411–420 of 476 posts
Top of the front page in less than a minute. What does it say about us that our first response is to rush over to HN?
I really like that. It makes the internet feel more like a community; reminds me of old slashdot days.
This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality. How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an absurd payout to willingly walk away right now, with all those contacts, messages, unread e-mails, organization, etc... Scary how much faith we put in this free service.
Install a desktop client and download all your Gmail using IMAP. You now have an on-site backup, and you can use your client to send emails via Outlook.com.
It's not hard. Anybody could do this.
This actually raises a slightly terrifying reality. How much would someone have to pay you to never again recover your gMail account? I would demand just an absurd payout to willingly walk away right now, with all those contacts, messages, unread e-mails, organization, etc... Scary how much faith we put in this free service.
More terrifying is that it's not just email. While Gmail was down I couldn't view or edit documents in Drive. And I also lost control of my Google Compute Engine instances, apparently since the gcutil application couldn't authenticate with my Google account.
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The "killer feature" of Gmail that people generally cite is its spam filtering, and that is hard to replicate, because one reason Google's spam filters are so good is because they have an enormous corpus of messages at hand to train them with. This presents would-be competitors with a chicken-and-egg problem: you need lots of users to be able to pull together a corpus like that, but you can't attract lots of users wi…
Honestly, my gmail gets a lot more spam (and I mean into my Inbox ) than the self-hosted email that I actually use (I rarely touch my gmail). Also they seem to engage in very spammer-friendly activities such as notifying spammers if and when you read their spam email (if images are turned on by default). Soooo, I can't imagine that competing against their spam filtering is as impossible as people tend to believe.
(just had to)
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Were they the most important words you say to her, though? Most of humanity has constantly been forgetting most of the conversation they've had with their loved ones. Maybe it is not reasonable to try to hold on to the literal incarnation of daily banalities.
What's important? I guess when I proposed, we were in the middle of Venice, so that wasn't recorded. But when we came up with the name for our dog it was. My mom got hit by a car once, I think I told her over chat. I don't see any emotional difference between chat and in person. But I can understand that some people do.
On a more serious note, I also think chat logs and email are important, but I can't understand why people trust all that stuff to a third party? (I do understand why people give up any idea of privacy by giving a third party access to it, I just don't understand why the let that party have what amounts to all the copies and/or use as system that while it can be backed up, can't be replicated (If you copy your gmail via imap, you still loose something wrt. organization -- you won't be (easily) able to resume your workflow without gmail -- in contrast if you use free software you will at least have the option of hosting everything yourself in an equivalent manner).
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I terminated a relationship with a consulting client right before the outage and thought,"How the hell did they manage that?" Then I realized I probably broke Google by dragging their folder from clients to clients/retired. Sorry about that.
You should be. That was very naughty of you.
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More terrifying is that it's not just email. While Gmail was down I couldn't view or edit documents in Drive. And I also lost control of my Google Compute Engine instances, apparently since the gcutil application couldn't authenticate with my Google account.
It's very risky to put all your eggs in one basket. Why not spread stuff around?
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Consumer Reports is actually pretty damn good for most things, especially in terms of reliability ratings. Good reviews is one of the things I'm happy to pay for, since the web doesn't seem to have spawned a good free alternative.
Ah, that convinced me to actually buy membership. Thanks for spreading the word.