect to 2-4 ultra-peers making the horizon multitudes larger given the same TTL.
But this is your horizon; Those at your horizon also has such an horizon and those connected to them also has one, so one can actually say that all computers in the gnutella network are connected. Because everyone shares files on gnutella, we can actually say that all articles on the gnutella network are potentially on all computers in the network. If I want a book from computer number 20000, one of the users in my 10000 number horizon would have to fetch that file first, for me to at all know about it, and so on. If an article or a subject is interesting enough (wants to be shared), it will spread pretty rapidly throughout the network in enough copies that anyone can get it.
The only problem seems to be one of trust, of quality, like in any other editor-less world where everthing can be anything and everyone is likely to be a terrorist or even socialist with communist tendencies. But who is to say the current media talks more truth? --Making a decentralized news-source without cencorship is incompatible with editing. The most popular stories are probably also the most interesting and therefore often most truthful stories. I know I delete the bad stuff myself...
Learning how to compute
lørdag, april 10, 2004
I just read an article on newsforge where a sysadmin is telling the story of his three year old grand-daughter learning linux.
It was a fun read, not only because I like to hear success-stories about Linux, but also becuse it reminded me of my first steps on my brothers first computer, a commodore 128 (I never got one myself). While I don't remember how I started things, how I saved things, or how I did almost anything, I remember how I was so facinated that I could do something, I could make something (draw houses, boats and cars at that time).
This is what the story above is about, a three-year old learning how to draw images and play games. On Suse Linux 9.0.
So who is growing up, Linux or the kid?
Check - 1,2,3 froogle
onsdag, april 07, 2004
Want a quick way to check the current prices for some product? Use the new Froogle wap service in your Opera hotlist. I've previously mentioned how you can customize Opera's wap display to make it perfect for the hotlist.Isn't Bill an MS fashist after all?
tirsdag, april 06, 2004
Corbis, the professional photo site, was founded in 1989 by Bill Gates. Ironically, you can now win an Apple G5 a day by logging in to that site.
Oh the irony...
Thanks to achhoo for mentioning gettyimage for me, this made me think of corbis, and well...
gmail = 1 gigabytes of mail
fredag, april 02, 2004
OK, is it an aprils fools joke? Seems not, cause google announced march 31(the most popular story on cnet right now btw) that they would set up a free webmail which offers users a whopping 1 GB of storage. Then they issued a pressrelease the 1.april, and its still there the second (today).
So we checked it out, we in #opera at irc.opera.com, and found that they indeed had mail-servers in place; I tried sending a mail to a nonexistent@gmail.com, and got a "Delivery failure" message, with a message ID of [dont@remember].gmail.com.
But sadly, only a selected number of people, 1000 of them, would be joining betatesting. I guess that means people they imagine are very popular with mail, (so they can really test it) and I'm not :-(
