Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups - <AUTHOR> http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-google-apps-for-businesses.html <comment><USER3> I really hate it when companies try to sugar coat a decision that is _all_ downside for their customers. It may be really hard to do, but Google should just come out and say it: _there is no upside for this to anyone except Google_. It is not about giving you a _better experience_ or making things more _straightforward_. It is _all_ about Google deciding to maximize their profits at the expense of their users. That's fine, it's what businesses (ultimately) do (even the ones that pretend they put their users first). Google should just say it - they no longer want to support a free version of their product because they can make more money another way.

When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations Google, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.

<comment><USER4> This is a pretty pessimistic view. Customers are self-interested too: they want free content and services, but they also want absolute privacy, to ad- block everything, and generally cut off any possible revenue stream. This seems like it leads to a sort of local maxima where you produce the minimum quality required to drive users, with as little cost as possible.

By cutting off ad-supported free users, Google is attempting to pursue a global maxima: rather than making the best 'free-enterprise email/document sharing/whatever else it does because I only use it for email', they're now free to focus their efforts on paying customers. I suspect the one area where this will impact the most is customer service; Google is traditionally horrible because they're loathe to waste money on minimum wage call-centre employees to support loss-leader products. Now that Apps for Domains will be a first-class, revenue generating product, maybe they'll answer the damn phone.

<comment><USER5> by cutting off free users they just opened themselves to getting undercut by a smaller company that can offer fewer, cheaper, targeted options.

I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps.

<comment><USER6> I used to run my own one-user email system. The hosting alone cost $240 a year. And I had to spend a lot of time configuring exim4 (and spamassassin and clam-av), figuring out which email indexer to use, setting up offlineimap, running cron jobs to archive mailing lists, coercing a friend to run a secondary MX for me, etc., etc. I didn't enjoy it all. And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through.

(And, when I was first doing this, someone trying to hire me for a job couldn't email me, because their hosting provider was once friendly to spammers and my aggressive blacklisting rejected their TCP connections. Oops.)

Running an email server is hard and very few people regret paying an expert to do it for them.

(As many HN readers know, I work for Google. But I'm not telling you that you should or should not use Google's product here, only that running an email server is not trivial.)

<comment><USER7> All you need is a forwarding service to forward the incoming mail to your gmail account, as regular personal gmail can handle sending out email with a different from address.

No exim4, no spamassassin, no clam-av, no figuring out which indexer to use, or any of that. Just a forward on the incoming mail.

<comment><USER8> I think most people would consider that cheating... You're hardly running your own email server, and still using Google.

I actually miss running my own email domain, the privacy of it, not the actual administration. I stopped when I had gotten so crazy with aliases and disposable addresses that the spam overwhelmed me. Wasn't worth the time to 'do it right,' and I gave up my privacy for the simplicity of GMail.

I would love to leave GMail and take my privacy back, but I haven't found an acceptable alternative yet.

<comment><USER9> If you get a domain at Gandi.net, it comes with a free e-mail service for 5 accounts. You could see if that suits your needs.

<comment><USER10> Seconding this; Gandi works well for me as a registrar, DNS provider, and email provider.

There are many email providers you can use with your own domain. For example, rackspace is $2 a user a month. [https://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email...](https://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/) I'm not sure why people are jumping from "Google won't do this for free for me anymore" to "I must do it myself".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Contrarian view...

by offering <50 email accounts for free, Google essentially destroyed the market for any other startups or companies to come into the market and offer non-enterprise B2B email services... thus limiting competition and innovation.

One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter this space.

Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.

 _[discuss :)]_

<comment><USER12> Still, $50/user/year doesn't give you that much room for manoeuvre as a startup...

<comment><USER13> Compared to what? You can provision your own apps and run your own services for less?

<comment><USER14> I think he means as a vendor of mail services, $50/year/mailbox means you can't make enough profit unless you're huge, and even mid-sized, $50/year/mailbox might not let you provide very good service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Huh. Just want to point out that one of the main reasons we're using google apps at my company is that I use google apps for hosting my personal email. When it came time to make a decision on that, and I am the one who makes that decision, I chose google apps because it was already familiar to me.

Poor choice, imho. I'm curious what the actual overhead is for people like me. I have 1 account (as in: 1 email address) that is hosted by google apps. I was going to set up an account for one of my other domains, but not for $50/year. (Per account!)

So full snark here, but it was between google apps, and office 365. I chose GA because o my familiarity with it.

But look here, Microsoft's equivalent offering is free: <https://domains.live.com/> I wonder what things will look like when we evaluate google apps next year?

<comment><USER16> You can still get a free Standard Google Apps Account with one free email address instead of 10.

See [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google- appengine/pVZfd...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google- appengine/pVZfdeky-ow/TO1SmipM2Y0J)

<comment><USER17> Just created an account via this link and it doesn't look like the number of users is limited to 1. Have my own user account and was able to create two additional test accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a Googler and for much longer, a Google Apps user for my family, this is sad news.

I wish they had just fixed the experience for "vanity domains" so that they didn't require all the enterprise features, and didn't let administrators have complete control of users accounts. Then they could roll out new features to vanity users without needing the enterprise controls.

I understand that this is a little tricky, and involves no paying customers, but Google Apps was by far the best experience for custom domains. I'm sure it attracted the type of influencers that pull even more users. I used it for my family, bands, friends with very small businesses and more, and the other people on those domains not already using Gmail, in turn migrated their personal accounts to Gmail.

<comment><USER19> I completely agree with this. I signed up for Google Apps for the sole purpose of having an email address at my own domain, and I always wished I could just have that email address supported by my existing Gmail account, rather than having to deal with the hassle of yet another account somewhere. I would gladly have paid for that.

Google's always been pretty good about making sure you aren't locked in to their services, likely due to the efforts of their Data Liberation Front[1], but it always seemed to me that being locked in to using an @gmail.com email address was a big exception to this.

[1] <http://www.dataliberation.org/>

<comment><USER18> Yes, there's really two parts to a "vanity" domain: I want a nice looking email address, and I want to own my email address no matter what service I use. It's nice to be able to also use an awesome service like Gmail on top of it.

It's worth some value to me, but $50/user/year is a bit much for a family of ~5 light email users.

<comment><USER20> I think this is only for new customers, not existing ones.

<comment><USER21> Right, but we're talking about the (now current) pricing model. There are many many many small family units that have not yet converted to "vanity" gmail. Now they won't ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'll tell you what the free plan was most useful for: business experiments.

I can't tell you how many small forays into new business ideas I and other folks I know have used google apps to kick off. For a business at high risk of failure and no budget in the early idea stages it was so useful to be able to stitch together a team and workflow really quickly using google apps to see how things pan out. This puts a real damper on kicking off new collaborative ideas

</comment><comment><USER23> Outlook.com's equivalent offering, <https://domains.live.com>, is free (Hotmail also offered it, but they've changed the branding). I've been running my email on there for the better part of a decade. To those who point at Office 365, that's similar but different, and it costs money.

If you want a guide, this one seems pretty good: [http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom- do...](http://www.omegaweb.com/2012/09/how-to-configure-a-custom-domain-with- outlook-com/)

Between the mistaken despair over having no good free alternatives to Google Apps and the platitudes and awe over the Gmail/Google Drive integration (which Hotmail/Skydrive have had the exact equivalent of for years) a couple weeks back, I'm starting to wonder why nobody here, when they are all quite tech- literate, seems to have any clue about Microsoft's honestly rather impressive cloud offering.

Most likely they're all in denial.

<comment><USER24> When I last looked, IMAP was not available on the free custom domains. Is that still the case?

<comment><USER23> IMAP is not, but the superior Exchange ActiveSync protocol is, through m.outlook.com - despite the name, it's just Exchange, so it works anywhere. See <http://help.outlook.com/en-gb/140/bb896613.aspx> for more details.

<comment><USER25> "Superior", ha!

<comment><USER23> Erm, yes, it is superior, as it has all the capability of IMAP and more. See this: [http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/07/10/34033...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/07/10/3403386.aspx).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not sure how to feel about this. The core feature of the free Google Apps was that you could use GMail with your own domain without having to run a dedicated mail server yourself.

<comment><USER27> You can still use GMail with any domain: [http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...](http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=21289&from=21288&rd=1)

This method is actually far more convenient than setting up Google Apps. You can both send and receive mail at the other domain, and you get a unified inbox (which Google Apps never provided).

<comment><USER28> No, that method requires that the other domain have its own mail server to accept and store the mail until gmail comes and fetches it with POP. Who will host that other server?

Google Apps for domains lets you point your domain's MX record directly at Google, and Google accepts the mail for you.

<comment><USER27> The important part of Google Apps is the GMail interface, not the SMTP service. SMTP hosting is easy to come by; most hosting services include it with their web hosting packages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yes, the announcement is corporate doublespeak.

No, I don't mind the end of free Google Apps. I use Google Apps for my business for five years, and frankly, it is mind-boggling what they have given me for free. Luckily us existing users still get the free service, but if I had to pay US$50 per year per user, I would still consider it exceptional value.

US$50 per year for a set of critical, heavily-used services is an inconsequential amount for all but the most penny-pinching operation.

<comment><USER5> and they lost a lot of people who _are_ pinching pennies when they start but would be hooked into the system by the time they needed the upgrade.

<comment><USER30> I would have (read: I did) assume that, but do we really have any data on whether or not this actually was the case? Google presumably considered this and made a decision based on the data available to them. Now that this decision was announced, it seems that this assumption is false. Google must not be hooking nearly enough businesses into using this system for money or they would not have made this decision. Of course, this assumes Google Apps is run by rational people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm not sure if I'm parsing this correctly, but it sounds like people who use Google Apps as an email backend for personal email on custom domains will now have to pay $50/year.

If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.

I _would_ happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.

I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after.

Anyone working on something like this?

<comment><USER32> I think you missed this sentence. "Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version." Still, I'm on free google apps mostly for a personal email domain too and will likely start considering alternatives just in case.

I'd also note that the $50/year is also per user, so there's sort of an opening to offer a family, personal domain type service. For a family of a maybe 2-6 users, the $50/year-user is a bit steep if you're mostly looking for a small group email + calendaring. Maybe that would even be an interesting vector for starting a new family-based social networking service.

<comment><USER31> I did miss that. Thanks for pointing that out.

I actually considered an email address like firstname.lastname@example.com. I figured I could add my parents, or future children.

But this only works for obscure last names or unusual TLDs. There's also the issue of family relationships - people get divorced, grow up and want more independence, etc. Marrying email to a family domain could be messy.

<comment> X-Istence I do exactly that, firstname.lastname@example.com. I've set up accounts for everyone else in the family, but most if not all just have it set up as a forwarder to another gmail account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have no problem paying for a Google Apps account where I actually use Google apps, but at the moment you have to have a Google Apps account to link a domain to an Appengine app. Some of our apps have two or three domains showing the same app, and because you need to have an account for each email address that Appengine sends email from, we have three or four accounts (support, noreply, accounts per domain.

So this move is going to add $600 per year to our costs - all for virtual accounts that don't actually use Google Apps at all.

Hopefully this was unintended, and Google will continue to provide free accounts for domains linked to Appengine apps - or provide another mechanism for linking and authorising sending addresses.

<comment><USER34> From the post:

> Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including > those using the free version.

<comment> X-Istence He is specifically stating that as of right now if you want to use Google AppEngine to send email you need to have a Google Apps account.

So after today (no more free accounts) if I want to set up example.com as a domain to send email from on my Google AppEngine webapp, I will have to fork over X amount of money a year to have those essentially non-existent users that are valid mailboxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Google made a mistake initially by 1) Giving too much away for free and 2) Charging too low. It is probably trying to correct these mistakes.

1) On giving too much away…

Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users, later reduced it to 100, then to 50, then to 10 and now to zero.

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze- on-...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-free- apps/)

At 200 free users, there was no room for a new entrant in the market. I am glad that didn't last long.

2) On Charging too low...

Back when they launched it, $50/user/year was extremely aggressive pricing. Vendors were charging $50/month. May be Google is realizing they were charging too low. I now see an additional plan with $10/user/month option (which didn't exist earlier).

Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, competition to Google Apps.

<comment><USER36> > Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users

And when Google Apps first started, you could request to increase the number of free users. I have an old account with a quota of 500 free users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> With this decision, I have now come to believe that Google is not the company that it used to be in the past. The user-friendly company with a quirky personality.

Somewhere in the mindless fighting with becoming the dominant social and mobile force on the planet, it has forgotten about the very users it once strived to please.

This has been more apparent since Larry took over Google as the CEO. His "more wood behind fewer arrows" has somewhere down the line taken away the humor with which Google has largely operated. 20% time? Google Labs? Hugely popular Google products scrapped into oblivion.

The only products that matter beyond search are - Android, Google+, YouTube and Google Apps which are fairly mature by now and are a serious threat to competitors.

The thing is they didn't need to do it because they aren't starving of computing resources for more important products and the marginal costs of adding free users is almost nil (although it exists).

I somehow feel betrayed by this decision. Google, so far, has resisted the temptation to shut down products that were important to it's users unlike other companies like Microsoft and Yahoo! I have been using Google Apps since they launched it a long ago. It feels like bait and switch.

This is completely right and there is nothing wrong with them shutting down a free service as a business but somehow it feels so non-Googly.

</comment><comment><USER38> On a related note could dear hn crowd suggest email provider (maybe paid, say up to 30-40$ annually) caring about my privacy a little bit more? Really delete my messages when I want to is a good start.

Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one account..

<comment><USER39> I've been using <https://www.fastmail.fm/> forever, nothing but good things to say

<comment><USER40> I'm a very happy customer since years. Probably they have a good support too, but I haven't had any problems so I don't know =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Google believes the cloud/apps have enough providers now, so they aren't needed to drive it.

Their strategy is to grow the web. This works because they make more money from the web being used. It also makes people love Google, which is important because switching search engines is easy. The love also helps in hiring.

However... they have introduced internal cost accounting, so that products must pay their way - a little internal market. IMHO, this is potentially dangerous, since there already is a market (the real one), and it ignores the advantages of a firm (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm>) But they don't follow it absolutely, e.g. android isn't paying its way. (NB: Apple is focussed on making better products, not on growing the web).

If google can see that other firms are better placed to do a better job of growing the web in some respect (or they can apply pressure on them to do so), they are happy to step aside.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm from a SouthAmerican nation, here the IT budget of small business is pretty limited and Google Apps (even with the 10 accounts limit) was a viable option for them. Google will have to adapt the prices for non USA markets (BRIC, EMEA, Latam) if they want to succeed. Also this movement bring space of innovation for email.

</comment><comment><USER43> Google under Larry Page is obsessed with short-term revenue. They did the same with AppEngine, Maps and now Apps.

Not to mention that I cringed throughout this announcement. They are doing it because it benefits users? C'mon, just tell us you love the money, nothing wrong with that.

<comment><USER44> It might be a sign that advertising revenue is not growing as expected. My guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is really a logical step. If you are an individual and don't really see the value in $50 a year, you can forward your own domain to your regular Gmail account and set the reply to email address to whatever you want.

If you run a business and need the Google Apps platform, then $50 a year really shouldn't be a barrier for you. If it is, time to rethink your business priorities.

<comment><USER46> $50 / _user_ / year - still not insane but I know it's put people off in the past.

<comment><USER47> Certainly puts me off. $5/10 per user per year, wouldn't think twice about it (even though the money would be paid grudgingly). With the number of users we have that would end up being around $50/year; but $500/year to host some email and store spreadsheets? No thanks.

<comment><USER45> Let's imagine your company has 100 employees in it. So at $5/user a month, you are paying $500 a month.

Now, the median salary for thos 100 employees is most likely at least $3000, so you are paying them collectively $300,000 a month. That represents 0.016% of their salary. Do you get where I'm going with this?

<comment><USER47> And when the median salary of your employees is $0/month (prototyping or a family domain or something) and your options are: a. Nothing b. $50/(employee/family member)

What then? Of course no company paying $300,000/month is going to care about $50/user/year.

Edit: Clarification

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Wow. Google Apps for Your Domain is a huge thing for a lot of hackers. I run my entire family's email using it. Is google just giving up on supporting custom domains? That would be a huge disruption for me =(

<comment><USER5> I posted this below but I was really counting on Google Apps to set up a custom domain email address. I'm just starting some stuff and it's still very "free time" right now and I am really not going to spend 50 dollars a year on it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> _Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version._

I give it six months before they start strong-arming free users into paid accounts.

<comment><USER50> It's been nearly six years of free. That's pretty gradual strong-arming.

Note that per user limits continue to apply, so people have as much incentive as they ever did to upgrade, plus for any new domains/projects people will naturally either migrate to other options (then consolidate services around these, moving themselves off Google) or start paying.

Not convinced there's any need for hostility on either side.

<comment><USER51> This is to kill the competition; At minimum to gain a competitive advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The free Google Apps was perfect for families: give each kid a nice email@example.com and no problem with the silly 18 year limit that gmail has. The shared calendars work great in our family too.

It's certainly not worth $50 per year because the little ones get maybe 1 email a month from grandma. Since Google does not allow kids on gmail, where should families go now?

<comment><USER53> I never thought about using Google Apps like this. It actually sounds pretty cool to be honest. If my whole family was using it, then I'd probably consider paying $50/year for the service.

<comment><USER54> But would you pay $50/family-member? (Which is presumably a significantly bigger amount of money.)

<comment><USER55> Exactly. I am in the same boat. I set up the family with individual, personalized addresses and a series of calendars that can be shared between all of us or just my wife and I. It's convenient, but not $200+/yr convenient. For now, nothing changes but I guess it's time to start looking around for a cheaper alternative should Google decide to kill off the free tier altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> So for hackers it's what? $50 a year for hosting + $10 a year of domain registration for vanity URLs - that's $5 a month.

Don't see much of a problem here - I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner - I'm happy to pay for this service at that price - no problem.

<comment><USER57> Depends what you need to host. If you just want email & a blog, gandi.net will providing hosting for those as part of their domain registration (~$15 per year, depending on which TLD you want).

They also include minimal web hosting with registration too, but last I looked their (free) offering was so bad it didn't really count as a feature.

I imagine some other domain registrars have similar options.

<comment><USER58> I got a domain through gandi and decided to try my email there for a change, it's been pretty reliable and solid, the only time I needed support it was quick. I don't however do a lot of email so my experience might be much different to a power email user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I have a free Google Apps account mostly so that I can have a custom domain for my small (free) App Engine site: <https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/domain>

It's sad that now attaching a custom domain will cost a lot more than the domain itself.

<comment><USER60> You can still create a free Google Apps account, limited to a single user, through App Engine [1], Google just doesn't want to advertise this fact to everyone.

[1] - [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky- ow...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky- ow/TO1SmipM2Y0J)

<comment><USER61> Just wanted to say thanks so much for sharing this; kind of a big deal!

Now to figure out which email should be 'real' for Google App Engine - <USER2> the 1 user will be 'noreply'!

<comment><USER62> Just did this and was able to create 10 users

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I gave up on Google Apps for your Domain for email a while ago (security, bugs, and the general black box nature of the product).

Right now, my favorite solution is Kerio Connect, which you can either self- host or purchase as a cloud solution. There are hosting providers who will handle all of this for you, but having the option to bring mail fully in house is really nice.

It's essentially Exchange, but much easier to manage, and far cheaper.

They also have a Sharepoint/Box alternative, Workspace, that I now love.

I'm more than happy paying $555 for a server and then $45/user for license, $15/user/year maintenance, and hosting costs. I really don't think $50-100/mo/user (once you factor in admin/hosting costs...you could do it for $20-30/mo but $50-100 is a safer budget) is an unreasonable amount for top quality email and collaboration tools.

</comment><comment><USER63> This might be painful at the beginning but it could be a win-win situation in _long term_ for most parties:

1\. Google: can focus on customer service, 2\. Google's share holders: more revenue, 3\. Competitors: more competitive advantages, 4\. Startups: time to disrupt, 5\. Users: Email should be decentralized, why rely on a single provider is a good thing?

</comment><comment><USER64> This is unfortunate indeed. The free Google Apps offering was a substantial value. What viable alternatives are there?

<comment><USER65> Seems most of the people recommending alternatives are only thinking of email. I use gapps for my family, and we take a huge advantage of having a domain- specific calender and docs.

<comment><USER66> What is the advantage of using domain-specific calendar/docs over using them with your personal google account?

<comment><USER65> It's a lot easier to have your data be shared with the whole team. Otherwise, with a personal google account, sharing a document with a team requires adding each individual person to each document. There appears to be a feature of adding a group to a document, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to define groups, and even if it were possible it'd be a few extra steps to manage as well as to keep track of, since the document overview only shows "shared" but not the people/group it's shared with.

With a domain-specific account, it's easy to set a document to be shared with the group - added benefit is if you add a new user to the domain, she is automatically given access to those documents. Also, the document overview is much easier to manage since anything marked "shared" usually means teamwide.

I get what you're saying, everything can be accomplished with the still free personal google account, just it includes a constant daily drain on mental processing power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Oh come on... can we just have the gmail piece for free? If you want limit it to 5 addresses so that only really poor hackers use free account and they become your paying customers as soon as they find some traction.

</comment><comment><USER68> Found a workaround to still sign up for the standard plan, modify the following URL to include your domain: [http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/selectDomain?existin...](http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/standard/selectDomain?existingDomain=YOURDOMAIN.COM&newDomain=false&ownDomain=true)

Likely to be disabled very soon.

<comment><USER69> Instead of giving you a free plan, it gives you a 30 day trial :(

<comment><USER68> Yep you're right, they just haven't gotten around to updating the copy on the form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if the cause of this is the support costs required for the free accounts? Obviously personal GMail is plug-and-play, but for someone who can't spell DNS, setting up a domain account was never quite drop-dead-simple enough. I suspect the goal here is to create a barrier to entry and prevent the inevitable support load of free users.

There was an excellent post about this a while ago, where a developer reported much better treatment from users after charging a token fee for their app.

As a final thought, maybe Google is catching on to the 'charge what something is worth, not what it costs you' way of thinking. Hosted email solutions for enterprise aren't free, and it seems like Google has realized the real value of their product. Also, ~$4/seat/month is pretty well in line with this kind of SaaS offering.

<comment><USER70> I doubt the support costs were very much. As with all things Google other than being an adsense buyer, support was basically "send us an email and we'll respond with a robo-faq that may or may not have anything to do with your question".

And Google Apps was actually quite easy to setup, partly because Google documented it pretty well but mostly because many DNS providers would basically do a one-click Google Apps setup automatically for you.

<comment><USER71> Google Apps for Business has 24/7 _phone_ support. Maybe you would know that if you actually used Google Apps for Business or read the blog post.

<comment><USER36> > Google Apps for Business has 24/7 phone support.

Not for the free version.

<comment><USER72> Given that there were people who would try to use the free version for their business, and then kvetch (on HN and/or other major technology blogs) when their account was hijacked and they lost business critical access and couldn't recover quickly because they didn't have the 24/7 phone support, it might actually be better that the free version is getting sunset....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> z-factor For people who just need email forwarding <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/> work great. They charge $0.02/forwarded domain/day. So ~7USD per year per domain. I'm a customer for 5+ years, no complaints.

<comment><USER73> Elephant killing and hideous website aside, GoDaddy forwards up to 100 addresses for free with domain registration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I use Google Apps with my personal domain. A lot of people are recommending alternatives but the main reason why I like Google Apps is that I can use it to easily sign into YouTube, Google Docs and various other services that they provide with my personal, official email address.

I use Google Apps for a small blog that I run and I gave out email addresses to all of the writers. Eventually we had 11 writers and they only allow 10 free so I upgraded that one. People can't do that now. It's either all or nothing.

Meh, their loss. May have to go with Microsoft's alternative or something.

</comment><comment><USER74> Any other decent, free IMAP hosts out there? Ever since the Gmail UI shit the bed and mail clients grew an archive button I don't really need Google Apps itself anymore anyway.

<comment><USER75> If you have the time for it, you could try a VPS and your own IMAP/SMTP-server and web-interface.

I migrated off Google a year ago to my own server, took a day to sit down and understand/configure it and have since then run smoothly w/o me touching it. And since I host some other people's domains and mail for a small fee, I actually earn a few $ / year.

<comment><USER74> How bad is spam if you do that?

<comment><USER76> I've done the same as him, and I just make sure I use spamassassin. It works just as well or better than GMail at catching spam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> I sorted out my gmail powered trendy email@example.com email not two weeks ago. Perhaps if they offered a single user package free of charge it would be more sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER78> This might suck for the power user who had his own domain, but I am betting the free version was abused by a lot of business unwilling to pay a few bucks for the service.

<comment><USER79> What's the difference? The cost to Google is presumably the same, except that the user count might have been between two and ten-ish instead of one.

And now they can't upsell those businesses to paid accounts anymore. Established businesses already have email in place, and switching them over will be a hell of a sell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Wow, I actually _just_ called Google Apps support the other day for one of my domains to get downgraded back to free G Apps (I had unintentionally signed up for a 30-day trial of Business, and it didn't auto-downgrade, it just suspended my account). Bummer to see this though, I have multiple domains (As I'm sure many do here) and it's nice having a quick setup for one or two @domain.com's.

</comment><comment><USER81> I would even pay $50 a year if Google stopped making "improvements" to the UI. The new composer looks nice at first but it slows me down when I need to use different fonts, etc AND they removed background color AKA highlight. I do not use Evernote just because they do not have highlight... and now they decided to removed it from Gmail too. If it is not broken, don't fix it :-/

</comment><comment><USER82> In reading the comments generally I feel like there's two main groups being affected here: small businesses and small groups (families, geeks, whatever).

The first group—small businesses—can of course afford $50/user/year, even if they would rather not spend it.

The second group—enthusiasts—even if they could afford it, likely cannot justify $50/user/year. I personally have a custom email hosted by Google for a small group of my friends, and I know that there is NO WAY any of us would pay $50 each per year. The price would need to be an order of magnitude lower for us to consider it. (Yes, I know that for the moment we're grandfathered in.)

Seems like there should be a way for Google to distinguish between the two groups based on services needed and then price two tiers accordingly. For example, offer a Small Group Plan at $5/user/year with a limit of 10 users & no phone support; and another Small Business Plan that offers up to 50 users, limited phone support & whatever else help small businesses for a higher price.

</comment><comment><USER83> Google decides to charge money for providing a valuable service. Crazy!

</comment><comment><USER84> Seems like a strange move by Google. Most small or starting businesses don't need a 25GB inbox (at least not every user) or 24/7 tech support. Why create the barrier to entry? Now people with businesses will be more likely to use personal Google accounts for business or look for alternative services. Why not just create a premium business account option that gives you this level of storage and support if you need it, instead of trying to convince your users that they need it, when most of them are happy without it.

Personally, I liked the direction Google was heading with their Google Drive product. You get up to 5GB for free and then pay for more if you need it. Makes me wonder how Google might try to monetize other products like Google+ once they have a substantial following.

</comment><comment><USER85> I wonder how this will effect the Google Apps Marketplace <https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/?pli=1>

At the very least there will be less potential customers now. I imagine some people would have been willing to pay $0 to Google and $15 per user per month for some kind of project management offering, now it's $65 per month, which is really going to hurt new sign ups.

Also for anyone with an existing free account who wants to add new domains, don't forget you can add domain alias's. So you keep the same account but just make it so email from two+ different domains can come in. For tiny ideas that always have the same 1-2 employees it's almost preferable to a whole new account anyway.

</comment><comment><USER86> What really struck me was that they're only offering three nines of uptime. I can't see many businesses ditching Excel or Word to go with something that will cost you half a day of productivity every year, especially not for $50 a license.

<comment><USER13> What's the "nines" of uptime on a typical corporate desktop? By my back of the envelope calculations it's worse than 3.

<comment><USER87> I'll take "Google downtime" (a damn small amount) over any other sort of downtime (Rackspace, AWS US-EAST-1, _the hardware on my desk_ ) any day of the week.

<comment><USER88> Same here :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Create a start-up with:

3 way email sync (mobile/web/desktop) like exchange server (or other enterprise stuff)

A slick feature rich UI

Custom domains via MX

Solid spam filtering

 _There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point._

<comment><USER90>
      > There is nothing out there that does this for under 10$/month per user and I think there is a solid market for a better price point.

You realize Google Apps is $50/yr (around $4.16 per month) per user, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Office 365 is much cheaper now - [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/office365/compare-plans.aspx?WT.z_O365_ca=Buy_online-software_en-us)

<comment><USER92> The cheapest plan (email/calendar/contacts) is only $4 cheaper per year than Google Apps.

<comment><USER91> You are right, I misread the pricing the first time. The prices are basically the same now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Wow, now I feel _really_ lucky that I signed up for a free account just a couple of weeks ago.

Then again, being forced to find my own email hosting would have made me less dependent on Google, which may have been a good thing...

<comment><USER94> Agree. I really think it's a bad idea to be tied to an ecosystem for all your needs.

I, for one, would sure want to Keep all my chat contacts to some other service than Google/Gmail, Calendar with an independent provider. Unfortunately, unlike Calendar and some other services services like SNS and Chat are dependent upon what and where your other friends are. I would love it if I can have my own chat setup and I can chat with my friends on GTalk and Facebook (no, I don't personally know anyone who uses Yahoo any more or used other services like AIM ever at all).

<comment><USER93> Google chat actually uses Jabber[1]. I believe nothing stops you from using some other Jabber service with GChat.

[1]: <http://www.jabber.org/>

Now Facebook, of course, is another story. My impression is that they use a technology _based_ on Jabber but not compatible with anything outside of Facebook. I could be wrong--I simply never use Facebook chat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Crap, ALL our customers use google apps for email (because we don't want to host email on our servers and it's free).

All our customers are small businesses (photographers, designers) and usually just make 1 to 3 mailboxes.

Any alternative out there?

<comment><USER96> The free accounts should stay free. However opening new accounts will not be free :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Not to change the subject, but this decision just made my switch to Office 365 that much sweeter. If anything I love that I get push notifications (active sync) for emails and group calendars work much better.

</comment><comment><USER42> An alternative I use for educational customers is Microsoft Live Domains, also have some comercial domains with more than 50 accounts. But given this situation with Google I`m expecting Microsoft to do the same

</comment><comment><USER98> Well... fair enough.

If you use google apps already, nothing changes (if I'm reading this correctly?)

If you're thinking about using google apps, you've got to pay for it now.

Yes, this benefits no one but google. Then again, google has been providing benefit to millions of people with google apps. Running your own e-mail server is not trivial. There's a reason there are no good gmail alternatives--it's harder than it looks.

If I were them, I would have charged for it from the beginning--it's a really useful service. And they could have been real dicks by forcing all current free users to start coughing up dough.

</comment><comment><USER99> At least with customers being made to sign up to premium accounts with 24/7 support available there will be less horror stories of customers being locked out of their Google Apps accounts.

</comment><comment><USER100> Ugh. The worst thing is that I've been relying on my personal domain e-mail address _also_ being a valid google address. So I have to either pony up for my family's accounts or move us all and re-create logins on a page or so of "authorized apps."

Still, the huge amount of spam that's been getting through (10-15 per day, despite always logging in to the gmail web interface and clicking Report Spam) has been encouraging me to consider a move anyway. This change is just the nudge I needed to finally make it happen...

<comment><USER101> It continues to be free for existing users. They're closing sign up for free usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> Just the other day I was looking for ways to offer email@mydomain to people who request it. I found that GApps was no longer offering free email. So, I ended up using Forwarders in cPanel to do the thing for me.

Forwarders in _cPanel_ simply copy all incoming mail to email@mydomain to myother@email. If I didn't already create an email account email@mydomain, the incoming mail WILL NOT be stored on server which makes this a feasible solution. If I had, incoming mail would be copied to myother@email.

</comment><comment><USER103> Wow, I'm so glad I'm grandfathered in! I have 8 users, just for me.

Having to spend $400 on my email (or spend a lot of time either switching or combining mail accounts) every year would be hell.

<comment><USER104> I have grandfathered 50 users account. No idea what to do with it.

<comment><USER105> Is it a good idea to grandfather the maximum users ? Or will the existing accounts still be able to use 10 users ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> This is actually expected development. As the market matures, it is time to start make money.

This is also means that probably less and less of online services will be free.

Of course, you will still have "Walmarts of the online services" but you will get what you pay for - nothing more.

And I don't think there will be "cheaper" alternatives: but I do expect emergence of more expensive and better alternatives (if you can fork $50/year than you can fork $100/year - free is different story).

</comment><comment><USER82> I just did a little research to see what alternatives are out there for custom domain emails. I haven't used these Namecheap for email, though I have used them for domain hosting after the SOPA debacle.

Namecheap offers custom domain email hosting for $2.99/user/year. 3GB storage. Supports IMAP. 50MB attachment limit. No ads. No clue on the web interface quality, nor spam-filtering quality, but it's definitely a good price from a good company.

</comment><comment><USER107> Re: everybody saying this was a 'free' service - Google were still harvesting & selling off anything you put in there. It wasn't truly free.

</comment><comment><USER108> $50 for only THREE 9's? NO THANKS. :p

It sucks that they've removed the free version; it's definitely a step up from managing multiple individual gmail accounts or creating a shared account of some sort. (I use one for one of the side jobs I do; it's a pain in the ass.)

However, $50/year for premium is really friggin good, considering that the cheapest alternative is $10/mo ($100/yr) for hosted Exchange 2010 alone.

</comment><comment><USER109> I would be happy with a one-time fee to use my domain name. I don't care about anything else, just the domain name on the email address.

</comment><comment><USER110> I signed up my domain for google apps as soon as I registed it about 3 hours ago. Must have been one of the last ones - I noticed they had taken the small text link on the apps homepage away and I had to click through to pricing to get the free version. Obviously Google had kicked off their deployment while I was registering.

Totally taking this as a sign for my next app btw.

</comment><comment><USER111> I hope they don't do this with Google Analytics next. Not just because it is a great product to get for free (I'm a massive fan vs other systems). To me it would seem wrong to come into the market @ free, wipe out or reduce much of the competitors and then expect everyone to pay up now they have a market dominance.

<comment><USER112> They won't. They get data on 100% of your user's / visitors this way and can use that data to advertise to them via their search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> 2011-07-20: Announces Google Labs will be shutdown 2012-07-03: iGoogle will be "retired" on 2012-11-01 2012-12-06: Google Apps no longer free

I'm not liking the direction they're going as I use all of the above frequently (including signing up new domains for GApps regularly). It always comes down to money at the end of the day.

</comment><comment><USER114> Google apps for education is still free (I wonder for how long.) At least google is focusing on charging for things that are revenue generating, however for some education enterprise, that is debatable.

<http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/>

</comment><comment><USER115> I think it's time for a dedicated email service provider with full search functionality and tools to migrate the old inbox from Google Apps. I would gladly pay more than $50/year for a simple, rock solid service like this if it had an excellent web client, real customer support, and cared about my privacy.

<comment><USER116> <https://www.fastmail.fm/> is probably the closest thing to it

<comment><USER115> That does look pretty good, thanks! I'd heard of fastmail before, but thought they were just a hotmail clone (personal, not business).

EDIT: <https://www.zoho.com/mail> looks pretty good, too, and is the least expensive of the pack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER117> A few years ago they were inadvertently dropping the link to the free signup... now they've killed the product. Not fun... [http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ro/2009/07/google-apps- stan...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ro/2009/07/google-apps-standard- edition-still-free.html)

</comment><comment><USER118> I use Google Apps for my domain but forward the mail to another account which means I see no ads and get hosted mail for free. I didn't even realize until this announcement that I'm probably a net negative and probably not the only person doing this.

</comment><comment><USER119> Its a result of a/b testing done 5 months earlier: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/free-google-apps-sign-up- pa...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/free-google-apps-sign-up-page-removed- a-sign-of-new-changes-to-come/)

</comment><comment><USER120> Not to hijack this thread, but I've asked a question [1] about how to setup an email server on a VPS, if anyone could help me(us?) out.

1: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4885281>

</comment><comment><USER121> I'm confused here. It says nothing changes for existing customers but when I log into my domain's Google App dashboard I see this now: "Free 30 day Google Apps for Business trial" with an upgrade button. Does anyone else see this?

<comment><USER121> To answer my own question. I see now that it isn't saying that I am currently using a free trial, the button is to upgrade and get the free trial.

This is important though. DO NOT TRY THE FREE TRIAL UNLESS YOU PLAN ON STICKING WITH IT.

After yesterday, even if you have a legacy free account, you give up that privilege if you try the free 30 days. See here:

[http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60755)

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> At one point Yahoo was tip-toeing into this market with its Zimbra purchase. I wonder if this move prompts Yahoo to look again? $50 per email account per year leaves a lot of room for competition.

</comment><comment><USER123> I don't see what they'd lose from offering this free to personal users and non-profits? They do free mail hosting anyway so why prevent it being configurable to a certain domain?

</comment><comment><USER124> Why hasn't Google offered an option to increase from the default 25GB of email storage? Drive has an option to increase upto 16TB, but Gmail is locked at 25GB? What gives?

<comment><USER125> I would like to see a breakdown (from google) of how much storage people use. I'd guess a majority use <1 GB, and I can't imagine many people need more than 25GB.

<comment><USER124> My comment is aimed at business users, not casual users. Several friends of mine have hit the cap with their business accounts and have had to consider alternative email providers because now they can't use their email accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER126> Actually they forcing small business to move towards hotmail. Spending $500/year for e-mail service is not worth for small (offline) business.

<comment><USER112> Just over a dollar day isn't worth it? I'd disagree. But with that said there are reasonable alternatives out there for less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER127> Running your own e-mail server is _easy_. I can't believe how many people here are throwing up their hands in horror at the idea.

<comment><USER128> After decades of running my own email servers I gave up because of the never ending blacklisting. Some random ISP will decide that your IP address is in a bad neighborhood and blacklist you. Eventually one of your users will realize that their mail to Aunt Vickie isn't getting through and you'll spend an hour trying to get unblacklisted. You may or may not succeed.

If you own your own block C or larger this may not apply, but if you are renting servers or using a colo there is woe to be had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> Has anyone tried Zoho?

<https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html>

</comment><comment><USER130> You can still send and receive e-mail to classic @gmail.com setting up default reply-from address to email@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER116> Well, they probably filled their belly with enough user-base, now they can ignore the rest and focus on cashing in.

</comment><comment><USER131> Okay, one MacGyver solution -

Buy one user account - set up a ton of aliases. Set up filters to Gmail inboxes.

Yeah, that feels dirty... I know.

<comment><USER132> You can only have 20 domain aliases per account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> Does this mean that some of my domains that are going expire might be worth money as they have google apps?

</comment><comment><USER134> I wonder how this will affect the various hosts around who offer easy "free" google apps integration.

<comment><USER99> Dreamhost has added a disclaimer:

 _(Google may charge you to use this feature.)_

Also, when you attempt to sign up, the link redirects to a google apps free trial page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER135> Any competitor products out there which are still free? All I want is email for my domains.

<comment><USER136> Surely this should be a lesson that maybe free isn't always the best option...

</comment></comment><comment><USER137> I wonder how soon it will be before they eliminate free domestic calling on Google Voice?

</comment><comment><USER44> I hope Google can offer a cheaper plan for those who needs only domain and email.

</comment><comment><USER138> Does this mean my old domains with 50 free users are now worth more?? :)

</comment><comment><USER139> bummer. the first thing I do when I buy a new domain is sign up there. they make it so easy to manage. all good things must come to an end I guess.

</comment><comment><USER140> so will users who pay the $50/year still see ads on their inbox page?

<comment><USER141> nope, the premium version is ad-free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER142> any good alternatives ?

</comment><comment><USER143> [http://www.nextbigwhat.com/google-apps-free-for-new- domains-...](http://www.nextbigwhat.com/google-apps-free-for-new-domains- using-existing-accounts-297/) : This is a nice workaround. Try it out. You can still use it for free using the existing account.

</comment><comment><USER5> _GOD_

 _DAMNIT_

I was _literally_ 10 minutes away from signing up.

<comment><USER144> According to another blog post, you can still "switch to it" for the next 30 days. So maybe sign up for paid and then immediately switch to free?

[http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to- goo...](http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-google-apps- packages.html)

<comment><USER145> [http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2855120) I started the trial on or after December 6, 2012. You cannot downgrade to the free edition, but you have the option to purchase the product or to cancel your account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER146> Could someone explain me why a business providing a service should ? give it for free ? are google engineers working for free ? is google running its servers for free ? so yes , google is rich , but so is your electricity company , most gaz companies and most supermarkets. Do they give you stuffs for free ? "freemium" model is dead , in the future you'll pay for every service you use on the web.

<comment><USER147> I agree with you on some points here, but your statement, 'freemium is dead' makes no sense. Gmail and all included apps is the free and Google Apps (business) is the pay premium. If anything the model is seen fully validated here, not dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER148> I am confused, if I am google apps oldfag and have 20 accounts. According to [http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=29...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=29190&ctx=topic&answer=2855120) can I still use it like before or I must remove 10 mailboxes to fit 10 requirement to continue free usage?</comment>


Rugged android phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.handlewithlinux.com/rugged-android-phone

<comment><USER2> Ahhh I heard that Pidion were working on one, nice to see they released it.

If you're interested then I recommend getting in touch with them as the Koreans can offer some seriously competitive pricing/discounts on their devices. They're also typically very helpful and supportive if you're having issues. There is usually a slight language barrier but they make up for that in being as helpful as possible.

Here's to the South Koreans destroying the market share of the incompetant Symbol/Motorola and Intermec! :)

<comment><USER3> An aside: a lot of Korean companies have offices in LA that help with their US market activities. These aren't always publicized so always ask!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does IP65 protection of this device compare to IPX7 of Garmin Oregon 450? ([https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=63349#sp...](https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=145&pID=63349#specsTab))

<comment><USER5> Oddly enough, the IP65 rating this phone has does not make it waterproof. IP_5 means it can survive being sprayed with a hose but not necessarily taken for a dive. The Garmin'x IPX7 means that it is rated for immersion up to one meter (the 7 in the second place). The X is not a valid part of the code so I'm not sure what it means. The first digit refers to physical ingress protection.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Question: why does the second top-most picture of the phone display a Windows mobile OS?

<comment><USER7> Because Android is one of your choises, not the only choise.</comment></comment>


USA country map divided by 1/3rds of Covid deaths - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gfuvq3/usa_country_map_divided_by_13rds_of_covid_deaths/ <comment><USER2> This was from 17 days ago, which is like a year in COVID terms. I'd be curious if the map would still looks similar as of today.</comment>


Show HN: Sleeping Spider – Web page change monitor - <AUTHOR> https://sleepingspider.com/ <comment><USER2> Does this site respect robots.txt?

Does it render javascript content (so e.g. <div ng-view> angular sites work)?

Does it exclude or include comments... if I watch a blogpost with comments will every new comment cause an alert or only blogpost changes?

Will I get a notification if the page briefly 500 errors when you hit it, or does it have to get a 200 before it reports a change?

Will I get a notification if a page disappears entirely?

Does it scrape only once per day or more often and alert only once a day?

What user-agent does it scrape from on the off-chance someone wants to block it?

Does it diff binary data.. for example, if I ask it to watch an image url will it hash the image and notify me when it gets updated?

Does it auto-detect pages with rss feeds or pubsub feeds and subscribe to them?

Does it understand twitter so if I watch a user, it only alerts me of tweets, not e.g. a change in the number of followers?

Does it have special code for any website whatsoever?

Is the webpage parsing/diffing library / algorithm open source somewhere?

Is there a monitization plan, and if not how can I trust it won't vanish?

Is there a limit on the number of sites I can watch?

I like the simplistic design, but it would be nice if there were more information.

<comment><USER3> Go write your own then.

I find this a bizarre response to a simple and easy to understand tool.

<comment><USER2> If it's easy to understand then I guess you can answer my questions?

I don't think "go write your own" is a legitimate response to my questions (if that's ever a legitimate response).

<comment><USER4> I'm using websec as an existing tool to watch website changes. It's not perfect but it's good enough.

For a while I had a webapp to do a better job but it never got any traction, most likely because I had no idea how to get traction. It's an interesting exercise to write such a tool though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you prefer privacy and control over your own tools, there are the FLOSS [http://specto.sourceforge.net/](http://specto.sourceforge.net/) or the free(as in no cost)ware [http://www.cmcode.co.uk/webmon/](http://www.cmcode.co.uk/webmon/) for Windows

<comment><USER6> I too used webmon until recently, but got tired of monitoring the monitoring tool on my desktop. Now I use ChangeDetect - [http://www.changedetect.com/](http://www.changedetect.com/) Despite what is said on the homepage, it is NOT free. Good luck...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the most amazing coincidence the first two pages I submitted had the same digest: 90c0568! One was the front page of a news site, the other was the management page of a company I follow. The mind boggles. Or, they have a bug.

edit: as did the 3rd. And 0 bytes returned so probably being blocked. On a black list already?

<comment><USER8> Getting the same digest (90c0568) with no response code and a 0 byte response size so looks like something is broken (the crawler maybe).

<comment><USER9> Problem fixed. All failed probes retried. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Adding watch results in a white screen of nothing, no new watches added. I'm trying to monitor the Nexus 6 page :D

[https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_6_32GB_C...](https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_6_32GB_Cloud_White?id=nexus_6_white_32gb)

For my use case, anything more than an hour delay wouldn't be practical. Ideally it would be up to the minute, but I'd imagine that would cause other issues for a service like this. In the past I just used a Chrome Extension. But living in Vietnam I have to make sure my VPN is up in order to see the North American content.

<comment><USER9> The probe received a 403 forbidden error from google. I realized that google store forbid crawls. So a simple http request won't work.

I was not aware of this situation before. I will see what I can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Does it understand twitter so if I watch a user, it only alerts me of > tweets, not e.g. a change in the number of followers?

What do you think if I provide a numeric filter option to watches, which filters out numbers on the page before comparing if turned on.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Does it exclude or include comments... if I watch a blogpost with comments > will every new comment cause an alert or only blogpost changes?

I don't have a good solution for this problem yet. Let the user specify a css selector or xpath?

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it only for HTML, or will it alert on changes to JavaScript files for instance?

<comment><USER9> It's only for HTML. But if you have a need for JavaScript files, just let me know, it's technically possible, I just don't understand the use case yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just built "Page Poller" for the Rails Rumble 2014, same concept! [http://pagepoller.r14.railsrumble.com/](http://pagepoller.r14.railsrumble.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks very similiar to [https://followthatpage.com](https://followthatpage.com) . Worked for me pretty well for non JS pages for last 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Does it diff binary data.. for example, if I ask it to watch an image url > will it hash the image and notify me when it gets updated?

Can you elaborate in what case you might want to do this?

</comment><comment><USER14> Typo in the footer: "Sleeping Sider"

<comment><USER9> Thank you. Fixed.

<comment><USER15> What's your twitter id. You're trending on PH.

<comment><USER9> The product doesn't have a twitter as the name was occupied by others. :)

Personally I don't use twitter neither. Email me if you need to contact.

<comment><USER15> If you had a personal twitter account, I could have granted you commenting access on Product Hunt. That's why I contacted you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is regarded as a change?

<comment><USER9> Text content changes. For example the site corrected a typo or published a new post.

Change <h1> to <h2> will not trigger an alert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Which timezone does "8 o'clock in the morning" consider?

<comment><USER9> It will try to detect your time zone with JavaScript. If that doesn't work, it falls back to Los Angeles and the user may contact the support to update this setting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just added HTTP authentication support.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice branding!

</comment><comment><USER19> simple, clean and useful. I'm trying it out. Good job!</comment>


Simple-check: QuickCheck for Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/reiddraper/simple-check

<comment><USER2> For someone who is not too familiar with the Clojure world, how does this compare to test.generative[1] (which I heard about in a talk[2] about Simulant[3])?

[1] [https://github.com/clojure/test.generative](https://github.com/clojure/test.generative)

[2] [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simulation- Testing](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simulation-Testing)

[3] [https://github.com/Datomic/simulant](https://github.com/Datomic/simulant)

<comment><USER3> QuickCheck (and SimpleCheck) have the ability to narrow the data being tested to attempt to find a problem. So where test.generative will say "This function failed when passed 42", QuickCheck will say "This function failed, we've narrowed down the range of unacceptable inputs to 40, 41-43 and 45".</comment></comment>


The Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Language of Dieting - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/tech-industry-diet-products-have-whole-new-language/574390/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> "bodies" ... "they're now just another device to be managed"</comment>


Free programming magazine featuring articles by Andy Hunt and Matt Yoho. - <AUTHOR> http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/140227/follow

<comment><USER2> Here's the link to the free issue:

[http://www.mashedcodemagazine.com/download/MashedCodeMagazin...](http://www.mashedcodemagazine.com/download/MashedCodeMagazine2011.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to clarify, the magazine is free as a PDF download at both www.mashedcodemagazine.com and magcloud.com. You only have to pay for the printed version.</comment></comment>


Y U NO commit?? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/esneider/YUNOcommit.vim

<comment><USER2> Committing code should not be a glorified Ctrl/Cmd+S. With few exceptions each commit should be an isolated unit of work. Also, this floating to the top of HN is a bit of a mystery to me.

<comment><USER3> You can really have two "species" of commits:

One of them is the "published, shared" kind; for this one, I can agree with you, that they should be self-contained and complete, especially when there many devs on the project, and/or you'd like to be able to use bisect.

The second kind, and for me actually a _very_ important one, is more of a "local backup, dirty hacking" one. Those shouldn't probably be published (unless a private/one-guy repo), but allow for easy hacking, developing, testing, experimenting. The "commit often, whatever you have, however broken or non-ideal" approach provides safe lightweight backup, and allows for easy switching between various paths/approaches. Now, after you design stabilizes, dust settles down, and you are completing the work, you can (and probably should) eventually either just squash everything into one final feature commit (the end result will be indistinguishable to what you'd deliver if not committing in the meantime), or remodel the intermediary commits to whatever ideal shape you like them to have retroactively (with "git rebase -i", including patch editing etc.) Knowing the benefits of this approach, I don't understand why anyone would want to reject it.

edit: Also, with many small, dirty commits, it's sometimes possible to fairly quickly do stuff like carving out some subfeature into a separate branch (with judicious use of rebases, cherrypicking and some occasional small edits). Or, remove/revert commits marked earlier as DEBUG. Seems useful to me, as a means to somewhat speed up such operations and decrease the possibility of manual error at the same time.

<comment><USER4> Interestingly, I have two different version control systems for doing these two different species of commit. The published kind, I do in my regular team version control system, complete with commit comments that explain the meaning of the complete thought that is being committed. The other kind (bookmarking my state before messing around with things I may want to cleanly revert) I do using the version control that is built into IntelliJ IDEA. It is completely orthogonal to the one used by my team.

Other IDEs should offer this feature... it turns out to be quite useful in practice.

<comment><USER5> I really like this approach, you can take it one step further. Set up an automatic independent (aka private) commit after every successful compile.

<comment><USER4> IntelliJ, when you combine the internal version control and the undo log, manages it so that effectively there is a commit after each piece of typing -- without any need to save or even compile. That turns out to be a nice way of working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It took me a while, but I think this is a tool to automatically remind you to commit your work after making [20] writes. It is a plugin for vim.

<comment><USER7> I thought it was clear enough from just the first sentence after the image: "Set the number of writes without committing before the message is shown".

Anyways, this is a cute idea but as someone who compulsive hits save after practically every edit (i.e. after most transitions from insert to normal mode), this wouldn't be very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think HN would do well with having a single sentence abstract on article submissions, because I have no idea what is this about.

<comment><USER9> I suspect this gets bumped up more for meme-compliance than novelty. I rather like the SublimeText plugin, gitgutters[1].

But it in any case, I'm a fan of VCS integration in my editor.

1\. [https://github.com/jisaacks/GitGutter](https://github.com/jisaacks/GitGutter)

<comment><USER10> GitGutter is available for vim as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This thread has included some interesting discussion of how everyone handles the different tasks of a) committing individual units of work, b) saving works-in-progress, c) syncing files, d) backing up files, and e) persistent undo editor features.

I thought I'd toss out what my setup is right now on my personal machine, for a bit of reflection/discussion...

\- I compulsively save to disk after nearly every edit, so I'm a big fan of editors that provide some kind of persistent undo functionality. Right now I'm using live-archive inside the Atom editor, and it is wonderful. I hit cmd- shift-y and it pops the current buffer open in a live-archive interface that includes VCR-like with rewind/fast-forward buttons, etc. It leaves me feeling quite free to mess with code a little more dangerously that I would otherwise. Whereas before I might briefly comment out a line while I try something out, now I'll just delete it and hack away. Anything that was there is just a cmd- shift-y away.

live-archive is actually maybe the foremost reason I'm still using Atom. I'll probably switch away from it eventually, but I'm grown to like the customized little hole I've built for myself, inside that particular editor. I might try out a JetBrains IDE next, sometime ...

\- I don't do a lot of work-in-progress saving. Maybe I should be better about this? I'm not a fan of git histories that read like "went to lunch," "stuck, think on this--" etc. Even when I'm the only one that's going to be seeing them. I keep a gitignored text file where I tend to scribble down notes like this, but maybe I should play around with WIP commits.

\- For syncing I have an hourly cron job that does a rsync -av --delete-after for my important directories to several different locations. This is mostly meant as a true sync and not backup, but I do find myself using it as a way to lose no more than an hour's work at a time. I might change this to running every 30 or 20 minutes since it doesn't seem to tax the machine too much.

\- For backup I have crashplan backing everything up to a local external drive and then their cloud service too. I haven't put a terrible amount of thought into this. It only runs when I sleep. I want to play around with using arq and amazon glacier eventually.

For git I just do small unit-of-work commits for myself, and then cleaning up when necessary.

</comment><comment><USER12> I just wanted to point out vim's persistent undo: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5700389/using-vims- persis...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5700389/using-vims-persistent- undo)

Sometimes I forget to commit, and suddenly I'm in the middle of a second feature, with the code in a non-working state. Then it's perfect to just undo back a couple of hours, save, commit, and redo back to where I am.

However, It's rather risky though if you're not confident with the undo system, so it's a good idea to save the file to a temporary location first.

<comment><USER13> Or use `git stash`.

Or use `git add -p`.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm finding that I commit in units of work. Currently, I'm refactoring LibreOffice's SalGraphics class to move the mirroring from this class into an upper layer, but I'm finding it better to do it little by little.

Gerrit topic is here:

[https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/q/status:open+project:core+...](https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/q/status:open+project:core+branch:master+topic:salgraphicsmirror,n,z)

I'm finding it productive to commit when I have a compilable change. I find it helps me keep track of what's going on.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Wouldn't this just encourage people who don't want to commit to stop saving regularly and possibly lose work?

<comment><USER15> Then they probably shouldn't be running this plugin in the first place. It's more for the people that can occasionally forget to commit, and their commits end up being huge.

<comment> k-mcgrady Ah ok. I looked at it more as something you force on your co-workers :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Slightly related, I get a lot of value out of a bash prompt which tells me:

\- if my git repo is dirty (uncommitted changes)

\- which branch it is on

\- if (and how many) changes I have stashed

It's not originally my work but I find it massively useful, since it avoids the "committed but not pushed" failure mode, the "on wrong branch" failure more and the "stashed and forgotten about" failure mode.

I know that regularly running git status would work, but this is a useful visual reminder for me.

<comment><USER14> Link to bashism that allows this?

<comment><USER17> [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=git+bash+integration](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=git+bash+integration)

<comment><USER14> [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=noone+likes+a+smartarse](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=noone+likes+a+smartarse)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess professional programmers has this sort of thing already sorted out, but it happens all to often to reach the point where my _new feature_ is working as it should (appears to be stable), and I keep working on yet another addition on the same branch. When I commit, I feel like I should have committed at least 2 or 3 times by now.

Happens too often so I setup up this plugin from 20 to 10 and see how it goes! But thanks, the idea is really handy.

<comment><USER17> I have the same "problem". I guess I'm just too focuses on fixing stuff to stop and commit. Thankfully we're alive in a time where we don't have to adapt to our tools anymore, but our tools are adapting to us.

      git add <file> -p

This lets you pick chunks of code from <file> that you'd like to stage for commit. When I feel I'm done coding for a session, I just run a `git diff` in one window, and in the other one pick chunks that contain changes that belong in one commit.

<comment><USER18> Oh good to know! I didn't knew that was possible :-) thanks for the hint. I use a cli tool called 'tig' to view difference between commits and not committed changes.

<comment><USER19> tig is (among other things) a more user-friendly tool that can replace git add -p.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I tend to write to disk after every edit (a bad habit, I know, but it's pretty ingrained in my muscle memory), so as-is, this would spam me quite a bit.

A better criterion for determining when to display the message would be to count the non-empty lines of the diff, and only show it if it passes a threshold.

Or: only if the added/removed lines ratio is > 1, or something like that.

<comment><USER21> I save after every logical edit too - I think it's a good habit. You never get caught out by network/file-system failures, and can confidently reload from disk to a recent good state if you mess up or change your mind mid-edit.

I think commiting should be done for a more meaningful unit of work than a single edit, something logically 'complete' akin to a transaction.

<comment><USER20> I tried to integrate git into this with per-file repos once, but I never really used it much: [https://github.com/fmoralesc/vim- autogit](https://github.com/fmoralesc/vim-autogit) This commits on writes.

> I think commiting should be done for a more meaningful unit of work than a > single edit, something logically 'complete' akin to a transaction.

What do you think would be a good set of criteria for what should count as a meaningful unit of work?

<comment><USER21> Is the motivation for commit-on-write to get a kind of persistent history for undo/redo? That is an interesting idea.

<comment><USER20> Yes. The commits are recorded in an independent repo, so you can have both a per-file history of changes and a global history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would typically commit at the end of the day, even if it is into my private repository. So days, I think it as backup, but on other days, I use it to socialise the code.

I find that this forces me to take stock of the current state of implementation and put my mind in the right mind frame for the next stage.

When pushing it into the main repository, it will be a unit of work.

</comment><comment><USER23> I like the general idea, I sometimes also tend to code too much until committing, however, for me it is more a combination of running tests, amount of code and of course completeness. Plus, I often start hammering ":w" when I am stuck. (which would be miss-interpreted by this tool)

</comment><comment><USER24> Commit time is a good time to step back a little and think about what I wrote and why. Organizing hunks of changes into a meaningful package. I usually commit when I'm done with a feature (once or twice a day) or right after fixing a bug (a good dozen times a day).

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice idea but I don't think I'd want to use it for risk of too many false positives. e.g. if I lift a 20+ line function to move it somewhere else in the file, I would guess it will warn I should commit now.

<comment><USER26> It prompts every 20 _writes_ (i.e. saves), not lines modified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems like a pretty useful idea. It would be great to also set thresholds on number of files changed and total number of lines (ignoring whitespace) changed.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have all my code in a dropbox synced in a dropbox folder. Works pretty well in combination with something like Git.

</comment><comment><USER29> I save pretty compulsively, so this would annoy the crap out of me...

</comment><comment><USER30> I much prefer our ascii art doge when all tests pass. :)

</comment><comment><USER31> Y U NO write this for other editors?

<comment><USER32> I would guess (and probably get downvoted for this) that it's because GIT is so widely used, is not well structured and overall group source control is not well understood by developers.

If you are exposed to several source control systems, you would avoid GIT, at least until you know what you are doing. But so many people use it and don't understand what they are doing, there are massive numbers of conversations just like this article - often between people who have never used anything other than GIT.

<comment><USER33> It's still better than when everyone just used CVS because that's what everyone was used to.</comment></comment></comment>


The $1 billion mission to reach the Earth's mantle - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/01/tech/mantle-earth-drill-mission/index.html?c=&page=1 <comment><USER2> Contrary to the claim of the article, $1 billion to get samples from the Earth's mantle does not sound particularly expensive.

Especially if compared to all the other things that we nowadays spend billions on, and where the long-term benefit is much less clear.

<comment><USER3> Considering that the unit cost for a B2 bomber was $737M (a little over $1B with inflation), I'd say that this is a steal. Just think of things in recent days that have reached the $1B level. For this kind of science? I'd say we'd be stupid NOT to pay for it.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Learning how to drill to effectively unlimited geothermal power reservoirs can't be a bad thing.

<comment><USER5> We don't fail to drill more geothermals because we are incapable of it, we don't do it because the cost/benefit ratio isn't favorable in most places. Since this isn't about advancing technology, but applying what we already have to this task, this project isn't going to change that.

There's all kinds of things that are possible, but not profitable. And especially when it comes to energy, "profitable" isn't just about money; putting in 2 Joules to create the ability to generate 1 isn't economically practical any more than a company that burns 2 dollars to make 1 is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human hair in the deep end of a swimming pool and inserting it into a thimble 1/10 mm wide on the bottom, and then drilling a few meters into the foundations"

Wow, that quote really put it all into perspective for me.

<comment><USER7> And to put it in even more prespective, we're just talking about drilling through the equivalent of the skin of an apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember as a kid some of the conspiracy theories about how the US cut off and then classified all the deep drilling work in the late 60's [1]. I had a chance early on in the 80's to invest in a company that had designed a new drill head (one of my USC alums went to work there), I thought it was a silly investment I mean drill bits? really? But they did quite well with it.

That said, the whole concept of just digging and digging until you hit the middle holds childlike fascination for me.

[1] Mostly related to discovering alien artifacts and the like.

<comment><USER9> i'm really excited about the medium-term promise of abundant geothermal energy

<comment><USER8> As am I although there is pretty damning evidence in Sonoma County [1] California that you can cause earthquakes with it. That said, I'm surprised we've not seen more closed loop systems [2][3]. My favorite is to take a loop of tungsten tubing a reservoir, a cooling tower, and a turbo pump and toss the tubing into the magma flow of a volcano. Pull out enough heat to run a turbine but not much that you freeze the lava. I'm totally going for this concept in my Mad Scientist Power Base.

[1] <http://www.geysers.com/>

[2] <http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/powerplants.html>

[3] <http://www.atlanticgeothermal.com/about/what-we-do.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll admit to being utterly ignorant about deep-hole drilling. If I was tasked with doing something like that I'd do two things:

1- I would not do it in the ocean

Lots of reasons, from the potential to damage an ecosystem to the unknowns that could be catastrophic in so many ways. Of course, cost is another reason.

Doing anything in the ocean --particularly deep-- is incredibly difficult and expensive.

2- I would not use a ten mile long shaft with a drill at the end of it.

I just don't think that this is the way to do it. Again, I am ignorant when it comes to drilling of this sort.

What I would do would be to design a drilling robot that would drill the hole and burrow itself down the hole as it works. To continue with the overly simplistic view, the only thing this robot would need would be power (lots of it).

You select a candidate site and build a large solar array, large enough to power the drill-bot.

A starter hole of the required depth and diameter would be drilled via conventional means. The robot would then be inserted into it. It would expand and clamp itself to the hole to begin drilling deeper. If the broken-up dirt and rocks must be removed either the robo-drill has the capability to collect some amount of it and traverse back to the surface or it comes back and a "cleanup" robot would go down to get the stuff out.

It'll take a long time? Is that a problem? The operation could probably have a good degree of automation.

Probably a horrible idea. Don't know.

<comment><USER7> Just for the sake of explanation, here are some of the reasons (I'm a geophysist, currently working in the oil industry, but my dissertation work relied heavily on the Chikyu (the ship in question)):

1: The ocean is the only place where it's feasible. The continents have much, much thicker crust (40-70km) than the ocean basins (7-15km). Areas of exposed oceanic crust (e.g. Iceland) have much thicker than normal oceanic crust.

Beyond that, it's (slightly) easier to "drill" through water than through rock. There are a still a _lot_ of challenges involved in deep-water riser drilling. You don't just have a what's basically a steel rod going down (as you would with riserless drilling), you have to have a system that's capable of returning fluids and maintaining high pressure going all the way down to the seafloor (and below, once you case the well). However, it's still faster to deploy the riser than it is to drill through solid rock. At any rate, I'm getting sidetracked. The locations where they're looking to drill to the moho are in relatively shallow water (3-4 km) compared to the water depths that the Chikyu has already drilled in.

2: You're misunderstanding how drilling works. :) In some sense, what you've described is exactly how it works. (Just think of the drillbit as the robot.) However, you have to overcome the pressures at the depth you're drilling at (otherwise the hole will collapse, among other things) and you need an efficient way to return the cuttings (waste material) to the surface. Thus: drilling mud. You circulate pressurized (and very dense, so that the pressure increases with depth) fluid that flushes the cuttings back to the surface and keeps the borehole open. (It's an oversimplification, but that's the basic idea.) In some cases (e.g. coil tubing rigs), this fluid is even what drives the drillbit.

At any rate, hopefully that helps illuminate things a touch. :)

<comment><USER10> My disclaimer was accurate: I am ignorant about these things. I going camping this weekend. Can't think of a better subject to Google while out there (gotta love coverage in California) and learn about.

<comment><USER7> Isn't googling while camping cheating? :) While you're at it, look up the Chikyu. It's a very neat ship! (and some of the translations on the JAMSTEC website for the Chikyu are amusing: e.g. "Science the Earth")

That aside, they're very good and very reasonable questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What happens when you hit the mantle? Does the rock come out or solidify in the pipe, how does the drill cope with the heat?

<comment><USER12> pretty sure no one has any real idea only theories. hopefully it doesn't start some crazy volcano that eventually engulfs everything. when this planet does go the way of the buffalo it likely will be our own fault.

<comment><USER13> I was secretly hoping for that Russian drill team in the arctic tapping into that frozen lake to unleash some sort of crazy frozen, earth-destroying demon/alien

Perhaps I will shift my wishes to this mantle quest to unlease some fiery, earth-destroying demon/alien.

<comment><USER14> You will like this Doctor Who episode if you didn't see it yet:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Doctor_Who)>

<comment><USER15> The first thing that came to mind was this one: [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/DoctorWhoS31E08T...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/DoctorWhoS31E08TheHungryEarth)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole>

"Because Russia"

<comment><USER17> "Because science isn't always cheap and doesn't always produce immediately obvious benefits."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If the hole is only 30cm wide, and it's going to take 8 years to complete (complete in 2020), isn't there a decent chance that there will be movement in the plates that will close up the hole?

<comment><USER19> If they take care not to drill through any faults, which I expect they will, then the whole hole will move as one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Only 10 times the cost of making a movie about reaching the core.

</comment><comment><USER21> Who else is expecting the chief scientist on the project to say: "What could possibly go wrong?" :)

</comment><comment><USER22> > It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human > hair in the deep end of a swimming pool and inserting it into a thimble 1/10 > mm wide

Can someone clean up this horrible analogy?

<comment><USER23> How about....dangling piano wire from a twenty story highrise rooftop down into a test tube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> >"It will be the equivalent of dangling a steel string the width of a human hair in the deep end of a swimming pool and inserting it into a thimble 1/10 mm wide on the bottom, and then drilling a few meters into the foundations," says Teagle.

If this is indeed an accurate analogy than I would be very interested to see it done as a proof of concept!

</comment><comment><USER25> Why not probe samples from a volcano, instead ???

<comment><USER26> Because the rocks extruded in a volcano suffer a lot of changes during its way up. Moreover, a mantle rock is composed by many different minerals. When temperature goes up, some minerals melt first. So, you expect the extruded magmas to be enriched in those minerals. The extruded rocks are not sampling the mantle properly. Of course they provide tons of information, but is not the same as having a fresh mantle rock.

<comment><USER27> Also the possibility of finding new life forms. We've found life drilling several miles down. How much further does it go?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My first thought (before reading) was that this was a commercial mining operation, in the vein of asteroid mining missions, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> What are you going to do once you get there?

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm ok with it as long as Gordon Freeman isn't involved.

</comment><comment><USER31> What is the earth explodes? Earth was designed to keep the very hot stuff inside a very hard container. If we break this container by drilling through it, the hot stuff will explode and humanity will get hurt.</comment>