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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: robg on Apr 01, '04 09:53:21AM
Not necessarily - the idea of April Fool's is to fool people, as apparently has happened to CNN, the NY Times, and others, regarding Google's April 1st gmail announcement. Check the front page of CNN for more: Google to offer free mega-email.

At the end of the day, if you made someone think it might have been real, then you've succeeded at an April Fool's day prank. The one rule I follow is to try to not do anything that might lead someone to hurt themselves or others...

-rob.

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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: Anonymous on Apr 01, '04 10:12:54AM

Rob, as weird as this may sound, I think it's legit. Either that, or Google is doing one hellishly good job with that prank, as I've heard rumors about Google offering free webmail for a while ... they must've been laying the groundwork early.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: robg on Apr 01, '04 11:07:04AM

Google will offer free web mail. The aspect that makes this one seem particularly April Fools-ish is the 1gigabyte of storage per person. Consider 100,000,000 users of Google at a gigabyte each...

-rob.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: robg on Apr 01, '04 11:54:38AM

Hmm ... now they have more info up, and they do claim 1gb. Either it's real, or it's the most elaborate prank ever :).

-rob.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: reiggin on Apr 01, '04 12:01:09PM

This is Google's April Fools Joke:

http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html



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gmail
Authored by: rgray on Apr 01, '04 12:14:54PM
con 1. no link in the CNN article (may be de rigeur for CNN - not my source of choice).
con 2. nothing on google.com front page

pro 1. see gmail.com
pro 2. CBC (trusty source) Ottawa local news at 11:30am Eastern time ran with this story.

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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: Makosuke on Apr 01, '04 01:14:44PM

The 1GB Google webmail thing certainly seems suspect (and it'd be an odd choice to release something so drastic on April 1st), but although my first thought was "obvious prank", it's not entirely infeasable;

Say, hypothetically, that their 1GB e-mail limit applied only to text mail. I'm assuming that they've got some sort of fancy compression scheme that allows them to deal with the mind-boggling ammounts of data they do, so 1GB of text could easily be a tenth or even hundredth that in actual storage space. Still, 10-100MB of email is a helluva lot.

However, if it's text only, 99.9% of users are never going to go anywhere near that kind of storage; 2 years of de-spammed messages in my account adds up to 2000 messages, and that's only 10MB on disk. Heavy users of course have a lot more, but plenty of home folks have a lot less.

The one trick would be despamming, since that'd overload any "store everything" system very rapidly.

Anyway, I'm still highly skeptical, but it's not wildly out of the realm of possibility--with fancy compression, and averaging of loads, that "1GB" of storage might only end up being a couple of megabytes on disk per user.



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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: harmless on Apr 01, '04 03:17:57PM

Google Mail is not an April Fools joke.

The german magazine c't asked Google if it was and they said it wasn't.

See

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/46204

and

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go.shtml?read=1&msg_id=5414437&forum_id=54872


Andreas



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Gmail not a hoax...
Authored by: olivesoft on Apr 01, '04 04:12:54PM
From CNN:
However, Google's one gigabyte of storage claim led to some speculation about the Gmail announcement being a hoax since it took place on April Fool's Day. Google has pulled April Fool's jokes on the tech community before, including jokes about pigeons being the driving force behind Google's search technology and that Google was looking to start a new research center on the moon. In addition, the press release about Gmail was fairly goofy, including lines such as "Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born." But Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of the products group at Google, said the Gmail announcement was legitimate. He did concede that the company did get caught up in the spirit of April Fool's Day in its press release.

---
-Bob
---------------------
I tend to think of [Mac] OS X as Linux with QA and Taste.
-James Gosling, Java Architect

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Apple releases speed- and CPU-bumped G5s
Authored by: Felix on Apr 02, '04 10:30:32AM

So what was (is) the final determination? Was this a hoax or not. Our esteemed webmaster sure seemed to think it was. Other highly-acclaimed folks in the Mac community said it was legit.

Now that it's 2 Apr, who was right?



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