Googleeee gone crazzzzzzzzy??? I dont' think so!

Was just checking my gmail again and I must the say the first thing I did was to see how many more Megs of space I've got after a good night's sleep! No new emails :-( and it got me wondering as to how in the wold Google can do this.... So I went to take a shower, its amazing how a nice a shower is to clear the brain, and I came up with this theory.

Google doesn't really give you that much memory up front. Hell I dont' even think they alloted 1 gig for u in the first place when we all went and signed up in the first place. The whole thing is a bit like mp3 music. With mp3s you dont' get all the sounds that were originally recorded, but only enough so that you percieve it to be absolutely correct. Well the same thing goes here with email space. You are made to believe by that indicator at the bottom that you have 1 gig of space. Doesn't really mean that there is whole 1 gig of space alloted on some server for you. ;-)

Now you may be thinking that whoaaaa these guys are cheating me. Not really if you look at it. I mean as long as you haven't stored 1 gig worth of data why should anyone make that available to you. And supposing you had a way to make the data being stored smaller, for your own purposes then again, why should I let you know about it. :-)) Getting the picture now guys?

Ok, let me explain in my favorite bulleted style. What I think is that potentially the following things are done behind the scenes with your emails:

• 1 GB is not pre-allocated to you. Memory is just given to you as long as you haven't exceeded 1 gig.
  
• 1 GB will never be the actual physcial size of your account. C'mon guys, is an mp3 the actual CD size of the music u listen to? Oh and CS guys, have you forgotten all those great compression algos that we studied. What I'm saying is that your data would surely be compressed and kept somewhere to save space under the hood.
  
• To extrapolate further, it might be that a lot of the data is shared. So if someone forwarded you a message, only their mail headers would be newly created, but the original message could potentially be stored only once and just shared around. Here I'm talking about a mail from one gmail account to another.
• Maybe they've become geniuses now and can even compare content across mail boxes and store only a single copy!
  

Ok so I'm starting to go a bit overboard, but then that is what a lot of you perceive gmail to be. Simply crazzzzzy. :-))

But what I simply love is the type of tension and panic these guys must be creating across other companies. I can hear people yelling yahooooooo while in some board room there are people wonderign where the hell did these guys get so much cash to start buying disk space from. Hello, wake up ding a lings they aren't that imbecilic to be buying up disk space to store data this early. I mean get real! Would it be even practical to be implementing those types of hardware systems ... Well I wouldnt' know really... I'm just another programmer who often thinks that there is infinite memory available to me ;-)

But I think there's something to learn here. I mean there are corporations out there who are going on about 'imagination at work' but then ummm.... ok no comments there. But at least its nice to see that someone is actually doing that now. :-))

It may seem impossible that someone can potentially offer you infinity+1 but then if you go back to the matrix you can still hear Morpheus telling Neo,

"This is a system just like any other. It has rules and those rules can be broken. You just need to believe."

Well I'm not going to dwell on this but then think about it.