The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Hey Gmail. In the real world, folks only get to celebrate their birthdays for one day. It's waaaaay past time to pack up the hats, balloons, and the cake.

Er, how is Gmail "folks"?
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Dennis

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Er, how is Gmail "folks"?
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Dennis

How does a non-person have a "birthday"?

[BetterRed]

A Google day is longer than a mere 24 hours.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

How does a non-person have a "birthday"?

Easy. Its creator declares a date as when it was born, (which will correspond to when it was released to the world), and an anniversary of the date is the birthday.

Amusingly, Gmail's birth date was April 1st, 2004. I began using it when it was still in invitational beta.

(And some people, as well as other entities, believe in extended birthday celebrations.)
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Dennis

[DiapDealer]

New rant: the urge some have to try and tec-splain away the rants of others.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

.

Amusingly, Gmail's birth date was April 1st, 2004. I began using it when it was still in invitational beta.


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Dennis

Me too. Remember they gave you 20 invites to share and how high in demand they were? You of course took a few invites to open more accounts so you would have more invites to spread around. I still use my original account and so does hubby. My first though was Hotmail and I still use that account. Wow it's probably 19 or 20 years old.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Me too. Remember they gave you 20 invites to share and how high in demand they were? You of course took a few invites to open more accounts so you would have more invites to spread around. I still use my original account and so does hubby. My first though was Hotmail and I still use that account. Wow it's probably 19 or 20 years old.

I got my invite from a chap on a mailing list I'm on who worked at Google at the time and was passing out invites to the list.

There was an amusing bit where another participant on the list was worried because Google could read her mail if she joined. I gritted my teeth and carefully did not ask why any human being at Google could be bothered to read her mail. The offerer simply explained that the things that read her mail were programs scanning for keywords to present hopefully relevant ads.

Gmail fundamentally changed how I worked. I no longer cared about spam. Gmail uses Bayesian filtering to classify mail, but the database of what constitutes spam was assembled from the spam markings of an enormous number of users, and provided the most accurate filtering I'd seen. Perhaps one new spam appeared in my Inbox every two weeks, and Report Spam and I didn't see it again. The odd false positive got flagged, and in a bit of irony, one of the most prominent sources of false positives was a mailing list devoted to another spam filtering product.

Having my mail reside on Google's servers meant I didn't lose mail if I had a hardware failure. And my mailstore became a database, searchable by standard Google search routines. Labels were arbitrary search keys, and filters provided classification. And it also meant my vulnerability to exploits plummeted. Email was the principal delivery vector for viruses, but I read the mail in a browser, and Gmail provided viewers for common attachment types, so none of it ever actually reached my machine. I stopped running a third-party AV product in consequence. It had never found anything save an odd false positive or so, and why bother running it? (Windows Defender is enabled here under Win10 to keep Windows happy, but I don't think I'd miss it if it went away.)

Google has done things that annoy me, like the recent termination of their Google+ service, leaving me stuck with Facebook as the closest social media equivalent. And I wasn't thrilled about the latest redesign of Gmail, though I was able to get it mostly set up as I desired.

But before Gmail, I was reading mail in Outlook, downloaded via POP and stored locally, and discovering the hard way that Outlook behaved very oddly when the local mailstore grew over 2GB. The difference has been night and day.
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Dennis

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Blossom

...
I still use my original account and so does hubby
...

As do I, although I only use it as a parking place for spam.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Me too. Remember they gave you 20 invites to share and how high in demand they were? You of course took a few invites to open more accounts so you would have more invites to spread around. I still use my original account and so does hubby.

Yup. I got to be the cool auntie. When I got gmail during beta, I was able to snag lastname@gmail. Some time later, at a family gathering, a techy nephew was describing gmail to his cousins and I mentioned my gmail id. To get a basilisk stare and dropped jaw from the kid; he'd tried for it and it was taken.

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by issybird

Yup. I got to be the cool auntie. When I got gmail during beta, I was able to snag lastname@gmail. Some time later, at a family gathering, a techy nephew was describing gmail to his cousins and I mentioned my gmail id. To get a basilisk stare and dropped jaw from the kid; he'd tried for it and it was taken.

1000 points to you!

I play "cool auntie" in other realms. After owning a copy of Sting (the sword) for several years, I finally gifted it to a nephew who'd been ogling it and drooling every time I brought it out.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

1000 points to you!

I play "cool auntie" in other realms. After owning a copy of Sting (the sword) for several years, I finally gifted it to a nephew who'd been ogling it and drooling every time I brought it out.

A chap I met at an SF con years back had a story on those lines.

He owned a fab shop in MD, and one of the things he had made was molded fiberglass battle armor, custom fitted to the wearers. They were a Trek Star Fleet Marine combat team. One of the costumes included a mini-gun along the line of a miniature Gatling gun, set so that as it rotated, an led at the mouth of what would be the barrel then firing would flash. The wearers came on stage, one by one, at the costume competition of Shore Leave, a fan run media con. The audience excreted a collective brick.

It got people's attention - he was contacted by some folks who wanted him to work for them. Unless he signed an NDA, they couldn't tell him who they represented, or what he would be doing. They did say he would be far away from everything, and out of touch with the rest of the world for 6 months. It turned out they were associated with Peter Jackson's production company filming the Lord of the Rings, and they wanted him to come work on the production as an armorer. With that little to go on, he said no.

People I mentioned this to later said "I'd get to do things like make Orcrist and Glamdring? I'd pay them to do that!", but I think he made the right call.

The next time I saw him was at the Worldcon in Philadelphia, where he had a two story high articulated dragon on exhibit. I don't know what he's up to now.
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Dennis

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I think he made the right call.
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Dennis

Yeah, but did [he] do it? (to quote "Chicago's" "Cell Block Tango")

I can't tell from your story whether he did or didn't take the job. I does sound wonderful (if I could make things like that).

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Yeah, but did [he] do it? (to quote "Chicago's" "Cell Block Tango")

I can't tell from your story whether he did or didn't take the job. I does sound wonderful (if I could make things like that).

I just edited my post because I realized I hadn't mentioned that. No, he turned it down. "We can't even tell you who we are or what you would be doing unless you sign an NDA" would be a deal breaker for me, too.
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Dennis

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I just edited my post because I realized I hadn't mentioned that. No, he turned it down. "We can't even tell you who we are or what you would be doing unless you sign an NDA" would be a deal breaker for me, too.
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Dennis

Ahhh, but what a missed opportunity, in retrospect!

I have a California cousin who says he was offered a job in the early 1980's, working with two Steves in a garage, making some new computer.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

1000 points to you!

I play "cool auntie" in other realms. After owning a copy of Sting (the sword) for several years, I finally gifted it to a nephew who'd been ogling it and drooling every time I brought it out.

Just having it was enough for cool auntie status; gifting it was goddesslike.