Thursday, July 31, 2008 Ng: Registering in ymail and rocketmail By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
MOST of the people in our country use Yahoo mail. It is pretty obvious that when we do a survey or get the emails of people who register in trade exhibits, for example, I usually see that over 80 percent of the people use Yahoo mail.
Yahoo has hundreds of millions of users. There is one problem–your name is most likely already taken, so most people have to switch to names that have a series of letters and numbers for their address.
Some people add their lucky number, their birthdays, their weight or some numbers to their name just to be able to register an email address.
Another problem is the confusion brought about by Yahoo.com.ph. It is possible to get this, but it results in more confusion.
When you have an email with the .ph extension, people will only mentally note that you are in Yahoo.
However, most often, they will send you an email but forget the .ph extension. I have had several experiences of sending an email but the person did not receive it. Later, they ask me if I added the .ph extension.
If you are one of those who has a weird email address or a Yahoo .ph extension that people forget, you might be interested to know that Yahoo has extended two domain names for its email.
One is Ymail.com (hardly imaginative and is a shortcut that is seen as a copycat to Google mail’s gmail).
The other one is rocketmail.com.
You still get to Yahoo but since these two domain names are less popular, there is a better chance for you to be able to register the name you want.
Whether you want to use it now or not, you might want to register your name already. You don’t want others to be ahead in getting it! I do the same thing in most social networking sites. Whether I want to use it or not, I believe it is always good to register ahead so that when you decide to use it, you will be able to use the name you wanted.
Many celebrities are doing the same thing. After all, if you are Bill Gates or Barrack Obama, somebody will most likely check your name, and if it is not yet taken, somebody will take it and pretend to be you!
HARD DISK. It is great to see that soon, 1.5 terabytes of hard disk will be avai-lable.
Gosh, in one stroke, Seagate added a 500 gigabyte storage space to its already big one terabyte hard disk!
Who wants to use that much?
Well, wasn’t that the same question we were asking when we suddenly saw 20 or 40 gigabyte drives? What is big now will be seen as sorely lacking in a few years! There are just so many files!
But it is good that vendors always upgrade. After all, that is how you get new sales.
I recall that for wifi, there was the 11 mbps speed, which was the 802.11.b standard.
Then they came out with the 55 mbps which was the 802.11g standard. Pretty soon, there will be an 802.11n standard which promises to be faster.
So, every few months, we get more memory, more processor speed, more hard disk space and we keep buying.
One of the items that have not seen very good sales is the network switch.
Remember that we are currently using mostly 100 mbps (fast Ethernet switches) which was already introduced more than 10 years ago.
There are new standards like the gigabit (1,000 mbps) and 10 gigabit (10,000 mbps) but it has not been getting a big so far.
As a result, we see many people who periodically get new servers, and new computers but do not upgrade their network switch because they think that the old ones are just as good.
This is probably a challenge for network switching companies to introduce faster switches and to convince users that they really need more speed.
This is a challenge that cellphone companies have been able to handle very well.
Although cellphones are still working, most people buy cellphones every two or three years. This attitude is helping cellphone companies earn.
