Posts by Stewart MacLund

EMC buys Isilon for $2.25bn

Er.... What?

"Update Since this report was filed, EMC announced that it was buying EMC for $2.25bn."

How very Meta.

Brits and Yanks struck with embarasment embarrassment

Pronunciation is the key, with accent being a close second...

after taking the spelling bee, i really must note that the pronunciation (for example, of "oral" sounding like awl to my admittedly backwoods canadian ear) is the issue. I suppose i should have looked at the hints more, since i guess "nought" for "knot". Oh well. And apparently that's even a less known spelling than "naught".

Is english confusing? Sure. Does it have too many borrowed words? Sure. But that's the point of it - it's pretty much the only language that allows you to create new words easily.

Unless you're German, of course.

GMail shakes IMAP out of coma

Surprised that no one mentioned the obvious...

Folder support. pop3 doesn't have it with inbox only support. imap supports folders, subfolders, and subfolders of subfolders. Etc.

As well, i don't have to rely on client sorting for email, since all the folders are kept on the server - procmail being your friend and all. Thus, even the stupidest thin client with a good imap implementation has all my folders properly sorted, and i don't have to work out spam filters when i change clients.

Admittedly, this is a very "in the innards" reason to use it.

my feeling is: you can make pop3 act like imap4, for everything BUT server side folders - and that alone is reason enough to use it.

But i understand why, back in the day of not quite so inexpensive storage, ISP's didn't want to. I remember back in '96 trying to convince the ISP i was working for that we should support imap, and it truely did simply come down to a business case for paying for storage. It wasn't worth it.