My Favorite Gmail Features continued…
In my last posting I forgot to mention my other two favorite Gmail features:
Gmail Drive
The Gmail Drive is a virtual drive which can be mounted to your computer and used as an external storage device. It has a block size of 5MB, which means that uploading small files will waste a lot of space in your gmail account. The beauty of the concept is that you can store your important and private data in the drive, and ,esp. if you are a Windows user, you can never be sure when your files will be corrupted by a virus, and you always will have your data in a safe place. Ofcourse you must ensure that no one hacks your gmail account, by keeping complex passwords. There are a plethora of online storage services like Xdrive, which offer more space than Gmail provides, but I dont like to maintain a seperate account for file storage purposes. I like them all in one place. Gmail is increasingly becoming a virtual office, it allows me to edit documents, spreadsheets, manage my calendar etc.
Integrated Chat Client
A feature which is really innovative and started by Google is the integrated Gtalk Client in the Gmail interface. I really find this very useful, and allows me to get in touch with my friends from anywhere, without installing any software (MSN/Yahoo messenger). The Gtalk client has basic features, however I prefer simplicity over feature-bloat. I really dont think that user need a whiteboard, application sharing, super-size winks most of the time. What they require from a chat client is just a simple way to communicate with their peers.
So this sums up my list of favorite Gmail features.
My Favorite Gmail Features
I've been a Yahoo Mail user since it was launched. Never really liked Hotmail, although I still maintain an address for instant messaging purposes. I liked Yahoo because it provided a simple interface, which unfortunately got more and more bloated with advertisements. The recently launched Yahoo Beta, sports an Add banner, to the right which takes up nearly 20% of the screen, and then there are yet more adds in the toolbar to the left, which take another 15%!
Frustated with Adds, I started using Gmail, and the more I used it the more I liked it! Gmail has a simple interface, and beneath this interface lies a very powerful backend, which enables users to manage their mail very effectively.
In this post I will cover some of my favorite Gmail features, which in my opinion set Gmail apart form the rest of the crowd.
Mail Threading
If you are a member of a high-traffic mailing list, and you don't have this feature, than you will find it very difficult to follow discussions in the mail. Gmail's threading capabilities sort mails with matching topics together which allows you to follow a discussion in a mailing list. It is a hugely useful feature for me personally, for example, being a member of the Linux kernel mailing list(LKML)(which gets 300+ mails per day), if I send a mail out to it, I may received 10+ replies. It would be very difficult to follow the discussion if the mails were not threaded together. This feature also keeps my inbox 'clean', for example a discussion about a patch to the kernel, may generate 30+ mails, however it may be completely irrelevant to my work, thus with threading I simply select the top most mail, and all mails in the thread are deleted! Had I subscribed to yahoo or hotmail with LKML, I would have to select all those messages which I don't want to read manually!
Tag Filters
Filtering mail is nothing new, Yahoo and Hotmail have been providing the ability to filter messages and route them to specific folders. However Gmail does not allow you to route a mail to specific folder, but tag them so that they are identifiable, in one glance, in the inbox. Tags in my opinion are better than routing mails to folders, because for example, typically users create folders to differentiate between different categories of mails: friends, family, office etc... And with folder based filters each mail ends up in a specific folder. But what happens if a mail overlaps two categories, that is its when its both business related and from a family member? Gmail allows you to attach different tags to a single mail. In the lower left corner you can see a listing of all defined tags, and how many emails you have which match the tags specification, clicking on the tag brings up all the mails relevant to the tag, and you can start dispensing/replying to the most important mails.
Putting a lid on Spam
Spam filters in recent days have gotten increasingly effective. Not long ago I used to get hundreds of mails in my inbox.
Gmail allows you to create custom aliases, which are an effective way to deal with spam. When giving out your email address to a company, who may latter end up giving your email address to scrupulous spammers, you can give your email + some custom alias for example:
xxx@gmail might be your email address then the custom aliases would be [email protected]
You can then set a filter to star the following mail, highlighting in the mail box, or sending them to trash etc..
Messages in Atom/RSS
In Gmail it is possible to use any aggregator to subscribe to an Atom or RSS feed of your incoming mails! This is not a hugely beneficial feature for my, because of the 300+ mails I receive from LKML, but many of my friends have raved about it, saying that they can be instantly notified when a mail arrives.
Searching Mail
Searching mail has been one of the oldest features around, so what does Gmail offer which others don't?Its fine-grained searches! Yahoo Mail simply supports searching of mails by text-matching, you enter the text, and it tries to find that text in all mails in the folders(inbox, sent etc.). Gmail allows you to refine your searches to narrowing done to sender, to, subject etc. Again this has huge productivity benefits if I'm looking for a specific reply in a thread. Lets say I want to know what Linus Torvalds has to say about this patch? I simply put the subject, and then set the from field, viola! There's the mail!
Tons of Space
I don't really know why Gmail offers an increasing mail box size, do they really offer that much, knowing that most people wont even use 500MB! Will they ever stop there mail box size count? But one thing is for sure: Gmail has made mailbox size a non-issue. We were using 4MB mailbox sizes when Gmail came around to offer 1 GB!!
Google since its launch has made a major impact on the way we use the Internet! Google Search is the default search engine, and provided an Add free, technically superior search engine to existing search engines. Gmail on the same lines, offers a powerful webbased mail management solution which has revolutionized the field, by introducing an interactive interface, tons of space, and some advanced features, some of which have been documented here.
Read the other of my favorite Gmail features
Linux rises as a Supercomputer Operating System, but faces hurdles in the Desktop
In Nov 1997, 99.2% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world ran Unix.
9 years afterwards, It's market share has been eroded by Linux which now runs on 73.5% of the top 500 supercomputers.
In 1998 Linux made it's debut in the Top500 List, an authoritative list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.
After 1998, it took Linux 7 years to break the magical 50% mark. As of November 2004, it ran on 60.2% of the top 500 supercomputers, in 2006 it nearly reached the 75% mark. I believe that Linux will go all the way to completely take over Unix's user base. Both OS's run on about 94.4% of the top 500 supercomputers.
The rise of Linux has come largely at the cost of Unix. Which is discernible from the fact that both operating systems are very similar in nature, and they both are operated the same way, thus the cost of switching is minimal. Linux is an open source, stable, secure, multi-user and multitasking operating system all these factors make it ideal for a supercomputer. Supercomputer manufacturers can modify the kernel source to suite their hardware. The kernel is monolithic but has elements of microkernels in that it allows kernel modules, which make kernel development very simple.
Contrasting open source Linux with closed source Unix leads to a major observation: A lot of money is flowing into Linux these days, and Linux has a large active community which contributes to it, enhancing and making the OS better. Whereas the money flowing into Unix is stagnant. After the commercialization of Unix, the operating system has been largely in decline, I expect the decline to continue and see it as irreversible. All these factors conspired to erode Unix market share in the supercomputing world.
Linux has made remarkable progress from a hobbyists project in 1991, to the leading OS in supercomputers and server systems. Linux also has made inroads into the embedded market. Motorola has been very successful marketing Linux based smartphones, like the e680i which I personally use, and have no regrets about buying it.
One area where Linux lacks is the desktop market. Which of course Microsoft rules. There are many things which conspired to make Linux entry into the Desktop difficult! For starters: Weak GUI(KDE is great, but in my opinion increasingly getting bloated), focus on command-line based user interface(no matter how good the GUI is you always have to go back to the command-line at some stage), difficulty of managing and installing Open source software (dependency hell! Gentoo's emerge, yum, conary do a great job at resolving that). But two hurdles I think have been overlooked, that is software piracy and lack of support for Open Source! The most natural user base of an Open Source operating system would be in the Third World. Countries which can not pay for basic amenities for their populations hardly can be expected to purchase proprietary software from multi-billion dollar companies. So open source software provides them a platform with which they can compete with the developed nations. However if I look around in my own country, Pakistan, I hardly see any Linux deployments around. The Government uses MS software in its offices, businesses use MS software, the people use MS software at their homes! MS Office is taught has part of the curriculum at high school. Most of the software is of course pirated, costing about half a dollar per CD (Windows is 1 CD). Because of software piracy MS Windows and related software are ubiquitous in Pakistan. Software Piracy helps proprietary software companies more than it hurts them! Precisely it makes people dependant on their technology! No-one I know is even considering of switching to Linux because they see Windows everywhere around them, they believe using Linux would put them at a disadvantage, so they better stick to Windows, no matter how many virii they get!
Not long ago I had an instructor at university, who was a senior officer in the Pakistan Armed Forces, he happened to be the director of the Army's directorate which was responsible for the IT policy. He was a complete "Microsoft Guy". He never considered any software solution which was not from Microsoft! I once had a discussion about why his directorate was making the Army dependent on Microsoft software, and not take up the initiative of making them "independent" by indigenously customizing open source software to suit their purposes. He replied this was impossible in the current scenario! There are no companies in Pakistan which provide support for Open Source software, and the Army required heavy-duty support, which to them was only being provided by Microsoft. Indeed in Pakistan there are virtually no companies which provide support for open source software. Most universities in Pakistan are busy at churning out software professionals which are adept at Microsoft technologies, and open source figures low on their curriculum. With no support companies it is very unlikely that any enterprise will take the risk to switch to Linux.
The Economics of Open Source
When I was a newbie in the Open Source world, I always wondered why someone would bother to make a complex software and give it away for free! I once came across the GPL, and its 4 freedoms, those left me with doubts about the entire Open Source software model! I said to myself: I develop a piece of software, although the GPL allows me to charge for the sale of the software, but I have to provide the sources aswell, so the first customer can distribute it for free to my other prospective customers, and I'll only have one customer!! What the hell?? I'll go broke this way! I better return to the proprietary world and charge for the software and NOT provide the source along with it.
But of course I didn’t return to the proprietary world, and stayed and investigated abit more, I came across writings of Micheal Tiemann, Doc Searls and the renowned work "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which cleared most of my doubts.
The Open Source economic model is the EXACT opposite of the proprietary model! Proprietary companies provide software at a substantial price, which includes support services. Open Source provides free software, but with paid support! So its like Retail vs Services for commodities model.
Open Source model allows various software companies to provide support for software which might have been developed by someone else, and it doesn’t lead to a saturated support services market! Because only the best companies survive. Whereas the Proprietary model naturally gives the software developer an advantage. I would call companies such as McAfee and Symantec "support companies" as they are providing solutions which keep your Windows installation running and remove malicious software. But they are providing support for a software which's source they do not have limited access to. The recent move by Microsoft to disallow access to the Windows Vista internals, should be a wakeup call for all support companies targetting non-open source software. In a proprietary world support companies are effectively second class citizens, and can be ditched by their "masters".
Making the source available and charging for support services, also leads to great software! A proprietary company can have a few great developers, some excellent quality assurance experts, an army of beta testers and provide software which is good. After release only two groups of people will actually see the code: The company's developers, and crackers/hackers! If the company's developer finds them, its a patch! If a cracker finds it; it’s a malware or a new virus, and users are exposed until the company patches the flaw. In the Open Source world, because the source code is freely available a lot more people have access to the source and ability to study it, find bugs fix it or exploit it. But the incentives in the open source world to exploit are less than in the proprietary world. Because the effect will be limited, mainly due to the enhanced security of most Linux deployments. Software such as IpTables, SELinux, LIDS etc. Make Linux so much more secure than any operating system I've used.
However "support" is not the only thing Open Source enables you to do. LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP/Perl/python) provides a great platform to innovate on and provide innovative services to people. Just Look around the Internet, and the quality of services is just amazing!
I (as many other people now think) conjecture that future software companies will be increasing support/services driven not based on the model of existing proprietary companies (eg. Microsoft). Google, the multi-billions dollar company, which made its wealth not from selling software like Microsoft, but from providing a service to its users, that is context sensitive ads, bases its software infrastructure mainly on Linux and Open Source software.
Is Open Source Software Really Better?
What is the Open Source hype all about? Nearly every week a seminar in some part of the world is being held on Open Source technologies. Every year (at least the last 2-3 ) we are confronted with reports which state that certain open source software have increased their's market share at the expense of already established proprietary software.
Is Linux really better than Windows? Is Apache really the better web-server? Does MySQL really have what it takes for a good database engine? Is Open Source going to take over the World?
The word 'better' when applied to software is an ambiguous term. In this article the word better will mean: "A Software which has a superior performance, stability and less prone to software bugs coupled with ease of use when compared to it's equivalents and given that it satisfies user requirements"
Armed with this redefinition of the word 'better' we will seek the answers to the questions we posed.
The Origins and Heavyweights of The Open Source Movement
The Open Source movement separated from the Free Software Movement and earned a separate identity in 1998. It's sole purpose initially was "to act as a marketing strategy for Free Software". The leaders of the Open Source Movement recognized that the term 'free' in the business world is synonymous with 'free of cost' where as the term 'free' in Free Software meant 'free as in freedom, not cost', the word itself was seen as a hurdle for market acceptance of free software. Thus to present free software to the commercial world, the term Open Source was coined in order to avoid the name ambiguity problem.
The Open Source community for large parts is identical to the Free Software Community except for it's inclination towards commercialization, whereas the latter is concerned with ethical reasons for usage of the software. The most renowned Open Source evangelists are Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, and Tim O'Reilly. In order to provide Free Software better marketing. They formed the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to
* promote the pragmatic benefits to the business community, and
* certify free/open source licenses that meet the Open Source Definition.
One of the earliest success of the Open Source movement was On January 22nd, 1998, when Netscape announced that it would open the source code for Netscape Navigator 5.0. Their announcement gave the free/open source software community a great boost in credibility in the eyes of business community.
Open Source Initiative's evangelism paid off. Following Netscape's announcement, several additional vendors announced support for Linux, including Oracle, IBM, and Corel. Intel and Netscape invested in Red Hat, the largest English language Linux distributor. Novell in a change of business strategy bought the German Linux Distribution SuSE, and various other Linux-related firms including Ximian to make a niche for itself in the Linux World.
Since the founding of OSI, numerous Open Source support organizations have been formed, one of the latest one is the Open Source Development Labs, founded by a consortium consisting of Industry Heavyweights such as IBM, Sun, Intel, Oracle, Corel, Novell, RedHat. The OSDL is the single largest non-profit organization supporting Open Source Development, and is located in Portland, USA. More significantly, many large corporations are now migrating to open source. Earlier this year, the European arm of automobile giant Ford decided to ditch Microsoft as its desktop operating systems provider and move to open source. Likewise in June, the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency announced that it plans to standardize with StarOffice.
What's different in Open Source software
As mentioned that the Open Source movement was conceived from the Free Software movement. The Free Software movement itself has its roots in the "hacker" culture of U.S. computer science laboratories ( at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT) in the 1960's and 1970's.
This community came to an end par se in the 1980s when commercial companies hired away most of the staff in the U.S. computer science laboratories. The companies protected their source code with special 'non-disclosure agreements' where the programmers didn't't own their code but the company owned it and they were obliged to not discuss or show it to anyone.
Richard Stallman, a programmer at the MIT's AI-Lab, revolted against this new-order which had destroyed the hacker-culture, by starting the GNU project which's aim was to produce a "Free" Operating System. The GNU project reinvigorated the hacker-culture, an they became united in Stallman's pursuit.
The GNU project spawned and entire software development methodology based on hacker ethics:
The community of programmers was closely-knitted. Code passed back and forth between the members of the community--if you made an improvement you were expected to submit your code to the community of developers. To withhold code was considered gauche--after all, you benefited from the work of your friends, you should return the favor.
With this methodology an entire Operating System, and it's accompanying application was built that operating system is called GNU/Linux. After the successful development of the operating system, an entire new array of application dawned. Open Source scripting languages like PERL, PHP were built, Open Source Web-server known as Apache was built, Database Suites, security tools, desktop multimedia applications etc.
Currently Open Source has a respectable and vast array of software to offer, and most of it at virtually no cost, but is it really better?
Yes and no, most people think!
Yes, because of the particular way these software are developed, where a multitude of people have access to the source code, and multiple programmers are contributing. Very few software companies can attract such a pool of talent as a single open source project can. In Sourceforge.net, the largest repository of Free/Open Source software, the average number of developers per application is 10, but the big open source applications such as the Linux kernel, Apache, MySQL have more than hundreds of people working on them.
Because of co-operating between working developers the time to release the software is reduced, bugs are spotted by end-users. It's a way that many individuals can collaborate on a product that none of them could achieve alone. It's the rapid bug-fixes and the changes that the user asks for, done to the user's own schedule. Another benefit of open source software is that the software can be customized by the user according to his or her requirements as the source code is freely available and there is no restriction in changing it and customizing for oneself.
Proprietary software such as the ones developed by Microsoft. Allow access to source code to only a few programmer which have exclusive rights to develop, maintain and debug the software. Source code of the software is thus hidden from the users and the users only receive the executable binaries. These software are generally general-purpose to achieve the maximum user-base, and thus are not customized for individual requirements, this leads to the user adjusting himself to the software instead of adjusting the software to his requirements, which is impractical in some cases.
Open source development methodology also leads to a more reliable software. Where-as proprietary software are released only to a minor community of pre-selected beta testers, open source software are tested by thousands and thousands of people before a concrete version is released, often open source development cycles produce software at speeds that even software giants face difficulty compete with.
The open-source model also means increased security; because code is in the public view it will be exposed to extreme scrutiny, with problems being found and fixed instead of being kept secret until the wrong person discovers them. Thus this leads to a more reliable software.
However the problem with most of open source software is that it's not easy to use, most open source software was made for fellow 'hackers' not for the normal user as a consequence generally higher level of technical knowledge required to install and maintain open source software. This is certainly an obstacle to wider adoption of open source software. However distributors like Red Hat and Mandrake have begun to offer user-friendly shrink-wrapped installations of Linux. But users who migrate to open source applications still face a steep learning curve.
For this reason, the implementation of open source solutions today tends to be restricted to infrastructure and other "invisible" applications such as servers, where techies are responsible for their installation and management. Currently, for instance, around 60 percent of the world's Web sites run on Apache.
Open source software also have terrible user documentations. A couple of years ago only sources of applications where available with little, if any, installations instructions. This situation was a consequence of the fact that only technical people used to use the software, thus developers rarely cared for documentation. Now fortunately the situation has improved. The Linux Documentation Project is a project dedicated to produce How-Tos, FAQs and Tutorials for users of Linux systems, covering topics has diverse as Artificial Intelligence programming in Linux to how to upgrade you Hard Disk. Open source developers now often maintain 'wikis' (which resemble blogging sites) where user of the software make contributions and these wikis act as a knowledge base for users of the software, often these wikis take the role of user-documentation.
Another major problem with open source software is that since their source codes are freely available, proprietary software companies can study the methods used and if they find a method which has already been 'patented', they can pursue legal action against the project. This often leads to destruction of the entire project, since no one takes responsibility. Software patents are a serious and are adversely affecting software development across the world.
However help on this front is on the way. Bruce Perens, open source evangelist and leader of the famous Debi an GNU/Linux distribution founded the Open Source Securities which sells legal protection to users (mostly mid-level companies) of open source software.
So does open Source software qualify for the "better software title"? Depends for whom you are answering! Although open source software matches most of the criteria we set, it still misses somewhat the mark when it comes to usage, which mainly affects the desktop users, however the technical users may regard open source software as the superior platform, that's why desktop users have been so far shy to adopt open source software whereas technical ones are porting to open source in droves. However since usage is improving with the advent of GUI environments for Linux, and graphical front ends to nearly every open source program, we can say that open source software are improving to match their proprietary counterparts especially on desktop, whereas in the back-office, open source technology has mostly already taken over.
The Future of Open Source
Although Open source software is considered to be more secure and less vulnerable to the many viruses now circulating on the Internet, this is not the reason why everyone is porting to Open Source: The most compelling feature is that, although there may be some distribution and setup costs, open source software is essentially free, Open Source is a way to avoid millions of license costs which would come with proprietary software deployment.
The ultimate test of open source will doubtless lie in its ability to become more user-friendly and to capture the desktop. But this will be an uphill struggle. Today Microsoft has a 95-percent monopoly of the PC operating system market, a 96-percent share of the office applications suite business, and an 84-percent share of the browser market.
On the positive side, there are new GUI-like desktop environments available for Linux PCs, including KDE and GNOME. And Microsoft's competitors are working hard to provide open source alternatives to mainstream applications, such as OpenOffice, which is derived from Sun's StarOffice and is emerging as an open source competition to Microsoft Office. There are also Linux versions of Netscape browser, and its celebrated derivative, FireFox.
Resources:
Open Source Initiative
http://www.osi.org
Free Software Foundation
http://www.fsf.org
Open Source Development Labs
http://www.osdl.org
GNU Project
http://www.gnu.org
Linux Documentation Project
http://www.tldp.org
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