Considering the amount of time everyone spends online today, it is funny that many people still don’t know what a web browser is, even though they use it every day.

The following video is a questionnaire conducted by Google while promoting their browser Chrome, and it shows that many people don’t know what a browser is, or they confuse a browser with a search engine. Only a few people answered correctly.

It also seems that Google is determined to educate people on what a browser is. The latest post on the Official Google Blog has a quick comparison showing that people spend way more time on the web than they spend in their car. However, they are more likely to know which car they are driving than to know which browser they are using.

The author of that post, Jason Toff, created a small video clip explaining what a browser is. It is intended for those who know almost nothing about the computer’s technical terms. Take a look:

In addition, Toff has also created a simple site, WhatBrowser.org, that gives even more information about browsers. On this site, you can see which web browser you’re using, explore links to browser diagnostic tests and read some useful tips for getting the most out of your browser.

So, do you know which browser you’re using?

Warning: includes spoilers!

I just came back from watching the movie Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis. Even though it was a bit short, it was very entertaining and engaging (at least for me). The events take place in a future where people can use robots to do whatever they want to do in real life. The intention was originally for people with disabilities or injuries to be able to carry on with their lives by connecting to these robots (called Surrogates), and controlling these surrogates with just their minds without leaving their bed. In essence, when someone is connected to a surrogate, it is like having the person’s brain in a brand new functional body that can do whatever the person wants to do. However, Surrogates became more than just an aid for people in need. It became a commercial tool where most people just stay in their rooms connected to their surrogates, while the surrogates are the ones that go out, go to work, fight wars, play sports, solve crimes, enforce laws, interact with each other… all under the control of their owner’s minds only. The manufacturers claim that this has made life much better and safer since the humans are safe at home, whereas the surrogates can take a lot of damage with no harm coming to their owners. However, when incidents involving surrogates result in human deaths, this claim comes into question, and this is where the movie starts.

I’m not going to write a review about the movie itself, or any aspect of the cinematography, the acting, the action, or the plot. What interested me the most is the concept. Even though the idea might seem pure sci-fi, to me it seemed very close to something already existing in reality. Online chat rooms, role-playing games, cyber-communities, and the like are all representations of the same concept: people building a customized character according to their liking, and using this character (sometimes called an Avatar) to interact with other characters within cyberspace (be it in a chat room, or in the setting of an RPG, or in some application like Second Life) without leaving their desks. The movie uses many examples to make it clear that it plays on that concept. For example: the overweight man whose surrogate was a young hot girl (a well-known stereotype for some online chatting practices), the man who uses many different surrogates for different purposes and situations (just like using different accounts with differently-designed avatars), etc.

The movie also does a good job of showing what happens when such technology is taken so far: People feel more comfortable and “safe” interacting with each other through a “virtual” world without their real identity being exposed — comfortable to the extent of ridiculing anyone who dares to disconnect from their surrogate and venture into the real world in person. As one of the movie characters said: “Surrogates are an addiction”, which is very similar to what happens to some people today who get addicted to online chatting or playing online games. They build their online persona and invest so much time in it that this online reality becomes their world, and it helps them escape from any tragedies or hardships in their real lives.

But what happens if this virtual world is lost? In this day and age, when an online game server crashes or goes down for a while, some people take that as a chance to take a break and do something productive in real life, while some hardcore gamers just feel lost and can’t wait to get back online, since this has more-or-less become their life. This was evident in the movie when the Surrogate servers were disconnected, and the actual humans finally left their rooms, not knowing what happened or what to do. However, maybe that was the only way to cure the addiction.

Overall, I think it was a well-played concept, and I highly recommend it. If you have any comments, I would love to hear them.

Many of us have heard about the new search engine Wolfram Alpha (made by the same folks who are behind Mathematica, the computational software used in mathematical, engineering, and scientific fields). The new search engine only came online yesterday, but has been hyped up for quite a while now. Even before it was open for the public, some people called it “the Google Killer”, even without using it themselves, but only based on some articles and demonstrative preview videos released by the developers.

So now that it’s out in the open, what is Wolfram Alpha? The new search engine calls itself a “computational knowledge engine“. The basic idea is that you type something in the search box and hit the search button. The engine does not return a list of answers as most other search engines do. Instead, it presents facts about the search term(s), summarized and organized in a way that is easy to understand at a glance. The search terms could be anything. For example:

• Canada population: will display the population of canada, and charts how it changed over a period of time
• Moscow rome: displays some facts about the two cities, including a comparison of their populations, time zones, the distance between them, flight time, etc.
• A calculation (e.g. $250+15% or 4.5*log(pi/2)): The engine will compute the answer, and display the entered formula using the actual mathematical terms (e.g. replacing pi with the Greek symbol, using proper fractions, etc.)
• A math formula (e.g. x^2 sin(x)): The engine will plot the curve of the formula, compute its roots, and display tons of related information (its derivative, integral, local minimum and maximum, etc.)
• and more..

Granted, I think Wolfram Alpha has a neat way of summarizing facts into a nice presentable manner, not to mention the mathematical capabilities (solving equations, plotting functions and expressions, etc.). I admit, this is a major strength, which is not surprising, given the background of Wolfram research. However, I personally think it is far from being a Google killer. In fact, the two engines are totally different in the way they operate, and the information they return.

The down-side: lots of the searches return no results. Some of the searches would return nothing, but if you navigate through the categories then repeat the search, then you’ll get a result. This is a flaw in my opinion, and it makes it hard to simply search for something from the main search box. The engine makes up for its lacking database by providing a link to “search the web”. However, the link is hidden in the bottom left corner and may not be seen unless someone is actually looking for it.

In my opinion, I think the only real edge that Wolfram Alpha has is the mathematical power. No other free online tools can solve complex equations, plot formulas and functions, or provide this much related mathematical information. If the folks behind this engine want to improve on it, I think they should focus more on this aspect, to make it stand out even more.

Although the summarization and presentation of information is neat, I don’t think there is real use to it (besides playing and just seeing how cool it is). For someone looking for some fast information, any existing search engine will probably do the trick. If the user actually wants to research something and get all the facts in a way that makes sense, there is no way to trust the results presented by Wolfram Alpha, especially since it does not offer any information as to the source of these results (which would be required in any self-respecting research).

Finally, Wolfram Alpha is definitely not a Google killer. It is yet another tool for web surfers to add to their toolbox. It is yet to be seen whether it survives and grows to be an actual competitor, or it withers and dies. Either way, it will definitely give the existing search engines something to think about in terms of summarizing and presenting results.

Update: I just found out something that confirms my expectation of Wolfram Alpha’s limited use. The Wolfram Alpha Terms of Use state that “The free Wolfram Alpha service is available for ad hoc, personal, non-commercial use only”, and that users must attribute results produced by using Wolfram Alpha to the company, and that failing to do so may constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright. I totally agree with Thomas Claburn that the facts (which is what the service provides) cannot be copyrighted. This is like using Microsoft Excel to produce some summarized tables of some information, then having to attribute these results to Microsoft. This restriction will only limit the potential usefulness of Wolfram Alpha.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…
No wait!! That’s another set of wars that we are talking about here, one that does not involve lightsabers and droids. According to Wikipedia, the term “Browser Wars” refers to the competition for dominance in the Web browser marketplace. So far, there has been two major browser wars:

Browser War I (late 1990s)

Main opponents: Netscape Navigator (aka Netscape Communicator) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE)

Highlights:
In order to compete, the two browsers kept on adding features to one-up each other. Each browser had its own implementation of JavaScript (which were not compatible). Each browser had its own set of supported non-standard HTML tags. Adding new features had higher priority over fixing bugs, which resulted in both browsers being somewhat unstable.

Microsoft delivered the winning blow by integrating Internet explorer with its Windows operating system, which made the browser readily available to every Windows user – a move that was broadly criticized.

Effect on the Web experience:
BW-I was a time of Web chaos: shaky Web-standards compliance, frequent browser crashes, and many security holes. It was hard to design Web-sites that could behave similarly on both browsers, and thus it was common for Web designers to display ‘best viewed in Netscape‘ or ‘best viewed in Internet Explorer‘ logos. Some Web-sites even went as far as to work only on one browser or the other. This was indicative of the divergence between the “standards” supported by the browsers and signified which browser was used for testing the pages.

Browser War II (2003 – present)

After Netscape was defeated, they open-sourced their browser code, which led to the formation of the Mozilla Foundation — a community-driven project to create a successor to Netscape. After several years, the new browser “Firefox” was born (version 1.0 was released on 9 November 2004). Since then it has continued to gain an increasing share of the browser market, and became the main competitor against Internet Explorer.

Other contenders joined the war at different points in time, including (but not limited to) Opera, Safari, and the most recent contender, Google Chrome.

BW-II differs from BW-I in a major aspect: The contenders try as much as they can to work under the umbrella of the Web-standards. All browsers have compatible JavaScript engines (except for minor differences), and support more-or-less the same set of widely-recognized HTML (or XHTML) tags. Whenever a new feature is added to a browser, it soon becomes an expected feature in all the others (e.g. tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, phishing filters, etc.). The contenders compete mainly in the following areas:

• Browser speed (the time it takes to load pages)
• Resource usage (amount of Memory and CPU needed)
• Stability
• Security (vulnerability to malicious code, holes that can be exploited, etc.)

Until the moment of writing this post, Internet Explorer still has the major market share, but the other browsers (particularly Firefox) are more popular particularly within the IT industry professionals because of serious security flaws in IE, in addition to some of the unique features provided by the other browsers (e.g. Firefox’s support of custom extensions, and the multitude of such extensions available online, which makes it possible to personalize the browser to each user’s needs). Also, IE seems to be falling behind in terms of browser speed. In a recent browser benchmark comparison done by gHacks.net, IE proved to be the worst among all tested browsers.

Effect on the Web experience:

Unlike BW-I, the current browser war is proving to be in the best interest of the user. The competition is bringing out the best of all competitors, and providing more and more features that help enrich the Web experience. The majority of Web sites today behave exactly the same on all Web browsers, and it is considered a design-flaw if a Web site does not work correctly on a certain browser. Tools are available to encourage (and sometimes enforce) using only the recognized Web-standards when designing a Web site. These standards have been vastly extended since the first browser war, and supporting non-standard elements is no longer an issue.

While skimming through various blogs, I came across a very interesting post on the How-to Geek. The post was about yet another online flash game, but this time it is based on physics and puzzle solving, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Fantastic Contraption turned out to be an extremely fun game to play. The objective of the game is to move the red object (usually a circular object, but sometimes other shapes) to the red area (called the “goal”). Sometimes there are some obstacles in the way. To achieve the goal, you have to build a “contraption” using the tools at the top of the screen, and use this contraption to move the red object to the goal area. To make things even harder, you can only build your contraption within the light blue area (the workshop).

The games with a large number of levels, each of which has a different arrangement of objects. One good thing about this game is that you don’t have to proceed through the level sequentially. If you find yourself stuck at a particular level, you can go to the main menu, and play a different level of your choosing.

You can also save your contraptions (in mid-level, or after you’ve solved the level), but you have to create an account in order to do this (which is free). You will be given a link that you can share with others so they can directly see your contraption in action. You can also upload your contraptions to the server. Once you solve a level, you can view contraptions built by other users for that particular level. Here are some of the contraptions I’ve built (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O). I am not listing them in level order, or even including the level, so that I don’t spoil your experience with the game.

Warning: The game is very addictive, so make sure you don’t lose track of time while playing it.
Have fun!!

Although many people are already experts when it comes to building a new computer from scratch, many others are still a bit intimidated by the concept of looking for each component, and putting everything together. For those who actually want to know how to build a computer, the computer help website “The How-to Geek” has put up an excellent tutorial about building a computer from scratch.

The tutorial is mainly divided into five parts (the titles are self-explanatory):

• Part 1: Choosing Hardware
• Part 2: Putting it Together
• Part 3: Setting it Up
• Part 4: Installing Windows and Loading Drivers
• Part 5: Tweaking Your New Computer

The tutorial is very thorough, and full of pictures and screen-shots which makes it even easier to read and follow. If you are interested to learn about building computers, make sure to check it out.

For those, like me, who love free software (who doesn’t?), it can be hard sometimes finding a good piece of software that does a certain task, especially since these freeware products appear and disappear all the time. This is one scenario that has happened to me personally too many times: I find a nice freeware program, and I use it for a long time. Then at some point, I recommend it to someone, only to find that it has now become a commercial software (and not free anymore), so I have to go and try to find a good freeware product to replace it. If this has ever happened to you, then you know what I mean.

That’s why I was very glad when I found Gizmo’s Tech Support Alert. This site offers a list of the top freeware products out there. It is classified into categories like:

• Security / Privacy / Encryption
• Internet: Email / IM / FTP / File sharing / Download managements
• Enhancements to Windows / Desktop
• Computer maintenance / Performance
• System utilities / Backup / Data recovery
• Audio / Video / CD / DVD
• … and more.

Each category is further divided into subcategories for easy navigation. Each sub-category usually features 3 or 4 products, with a full review showing the pros and cons of each product, so that the reader can make an informed decision of which product to use. The list is also updated constantly, removing products that are not freeware anymore, and adding new software that just proved itself to be worth mentioning. The website also provides a free monthly newsletter (with a paid version that has more stuff in it), and a forum where visitors discuss freeware programs and computer problems.

This site used to be a lone effort by Ian “Gizmo” Richards, who created and maintained a highly popular list of the “46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities”, but over time that list grew well beyond 46 and reached the point where it could not be maintained by one person. So, now the website has changed to wiki-style, where it relies on the contribution of dozens of volunteer editors who edit and moderate suggestions from thousands of site visitors. As a result the range of software covered is ever increasing and quality of the reviews ever improving. In some sense, some might think of it as a Wikipedia for Freeware.

At this point, whenever I am looking for a software product in a certain category, this is the first place to check. I wonder how many others do the same. Again, the URL of the website is http://www.techsupportalert.com

When you are as famous and well-known as Google, the slightest changes in your identity will be noticed by millions. A couple of weeks ago, many people around the globe have noticed that the big capital “G” that was used as a favicon for the Google website was replaced with an unrecognizable lower-case “g” (which is the second “g” in “Google”).

Old Favicon	New Favicon

Some people seem to like to new icon, while many others (including myself) seem to prefer the old one. I personally think that the old favicon was instantly recognizable as the initial “G” from “Google”, while the new one does not have that quality. For a brand name like Google, I believe it is very important to have a logo (or even something as small as a favicon) that can be recognized.

Google’s reason for this change (as mentioned on their blog) is the following:

..we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices..

They also state that the selection process was not easy, since they had to chose from among more than 300 different permutations. Some of the other alternatives they came up with are:

Seeing these designs, personally I would have chosen one of the more colorful designs with the capital “G” in it, since these two features (the capital “G” and the colors) are what comes to mind when you think Google. However, they also say that this is not the final design, but rather a first step to a more unified set of icons. So, hopefully, they will come up with something better. They also welcome suggestions, so if anyone can come up with a idea for a design, they can submit it here.

So, what do you think about the new favicon? Do you like it or not? and why?

For those who don’t know what phishing means, Wikipedia defines phishing as:

“an attempt to acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.”

The most common form of phishing is when someone receives an “urgent” email asking them to take immediate action to prevent some impending disaster. Here are some examples:

“Our bank has a new security system. Update your information now or you won’t be able to access your account.”

“We couldn’t verify your information; click here to update your account.”

Once a person clicks on the provided link, they are taken to a webpage that looks exactly like the legitimate web site that they know (e.g. the website of their bank). Because the page looks familiar, people enter their username, password, or other private information on the site, not knowing that they have just given their information to someone unknown, who can now use this information to hijack their account, steal their money, or open up new lines of credit in their name. They just fell for a phishing attack.
Google just issued a warning on their official blog, to warn people from these phishing emails. According to this post, you can reduce the chances of being a phishing victim by following these steps:

• Be careful about responding to emails that ask you for sensitive information
• Go to the site yourself, rather than clicking on links in suspicious emails
• If you’re on a site that’s asking you to enter sensitive information, check for signs of anything suspicious
• Be wary of the “fabulous offers” and “fantastic prizes” that you’ll sometimes come across on the web
• Use a browser that has a phishing filter

You can read the details of these steps here. In addition, there are several quizzes online to test whether you can differentiate between a legitimate webpage (or email) and a phishing one. Just type “phishing IQ quiz” in your favorite search engine, and enjoy!!

A friend of mine was working on a paper, and he pointed out that one of the references he had to cite is:

W.H. Knox, R.S. Knox, J.F. Hoose and R.N. Zare, Observation of the 0 fs pulse, Optics and Photonics News, April 1, 1990

Now, try reading the authors’ last names together into one phrase, and see what you get…

Are you a fan of free, open-source software?
If yes, then please continue reading. Otherwise…well…also continue reading, you might change your mind!!

A while ago, I was surfing the net, and I came across the OpenDisc project. This is basically an ongoing collection of high quality open-source software for Windows, classified into categories, such as: Design, Internet, Multimedia, Utilities, etc.

The programs in this collection include (click here for the complete list):

• Blender: an advanced 3D graphics modeling program
• The GIMP: the open-source alternative for Adobe Photoshop (although a bit hard to learn)
• Azureus: a powerful BitTorrent protocol client
• FileZilla: a fast and reliable FTP client and server
• Firefox: web browser
• Audacity: an audio editing program
• VLC: a media player that supports a lot of audio and video file-types
• OpenOffice.org: a full-featured office suite including a word processor, spreadsheet, web page editor and presentation program.
• and many more…

Of course all these programs can be downloaded from their corresponding websites, but I think it is a good idea to group them all into one collection that can be downloaded from one location. The whole package can be downloaded as an ISO image that can be easily written to a CD. Go to http://theopendisc.com/ for more information or to download the package.

Also, another related project is the OpenEducationDisc, which is similar to the main OpenDisc collection, except that it claims that it focuses on providing students with quick, easy and powerful tools specially selected to solve their educational needs. However, I personally don’t see much difference between the two collections (except for 3 or 4 science and mathematics programs). The whole list of programs can be found here.

Still, I think it’s a good idea, and I’m sure more and more programs will be added to the list in the future. The project team is open for suggestions, and users can suggest programs on the forum.

Recently, the term OpenID has started to gain much attention, especially among bloggers. But what is OpenID? As mentioned in the OpenID website:

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID eliminates the need for multiple user names across different websites, simplifying your online experience.

So what does this mean? Each one of us has different accounts on different websites, and we need to maintain a list of different identities to use with each of these websites. Sometimes, however, it’s better to have something that tells you that user jsmith who commented on your blogger blog, is the same as the user john_s who writes in blog “X Y Z!” on WordPress.com, and he is even the same j_s who owns a particular Flickr photo album. So how do we do that??

This is where OpenID comes into play. More and more websites (especially blogging websites) are adopting OpenID. Anyone can sign up for a new OpenID for free. Now, let’s say you want to post a comment to a certain blog post. In many cases you can choose to sign in using your OpenID, which will link back to your OpenID profile, in which you can link to all your other identities (blogs, photostreams, profile pages, etc.). Actually it is even easier than this. If you have an account with some particular providers, then you might already have an OpenID. For example, if you have a blog on WordPress.com or LiveJournal, then your username is already your OpenID.

However, I do recommend that you sign up for an independent OpenID (at OpenID.net) that you can link with your other identities. The reason is as follows. Let’s say you use your OpenID that you obtained from LiveJournal, then you decided that you don’t want your LiveJournal account anymore. In this case, you have two options: You either have to keep the account, since you already used the OpenID to comment on other people’s blogs and so on, OR you can delete the account, and therefore all those comments will not be traceable back to you. On the other hand, having an independent OpenID means that you can keep it regardless of what other accounts you have.

So, do you have an OpenID? What do you think about it? Which provider do you use?

Google Maps strikes again!!!

Another newly added feature to the already amazing Google maps. Google Maps has teamed up with The Weather Channel to offer a new My Maps overlay of current weather conditions and forecasts. You can see different overlays (like clouds and radar), in addition to temperature and weather conditions at different points of interest. All you have to do is go to Google Maps, click the My Maps tab, and enable The Weather Channel from the list of maps.

… especially to all fellow grad students.

Source: PHD Comics

It seems that Google has started working on a new project; a new online knowledge base (similar to Wikipedia), where information is contributed by users. Google claims that they will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. The project is still under development and testing, and it is currently named knol (which stands for a unit of knowledge). You can read more about that project on the official Google blog.

This is actually interesting, since Wikipedia pages seem to show up really high on the Google search results, no matter what you search for. I wonder how this will change, given the new Google knol. Will Google favor results from their own knol over those from Wikipedia, or will it be a fair game based on which has the more valuable information? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I just found this interesting page, whose author criticizes a research paper that has appeared in VLDB 2006 (a major Database research conference). The author of that page (not the paper) proceeds to point out some major (and minor) flaws in that paper, and also tries to find reasons why this paper did not get rejected. Here is an interesting extract from that page:

There is a common belief that the conference program committees never read more than a few pages of a conference paper when they make a decision on whether to accept or reject a paper. Since the statement contradicting the claim in the abstract is near the end of the tenth page, it would be easy to for such a referee to miss the contradiction.

The author also provides some suggestions on how to improve the review process. Some of the suggestions are quite obvious, like “authors should read their own papers”, while other suggestions might be a bit more drastic and need some time to see whether or not they make sense, like having one reviewer responsible for the paper, and getting their name associated with the paper if it is accepted (hmmm, what about blind reviews?)

It would be interesting to see if those suggestion could be implemented or not, and why. Any comments?

Well, this happened almost 3 weeks ago. My backpack got stolen at the gym, with my wallet inside it. This is the kind of things that you hear about all the time, but never think it could happen to you.

Anyway, of course the wallet contained a whole bunch of cards, and immediate action had to be taken in order to prevent any misuse (and to replace the cards), So I thought I should just write down everything I did here for future reference (and for anyone who might face a similar situation). Of course, this is specific to where I am (Ontario, Canada), so people at other places might have to do things differently, or at least use different contact information.

1. Deactivate or cancel all credit cards (usually your credit cards have a phone number to call for any help. Make sure you write that number down and keep it in a safe place). This has to be done ASAP before someone can use the stolen credit cards.
2. Deactivate or cancel any debit or ATM cards. This is usually less urgent than credit cards, since no one can use these without the PIN code. Still, it is a good idea to shut them down.
3. File a police report about the incident. (This could be done before step 2, or even before step 1, depending on how long you think it might take).
4. If the wallet also contained the social insurance number (SIN), you need to inform Service Canada, and get a replacement.
5. Call the three national credit reporting organizations immediately to place a fraud alert on your credit report. The alert means that whenever you apply for new credit (credit card, loan, etc.), the creditor will have to contact you to make sure you are who you claim to be, before they authorize any new credit. It took me a while to get a hold of the correct phone numbers for the 3 organizations. So here they are:
   a) Equifax: 1-800-316-7530
   b) Experian: 1-888-826-1718
   c) TransUnion: 1-800-663-9980
6. Replace driver’s license.
7. Replace University student ID.
8. Replace Health Card.

It is also a good idea to keep photocopies of all the contents of your wallet. It is much easier to have your driver’s license number, credit card number, etc. on hand when you call the corresponding organizations.

Side note, the backpack was found 2 days later, with all its contents, except for the cash and the watch, but that was after I already had to go through all the trouble of replacing the cards.

In addition to deciding whether or not to move my blog to WordPress, I have also decided to start a new blog. This new blog “Database Land” will be dedicated to databases, and anything related to them, which makes sense since it is my primary research area. Here is the address of the new blog:

http://dbland.wordpress.com

There will also be a permanent link to the new blog on the side bar of this page. Happy reading!

For some unknown reason, I suddenly decided to give WordPress a try. However, I will not abandon my original blog on Blogger just yet. Until I decide which of them I will continue to use, I will be posting to both of them at the same time. So please feel free to visit either of them, and let me know in the comments if you think one of two services is particularly better than the other (based on personal experience).

The web is endlessly full of articles that compare different email services, particularly Gmail (from Google) and Hotmail a.k.a. Windows Live Mail (from Microsoft). Still, I found this article:

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-11-20-n35.html

I think it is a very interesting read. It is yet another comparison between Gmail and Hotmail…with a twist. The author tries to envision what would have happened if Gmail was designed by Microsoft instead of Google. Needless to say, the article is heavily biased against Hotmail (or against Microsoft), but still some of the mentioned points are very true and to the point (e.g. banners, spam filter, splash screen, log in information, etc.). Here is an excerpt from that post:

“First of all, we need to rebrand the application name to something longer. Let’s call this Windows Live Gmail, and add some of the visual elements connected with Windows. Also, as in Hotmail, there needs to be less space for the email subjects to make place for a reading pane, which is full of verbose explanatory help text…”

If you have used both services, you’ll enjoy the read. Let me know what you think in the comments!