[extropy-chat] Hunting for a Gmail account

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

Hunting for a Gmail account is the new game on the net. At the time of
writing Gmail is only open to a small number of beta testers, there is no
"New Account" or "Signup" screen visible, and none of the obvious hacks to
get in the system anyway work. Making things difficult for new users has
probably generated even more publicity for Gmail. There are indications
(look at the error message displayed when you try to login with your
standard Google account) that Google may soon open an access system based on
invitation like for Orkut. If you wish to know new developments on access to
Gmail, the best thing you can do is to join the Gmail community at Orkut
(you will need an invitation to join Orkut first).
In the meantime you can read a very interesting article on the topix.net
blog: Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system.
There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the
initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the
observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user
value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into
other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red
herring. No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are
actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that
Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and
run web-scale applications than anyone else. Google has taken the last 10
years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their
own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that
Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage
web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte,
distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably
network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management
system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000
servers...

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