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06/29/2004:
NF . GMail and SPYMac


Just as I have fully absorbed that GMail's 1000MB e-mail quota was not really an April fool's day joke, here comes SPYMac. SPYMac which was released a couple of days ago is now available while GMail which was announced last April 1, is still in its beta phase. (Although someone posted screenshots of GMail already)

While a number of individuals, especially those whose e-mail accounts were rendered useless by SPAM, leaped in joy... there are also individuals that are concerned with privacy related issues. Google did express their respect for privacy and I believed them. Besides, their continuous quest against evil is much respected. Needless to say, SPAM is indeed evil.

But there's a subtle problem I see in this. The very same problem that bugs computer users with large capacity hard disks... the more resources they have the more inefficient they become in terms of file management. There was a time when 100MB storage was expensive, users were more organized and file management was file management. These days I see a lot of users storing and piling up useless crap in their systems and don't even bother to uninstall applications that did not survive the seven day software rule.

Same holds true with software applications. Some programmers and developers don't care to optimize their codes and rely much on the excess of higher end hardware that is getting cheaper. Bill Gates was even bold enough to predict that in the future hardware will be free.

So what we have are bloated software applications that do not manage memory well. Garbage collection has become a thing of the past. So what if my program will run slow on a lower end machine, it's the user's responsibility to upgrade. That has been one of the bad practices I see these days.

Let's just hope that online services such as GMail and SPYMac, will not be devoured with what humans usually do best... abuse and misuse things in this world.