Yahoo's Geek Statue

Philipp Lenssen writes "Yahoo put up a life-size alpha geek statue in honor of the Yahoo Mail team, which they think beat the Gmail team. The statue's plaque says it's presented "in recognition of tremendous intellectual efforts put forth in order to defeat Gmail", and: "Not since the code breakers in Britain's Bletchley Park deciphered Germany's Enigma code during World War II has so much brainpower been focused on kicking an enemy's ass." Flickr has a photo." It's a nice little article on the difference between two of the net's superpowers.

Re:Here, have a trophy.

[mallumax]

They are claiming that Yahoo Mail is better than GMail.Check out this sticker
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbrew/60225255/in/ photostream/ [flickr.com] It says

Thanks to the new YAHOO! MAIL we can all give the competition something to kiss.

The New Yahoo! Mail is superior to GMail
Wall Street Journal

sigh..

[Janek Kozicki]

no one ever remembers that it were polish scientists who cracked [wikipedia.org] enigma...

Re:This is Wrong

[clap_hands]

Yes, it's certainly hyperbole.

(A bit off-topic, but, because it's not as widely known as it should be, it might also be good to point out the considerable contributions of Polish and American codebreakers to the reading of Enigma. The Polish had been solving Enigma since the end of 1932. Shortly before the start of World War II, they passed their techniques and knowledge onto the British. Without the Polish head start, it would have taken Bletchley Park much longer to get going on Enigma (if at all). The US chipped in later.)

Boring, pointless, irrelevant

[MacBeliever]

1. This is not news, it's gossip. Who cares what stupid tricks Yahoo! management uses to try to motivate their employees? Oh wait, I know, I better sell that Yahoo! stock.

2. If any of the Yahoo! Mail team members is actually motivated by a 3D cartoon character with a plaque, they've already lost to GMail.

3. The plaque says the team's bravery, blah, blah... won't be forgotten until the next version of Yahoo! Mail is released. What happens then? We forget?

4. I just checked my Yahoo! Mail account (which I only use to give to stupid registration-required sites), and my inbox is full of spam. My GMail inbox has yet to receive a spam message.

5. They must be referring to a yet-to-be-released version. What good is a product that no one can use? How is that progress towards defeating GMail?. Hint: While Yahoo! celebrates, GMail gains more users.

Re:sigh..

[Ed Almos]

Some of us do. Without the work of the Polish scientists on a captured Enigma machine the task at Bletchley Park would have been impossible. Perhaps we should educate the rest of the Slashdot readership.

Ed Almos

Re:sigh..

[Anonymous Coward]

Bletchley Park did more than the Enigma work (the Lorenz cipher being most notable) and while polish "scientists" did the indeed do the initial work on the Enigma, it still required considerable manpower to "crack" individual messages -- a task which Bletchley Park is rightly credited with.

I see no reason to belittle Bletchley Park.

Re:Boring, pointless, irrelevant

[Nutshell_TA]

Just wanted to point that if you use your Yahoo account for "stupid registration-required sites" and keep your GMail box private, then you shouldn't be surprise if the Yahoo one gets filled with spam while the GMail one doesn't.

Re:Here, have a trophy.

[clap_hands]

Breaking Enigma wasn't a one off-event (like breaking an egg). You had to do it each time the settings changed, which was at least once a day. So it's quite accurate to say that Bletchley Park broke Enigma, and that Polish mathematicians broke Enigma (and the US too). As considerable as the Polish work on Enigma was, the British work was certainly quite comparable as an accomplishment in its own right.

It is true that the Polish contribution is often overlooked, but we needn't diminish BP in order to rectify that state of affairs.

Re:Didn't Yahoo! have webmail first?

[kimba]

Yeah you did. It is talking about the new Yahoo! Mail which is about to be released and has been subject to previewing for the last few months. It is not talking about the Yahoo! Mail that has been around for years.

Here is a screenshot [zawodny.com].

Re:I've got news for them...

[Bertie]

If you install Greasemonkey [mozdev.org], there's a script [userscripts.org] for it which will add a delete button to the page alongside the "archive" one Google seems to think you should use for even the most useless messages.

Re:I don't get it

[Nevenmrgan]

Oh wow.

- Because [e-mail] is a terrible email address
- Because I want to be able to change my ISP and not lose my email address
- Because most ISPs' webmail interfaces are terrible (actually, are any even decent?)
- Because ISPs will never even attempt to catch up to the feature/storage/ease/coolness of the webmail superpowers
- Because a Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail (to mention the three big ones) account also gives you numerous other services

AJAX for Yahoo! Mail

[cciRRus]

I like GMail because it supports AJAX, and Yahoo! Mail seems to be behind in this area. Then, I chanced upon a Firefox extension [mozilla.org] that adds AJAX support to Yahoo! Mail. It's pretty neat. :)

Re:Didn't Yahoo! have webmail first?

[jambay]

You can sign up for the Beta here: http://whatsnew.mail.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]

Re:Slow motion pictures

[TheOneTrueRhys]

It's called AJAX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) [wikipedia.org]

You don't get it do you?

[animus9]

Am I the only one that recognizes this as being a joke?

About the text on the plaque: Do you people really take this literally?

The giant life sized plastic geek doesn't give it away to you?

It's just a harmless gag.

Re:As a GMail user...

[fionbio]

There was an inaccuracy in my original post - GMail doesn't just kill attachments, it kills the whole messages containing anything suspicious.

GMail has selective policy on rejecting messages that have some file types attached to them (it judges by extension). It doesn't accept executable files or anything that looks like them or contains them. It rejects ZIP files containing anything suspicious. What's more unpleasant, it seems to reject all RAR attachments regardless of their content. Unfortunatelly I have to work with VB.NET in a somewhat distributed team, and despite the fact that Subversion solves code storage/exchange/etc. problems, there still can be situations when someone sends you several little source files in ZIP - they also get rejected (suspicious .vb extension). As of now, the common solution is renaming files to change their extension to something meaningless before sending them.

I understand that if Google didn't do anything about filtering out virus attachments, unattended accounts would quickly be overflown despite great mailbox size. But I think they could use some antivirus (e.g. an adapted version of ClamAV) instead of rejecting e-mails.

Among my friends/colleagues the attachment problem is the greatest complaint (and the most often cited reason for not using GMail). Some of them actually contacted Google, and the answer was something like that this is going to be fixed somehow when they're out of Beta, but something tells me that it's not going to happen too soon).

Actual photo link, without blogs, etc.

[Animats]

Direct link to actual photo. [flickr.com]

Re:Slow motion pictures

[Kadin2048]

That's pretty funny, because I'm reading my Gmail account right now using Lynx, which despite its many capabilities doesn't do ActiveX.

The only thing GMail requires is JavaScript and cookie support, and even that isn't required, you just get a "For a better Gmail experience, use a fully supported browser" message at the top of the screen.

To quote from their help page:

  To take advantage of all Gmail has to offer, sign in to your account
      from a fully-supported browser. The following browsers will give you
      access to all of Gmail's features (each is available for free
      download):
          * Microsoft IE 5.5+ (download:Windows)
          * Netscape 7.1+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
          * Mozilla 1.4+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
          * Mozilla Firefox 0.8+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
          * Safari 1.2.1+ (download: Mac)

      If you don't have access to a fully supported browser, you can still
      sign in to Gmail with almost any other browser.

Re:Slow motion pictures

[imroy]

Not exactly. Gmail is an 'AJAX' webapp, and under IE the XMLHTTPRequest object is implemented as an ActiveX control. But it's not installing its own ActiveX control, just one that's provided standard with the browser install. The security hole that ActiveX creates is when web pages can install their own custom control(s), which runs as pretty much a normal user app (not in a sandbox), and that Windows users are so acustomed to clicking 'ok' without reading whenever a confirmation dialog pops up. So I wouldn't say Gmail is insecure just because it uses ActiveX (on IE). It just doesn't use it in an insecure way.