I believe that it was called Hotmail when MS bought it. It ran under than name Hotmail until quite recently where they renamed it to outlook.com. The biggest advantage that Google brought to the table was the amount of space you got. At the time, Hotmail offered only 2MB of storage. If I'm not mistaken, I had 11 MB with Yahoo at the time. Google started off with 1 GB, that's 500 times more storage than MS, and 90 times more than Yahoo was offering. That combined with reasonably good spam filtering, probably aided by the fact that they had good experience with text analysis due to the search engine expertise, make it a joy to use over the other alternatives at the time. Hotmail's spam protection at the time was so bad that most people I know who used it employed the use of a white list and everything else went to spam. It was the only way to not have your entire inbox full of spam. Of course you missed messages from new friends, but it was better than using the default spam protection.

Yeah, so it's great for foreign language things like anime, but for the movies that most people watch, it doesn't make a difference in the slightest.

I guess it depends where you work and how high you are in the company hierarchy for this to be effective though. Somebody like Larry Ellison, co-founder and chairman of Oracle, couldn't have a "personal" Twitter account, because he is so well known, and anything he said would be taken under suspicion as being connected to the company. Looking further down the line, you got guys like Scott Hanselman of Microsoft, who tries to maintain a personal blog and podcast, but you still see plenty of people calling him out when he pushes things like Surface Pro or Windows 10. Even if he truly believes that they are great products, some people will still call him a shill for Microsoft.

expensive drives that wear out or can mangle the tape

This is my main problem with removable magnetic media. The simple act of reading the data actually degrades the storage medium. And if you have a bad drive, it can actively destroy any disk/tape you put in there. And it's actually hard to diagnose if the problem is with the disk or the drive, so you're likely to destroy a few disks/tapes before you figure it out. I've had floppy drives, zip drives and tape drives that have all ruined the storage media. At least with optical drives, it's very unlikely that the disc will be destroyed by attempting to read it.

That's the thing. Most people who need 3.2 TB of space will only write to each location a few times, and data won't change very often. Sure, some writes will be happening, but not even close to the magnitude that you'd need to wear out one of these drives. There might be some cases in commercial applications where you'd need to write that every day, but the typical desktop or laptop is never going to see that kind of usage.

You could fit every tool with an RFID tag and put a small computer with an RFID reader in the tool box. When a tool it taken out of the tool box, the tool box would check it off the list. When you're done with the tool box, you could get a list of any missing tools before you put the tool box away. If you notice something is missing right away, it should be easy to locate the tool, unless you intentionally what to lose the tool so you can take it home. This could be what's happening. Even then, $35,000 in tools isn't very much. How many workers is this loss rate calculated over?

The biggest problem that I found with Diaspora was that even as somebody who already has a hosting service for my personal web site I found that I wasn't able to get Diaspora to actually working on my server. Making it easy to deploy on various web hosts is key if you want people to be about to host it. Also, it has to integrate with existing solutions. It would be great if those of us who chose to use whatever open source social networking is created could still interact with facebook, twitter, and other social networks without having to go to those other sites.

The rest of the problem is actually pretty straight forward. Most social networking sites are nothing more than an RSS Feed of a bunch of content produced by the user. Add in the ability to attach pictures and videos to the posts and you have most of what people use social networks for. Private messages are nice too. We actually have tools that do most of what we need out of a social networking site. The difficulty is putting the pieces together into a cohesive package and getting it to play nice with the other social networks so that people can slowly move over.

Are there any reasons (safety or otherwise) why it wouldn't be easy to install a natural gas compressor in my house? I have natural gas, but that just flows under low pressure to the furnace and hot water heater. I don't think it's at very high pressure. Would having a high pressure tank of natural gas sitting in or near my house sit well with my insurance company?

So you're minimizing the impact on retail-type people by shopping online, which effectively makes them obsolete and unneeded. I kind of say this in a joking way, but I too do a lot of online shopping. It's just easier. Why would I want to go out to the store, when I can order it from the comfort of my living room and have it delivered in a few days. That isn't to say we don't need any retail. I still like to have physical grocery stores, because even next day delivery is too long, and it's very convenient to be able to stop on my way home and pick up some groceries. And there are advantages to things like clothes, shoes, and bikes, because it's nice to be able to check if something fits. But a laptop, camera, or book is pretty much the same wherever I buy it, and there's very little reason to have it right now.

The appeal of Tetris is that it was done well. There are a million Tetris clones out there, but how well the game is programmed really makes the difference between and enjoyable game, and one that is extremely frustrating. I'm not sure what the original Tetris was like, the the versions for the NES and Gameboy, which a lot of us remember playing were done very well. It's like going back and playing Mario Bros, and then going to some cheap knockoff that some kid programmed in a few weeks. The underlying game is basically the same, but the experience of playing the game is completely different.

Also, the computer predicting the weather is only as good as the algorithms running on the computer and the data fed into the computer. Garbage in = Garbage out as they say. Maybe the correct approach isn't to build a giant supercomputer, but to build a better and more densely distributed set of sensors so that the existing computers have more and better accurate data to work with.

A water bottle which can hold .75 litres probably weights at maximum 100 grams, so just using a regular water bottle on your bike, which it usually has room for anyway. Most bikes have room for 2, so you can carry 1.5 litres of water with 1.7 KG of bottles. If you're looking for lightweight ways of carrying water, a water bottle is probably close to optimal.

I can't think of a good reason why anybody would want to pay rent with cash. First, there's a big liability walking around with that much cash. Even if you're just carrying from the bank to the rental office, that's a huge amount of money to lose. Also, there's no record that the transaction took place. If I pay with a check, or using a debit card, there's a record that the money went from my account to the building management account. With cash there's no direct record. The best you can hope for is that they issue you a receipt, but even then they could say you forged it, and that they have no record of the payment. Plus, I can really understand why the building wouldn't want to take cash. Otherwise, they would have a huge amount of money on hand at the beginning of the month. They would have to take a lot of precautions to ensure that the money was not stolen.

This car is going to have a major problem with most people because there are no stations that carry hydrogen to refill it. It's hard enough for the Tesla to gain traction because you can't refill it in as many places as a standard gasoline powered car, but at least in that case you can charge it every night at home, and it has enough range to last you for the day. You won't be able to generate or store hydrogen at your house. And until there's enough hydrogen stations across the city, it will be very inconvenient to own one of these cars. Even a couple in every city wouldn't be enough because nobody wants to go 20-30 minutes out of their way just to pick up fuel for their car.

Yeah, but you could make a game just to illustrate how stupid the double standard is. Make a game with only female lead roles who are portrayed in a very positive manner and have all the men in the game be bumbling idiots who are constantly causing problems.

I wonder how such a rating would be applied to a sports game like such FIFA/NFL/NHL, in which no women are actually players in these sports. Is it sexist to now allow females to be created when creating custom characters? If it allowed creating female characters, would it be sexist to not allow the stats to be above the level of the best woman players to keep it in touch with reality?