It's Yahoo Mail! It's an RSS Reader!

The next version of Yahoo Mail--currently in a beta test that's open to some, but not all, Yahoo users--is already a spectacularly good Web-based e-mail client. As of tonight, it's also a pretty darn impressive RSS reader.

Logically enough, Yahoo Mail treats RSS like, well, e-mail: Your feeds sit in the same pane with your mail folders, and you can e-mail items and move them into the folders you use to manage e-mail. Your feeds are subfolders within a folder called "All RSS Feeds"; click on that folder, and you see all items from all your feeds in one continuous stream.

Everything's done with Yahoo Mail's new AJAX interface, so it feels more like a powerful desktop application than a mere browser-based service. (On the downside, the beta version is a tad slow by desktop standards--at least at this very moment in Firefox on my Wi-Fi-connected laptop.)

Here's a peek at the interface:


Of course, Yahoo already has a fairly sophisticated RSS reader--My Yahoo. And thankfully, your My Yahoo RSS subscriptions are simply your Yahoo Mail RSS subscriptions, and vice versa--add or delete feeds in one interface, and your changes will be reflected in the other. (This sort of pan-site integration, by the way, is something Yahoo still does way better than Google: Google's personalized home page and Google Reader both speak RSS, but neither seems to know the other exists.)

At the moment, Yahoo Mail only lets you add feeds by choosing from a smattering of recommended Yahoo picks or entering a feed URL. (My Yahoo has more pre-programmed feeds, and lets you find feeds via keyword searches.) More robust tools for choosing, importing, and exporting feeds are apparently on the way; I hope that Yahoo also adds the ability to sort entire feeds (not just individual items) into custom folders, and (like Bloglines and Newsgator) adds a count of how many new items there are in each of your feeds.

But like I said, this is already a slick way to do RSS...and it makes a lot of sense to do it in an application you visit frequently anyhow. Here's hoping that it, and the rest of the new Yahoo Mail, go completely public soon...

Pictures of my college days

A few old pics of my college days.

Sheru, Addu, Azzu,Me

Me, Sheru and Addu

Addu, Me and Sheru
Azzu and Me

Root servers: The real Net power

Delegates from third-world nations spent much of last week at a United Nations summit here railing against the Bush administration's alleged control of the Internet.

But in reality, the U.S. government has strictly limited influence on which top-level domains--such as .com, .org, and .uk--are actually seen by Internet users.

The real power behind the network lies with the group of 13 organizations which, through a mechanism little-known outside of technical circles, operate the root servers that guide traffic to each one of those top-level domains.

Some root servers, named A through M, are located inside the U.S. at organizations such as VeriSign, NASA Ames, and the U.S. Army Research Lab.

Not all. The M server is operated by the WIDE Project in Tokyo, and the K server is managed by Amsterdam-based RIPE. The F, I and J servers point to many addresses around the world through the anycast protocol, yielding a total of 80 locations in 34 countries.

This process doesn't involve the United Nations or its agencies at all, which is just fine with the root server operators. The U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union, on the other hand, signaled earlier this year that it wouldn't mind taking over the oversight operations.

Gates, Windows Mista, they really dont get it, other than your $

True to form, MSFT takes a simple idea, and BLOWS it again. All
the windows users of the world unite when saying how common
it is in businesses, noting the interoperability. Thats all "well and
good" except that the great corporate OS is the absolute
BIGGEST RISK, to corporate and private users Worldwide, its a
piece of Junk for web use. NO, MSFT missed the chance to do
what they should have done from the start.

Bill Gates, unable to grasp the concept of "the road ahead" early
in the game, got caught with his pants down by Netscape. So
rather than give his customers something new, and REALLY
improved, he just bastardized windows by mashing in IE. He did
not care about his users, the corporations, or their data.....he
wanted to cut off Netscape's air supply...period. In so doing,, IE
opened ALL the great business software interoperability "hooks"
and left us NONE of the security it sorely needed.

Customers be damned, full speed ahead....and the world has
been paying for it ever since. Oh sure, you got a web browser in
Windows, but why couldnt it be ON windows, not in it? Well
because "smart Bill" hahaha couldnt see the web coming, and he
couldnt see the risks of opening the OS to the web. Now you get
to spend the next 10+ years, cleaning up after him, while he
spends it counting "YOUR" money. He is worth $50 billion, that
is about what the virus, spyware, and patch labor cost
businesses last year.

So to make my point: they had a chance now to build a truly
new, and secure OS, maybe they call it Vista; make it small,
tight, useful, and faster...by tossing out the lame amalgamation
of consumer garbage they keep bundling in.

Could they do this, think outside the box, give us what we
need....a small, fast OS that "works" rather than a bloated code
morass that keeps clogging the internet and emptying wallets.
Nope, they just keep piling it on, and we know what they're
piling up dont we? crap.

It wouldve been best to build a Windows "slim" so it had no IE,
no MediaPlayer, no IM, no Passport, just the business essentials.
Then fragment and cater to the market's tastes, offering Add-on
packs to give users the functionality they want to merge onto
windows.

They couldnt do that for 2 reasons:

1. they dont think like that, and would never admit their mistake
of "bundling" the browser into the OS.

2. The merging of the business and consumer code base of
Windows 2000, or XP, was their goal to reduce costs and
disparate OS pieces, making it better for them, but worse for the
users.

You see consumer and corporations have totally different needs,
and security concerns. A Company cannot afford to allow their
information to escape, whereas an unknowing consumer is less
likely at risk, other things being equal. Instead, we still have IE,
mashed into the OS, and now we have 7 versions of Vista, none
of which is really the secure OS, that does NOT have the web
framework open for hacking underneath.

It would serve the market and MSFT much better had they really
innovated...simplified, improved the OS by adding stability.
Putting more "cards" on top of the already shaky cards that are
up, is no way to build a new OS. But my breath is wasted on the
dim witted, unknowing mass of users who will "flock" or
whatever lemmings do, when they run out to buy the next
windows, only to find it is just as much a tossed salad as it ever
was, and it needs a few more "bolt-on" security components
made by other manufacturers to try to keep the pests out.

Nothing like building it for the long haul.

If MSFT had made bridges, airplanes, buildings, cars, or some
sort of real, tangible product, many users would have long ago
realized they bought a cheapo imitation, after seeing it fall apart
on the web.

But since many cant begin to understand proper software
coding, and security practices, you keep buying the Winblows OS
that works like a Ford Pinto "fireball", or the Firestone "maypop",
when what we really needed was the J&J Tylenol "tainted"
product pull, and rethinking their strategy.

If you dont understand, I cant explain it to you any better....the
OS was not built for the user, it was built for MSFT to make more
$$ at your expense.....get used to paying for the true definition
of "slack" ware... should be called MSFT Mista. They Missed-a
chance to do the right thing and make it secure.

Linus Torvalds Says...

Talk is cheap. Show me the code. [Link]

Do you have any advice for people starting to undertake large open source projects? What have you learned by managing the Linux kernel?

Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.

So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. [Link]