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Oct. 17, 2005 For the benefit of some my fellow computer semiliterates, I thought I'd just jot down a couple of observations I've made in the last year or so. I've been using Yahoo! Mail for some time, but only last year did I pay any attention to the amount of storage that it offers. Perhaps there had always been a question in the back of my mind, but I never took the time to look into it, saving all my writings to floppy disks. Since these disks are susceptible to viruses and physical damage, you really have to save 2 or 3 copies of everything you deem important. Then if you want to change the text in one of your writings, you have to change all the copies. So last November, planning my move to South America, I began to realize that I could store everything I had right in my Yahoo Mailbox once I had got Yahoo! Mail Plus. I wouldn't even had needed Yahoo! Mail Plus if I had realized that the capacity of regular Yahoo! Mail was soon going to be increased. With Yahoo! Mail, which is free, you get 1 gigabyte of storage, the equivalent of about 695 floppy disks, or of perhaps 350,000 typed pages. It was recently increased from 20 megabytes, a 50-fold increase. With Yahoo! Mail Plus, which costs about $20 a year, you get 2 gigabytes, which is equivalent to 1389 floppy disks, or about 700,000 typed pages. My novel, which is 463 typewritten pages, double-spaced, is all contained on a single disk, and I have it also in my Yahoo Mailbox. I have two other books, over 1000 pages, of which about 400 pages consist of tables. And I have reams of other writings, including over 300 articles that I’ve submitted to useless-knowledge.com, copies of which I have in my Yahoo! Plus Mailbox too. In addition, I have several thousand incoming and outgoing items of e-mail saved. Then I have many articles that I’ve copied from elsewhere, including lyrics of songs and so forth. This all comes to 5% of the capacity of the mailbox. I don’t even have my own computer. I use public computers. But I can access my Yahoo! Mailbox from any computer. So if I type a couple of pages that I want to save, I merely e-mail it to myself and store it in one of the Folders that I have as a feature of my Yahoo! Mailbox. Later on, if I want to access it, I just go to any computer. I’ve heard about people losing all kinds of information or records because they hadn’t made disks or because their computers became inoperative, but if they worked from Yahoo! Mailbox, this would hardly be possible. Nonetheless, I do have 3 or 4 disks of each of the things I consider most important. Furthermore, I can move writings from my Yahoo! Mailbox to Microsoft Word and back. This doesn't do a lot of good in Brazil, as Microsoft Word's spelling correction feature doesn't cover English here, though English is probably downloadable. This feature, of course, sifts out a lot of typographical errors. Once the text is amended, it can be moved back to Yahoo! Mailbox (Plus or non-Plus) and saved, while the earlier version may merely be deleted. Yahoo! Mail (Plus or non-Plus) offers a Notepad feature, which does just as the name suggests, allowing you to type and save anything you can compose on a keyboard. There are searches and other features. I'm sure there are several I haven't even discovered yet. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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