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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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