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<DIV>Hunting for a <A href="http://gmail.google.com/">Gmail</A> 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 <A href="http://www.google.com/accounts/">Google account</A>) that
Google may soon open an access system based on invitation like for <A
href="http://www.orkut.com/">Orkut</A>. If you wish to know new developments on
access to Gmail, the best thing you can do is to join the <A
href="http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=35016">Gmail community</A> at
Orkut (you will need an invitation to join Orkut first). <BR>In the meantime you
can read a <A href="http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html">very interesting
article</A> on the <A href="http://blog.topix.net/">topix.net blog</A>: 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...</DIV></BODY></HTML>