"4 Giraffe birth canal. Mama giraffes stand up while giving birth, so baby's entry into the world is a 5-foot drop. Wheeee! Crack."
- Tudor Bosman
from Bookmarklet
"10 Narwhal tusk. The unicorn-like protuberance on a male narwhal's head is actually a tooth that erupts through the front of the jaw and keeps on growing, up to 9 feet. Narwhal: "Doc, I have a toothache." Dentist: "Indeed.""
- Tudor Bosman
I'm surprised by this strip. I mean, this is xkcd: androids would definitely use Python longs, which have unlimited precision.
- Tudor Bosman
Well, it was a cost-saving design decision. They decided to make the sheep-counting register on the CPU only 16-bit.
- Victor Ganata
"2^15 sheep ought to be enough for anybody." -- not Bill Gates
- Karim
Still, you'd think they'd declare it unsigned.
- Gabe
They probably wrote the sheep-counting logic in some fancy new language that doesn't support unsigned values. Like, uh, almost everything but C :)
- Joel Webber
my favorite mistake was a colleague defining zipcode as a signed short int, then wodering why so many users in Paisley, Florida
- Kevin Marks
from twhirl
I love these things. Worth watching.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, agreed. I wish the iphone had the ability to send a link to a youtube video quickly so this could be sent to my daughters today
- LPH™ and his dog P™
I wish they tuned down the audience a bit... Could barely hear her at times
- Mark Philpot
this lady certainly has a voice! good for her i say for being brave. :)
- Tatty Gibson
OMG, I'm in tears here. That was lovely and wow that song with all that. Had to favorite it. </sentimental wimp>
- Anika
Is good to see what nature can do. Incredible voice!
- Rafael
That's a magnificent clip, I wish America's Got Talent was so entertaining and surprising.
- Jonathan Coffman
i watched this last night, love her! Her voice is a true gift.
- Laura Zickus
Thanks for sharing that - perfect for this time of year
- Jesse Stay
She's this year's Paul Potts. Great voices, the pair of them.
- Mark H
That was just amazing. And the perfect song for both her situation and to start the waterworks. Now i have to follow the show and see if she wins.
- Kevin Fox
While I absolutely detest these shows, I must say, this woman got to me.
- Rob Michael (Atmos Trio)
Oh, Duh. Got it, Kevin. This reminds me of the British man who sang opera. It was unbelievable. I think our American shows shoudn't limit the age. I'd love to see what some of the older folks here can do.
- Dawn
Dawn, America's got talent doesn't limit age either
- Jesse Stay
Great! I was thinking of American Idol. Never seen America's Got Talent.
- Dawn
"so you think you can dance" limits at 30 years or so. Such a shame.
- Kevin Fox
"So that's just one side of me!" Hahaha. So nice, she's courageous and willing, good game! So modest to have her walk away after her performance, I'm almost crying.
- Zu from AOD
Wow. I usually avoid all of these types of shows. But that was very cool!
- Louis Gray
As LG said, it's my first view of that. Damn talents' shows, they got me.
- Zu from AOD
Gosh, I think I've watched this video like 50 times already.
- Nir Ben Yona
Just goes to show how synical we all are, and how fast we are to judge people.
- Steve Mactaggart
from twhirl
Not bad! I still prefer this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - That said, it was a surprisingly good performance. Not as much as Paul Potts, who was entirely horripilative and transcendent.
- david beckwith
This was a surprise--and lovely, thx
- susan mernit
Awesome performance. I've never seen the look of pleasant surprise on Simon's face before. You could tell that even he enjoyed it. He still needs to get a better haircut though.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Britain may have talent, but that's more than I can say for Simon Cowell. The man is the Antichrist, as far as i'm concerned.
- Iain Baker
He was a tamed little kitteh for 6 minutes during that performance though.
- Scoble, Alex Scoble
Don't know enough about Cowell to make a value judgement on the man. Sometimes (and I don't know if this is the case with Cowell) the a-hole attitude is a public front. It's possibly the case with Gordon Ramsey, and it certainly is with Ann Robinson - I've been to a recording of 'The Weakest Link' at Pinewood Studios, and she switches 'bitch mode' on and off along with the cameras.
- Ian May
Wow! Brings back memories when I first saw paul potts...
- Jorg Jansen
Seriously? This reeks of scripted viral. The show caught (online) fire in '07 with the Paul Potts audition...arguably the hottest shared video of the year. When the show returned last year, there wasn't an act even minutely close to the WOM impact Potts had generated the privious year. Clearly the BGT online buzz strategy for '09... Potts 2.0. #fail
- Zach Lytwyn
ahh, the power of the edit. great job of making her look like a 'cat lady' for the first several minutes. all the more powerful when we find out she's not totally daft.
- MikeAmundsen
That is one courageuos woman with an amazing voice. Goosebumps all over.
- Jochen Lillich
From an online forum. "
I was talking to this dude about Java. He was like, "I like it!"
I was like, "It gives me hives!"
He said, "Really?"
I said, "No. It gives me HiveFactoryConstructors, which give me HiveFactories, which give me Hives." "
Have features been graduating out of labs? I'm looking forward to seeing some of the more helpful, less controversial features graduating to the beta version. (Heh. Graduating to beta...)
- Kevin Fox
"Using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, you can instantly provision as much or as little capacity as you like to perform data-intensive tasks for applications such as web indexing, data mining, log file analysis, machine learning, financial analysis, scientific simulation, and bioinformatics research. Amazon Elastic MapReduce lets you focus on crunching or analyzing your data without having to worry about time-consuming set-up, management or tuning of Hadoop clusters or the compute capacity upon which they sit."
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
I'm smilin and nodding and secretly going 'huh?' although I get the principle
- Phill Price
"Develop your data processing application authored in your choice of Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++." (from http://aws.amazon.com/elastic...).
- fshamsi
I'm betting the App Engine version will be worth waiting even longer for.
- Christopher Galtenberg
Nice to see this principle being used more widely in the industry. Not all problems fit well into a map-reduce structure, but when they do, it's incredibly useful to be able to point a thousand machines them without a second thought.
- Joel Webber
For some of those problems, like finance, bioinformatics, and n-body simulations, you get substantial benefit from using something like OpenCL/CUDA/Brook on GPUs. The GPUs are insanely faster at doing things like running Smith Waterman or HMMR compared to x86 cores. Seems like someone needs to build a map-reduce cloud service on top of NVidia Tesla servers. Hmm, didn't Google already buy PeakStream? :)
- Ray Cromwell
wow, cool infrastructure with some serious scalability options
- Susan Beebe
@Ray - a little off topic, but I've often thought that the vector processing capabilities in GPUs would make them a good match for doing recommenders on the client
- Nick Lothian
We have Google Apps at work, but my boss is a Microsoft guru and LOVES Outlook. I LOVE Gmail, so I've resisted most of his attempts to get me to pop Gmail down to Outlook. It's a battle every day. :)
- Jandy
I use the Mail.app in Mac, but everything stays on the server.
- Aaron Hood
Not sure I understand this debate. I use Mail.app to access my Google hosted mail via IMAP. Best of both worlds and Google in no way "destroys" my use of Mail.app. I presume Outlook could do the same.
- Nick in Manila
I love Gmail, but they still need better integration with other apps/platforms. For example, Google contacts needs to sync directly (and for free) with iPhone/iTunes, salesforce.com, etc.
- Peter Ghosh
@Kevin - They're going to rename the company to Google BETA, Inc soon? ;)
- Tyson Key
Sorry, I meant Google Calendar, not contacts . . .
- Peter Ghosh
Gmail is a great consumer webmail, but in no way "destroys" Outlook. How does Gmail allow me to book conference rooms, or recall errant emails, or follow SOX retention policies? Both have their place and are leaders in their own area, but one does not supplant the other.
- Ryan
one huge reason why Microsoft HATES Google, outlook is just one of the major pay for software offerings by MS that are being eroded in market share due to Google
- sofarsoShaw BAZINGA!
Comparing GMail to Outlook is like comparing Apples to Fruit Salad. :) They're not the same, even if they overlap on a few features.
- Kenneth LeFebvre
I would guess that Gmail is likely destroying Hotmail -- Outlook not so much. Still reason for Microsoft to be pissed at Google though.
- Brian Sullivan
I turned my tom(at)thomashawk.com email address over to gmail and I have to say that the reduction in spam is nothing short of remarkable. Every now and then I check the spam file and feel bad because real email gets trapped in there, but by and large it's awesome.
- Thomas Hawk
Feels like I'm preaching to the choir here but have been using gmail in one form or another since almost the beginning. After spending years using mac mail to consolidate accounts went full gmail a few months ago because it just works better and the extras are great. Don't see how anybody can top it. The only other one I've tried which shows some potential is zenbe.com.
- Mike Elliott
Gmail rocks! Once you start using it there's no going back. Two niggles though: Multiple signatures and blind group mailings, please!
- Todd Brunner
from twhirl
Gmail seems great at first - but recently, I have seen several messages disappear from my Inbox while I watch. Sometimes they reappear next time I check - sometimes not. Searching for reports of Gmail eating messages turns up a disturbingly high number of hits. Destroys Outlook? Maybe. Destroys messages? Yes. Not good enough, even for a free service! What use is 7 Gb of space - when it isn't 7 Gb of *reliable* space?
- James
from twhirl
so gmail finally has complete windows compatible keyboard macros, syncs my to my mobile phones, I can do my mailings with them, has an integrated crm system, and more? great. </sarcasm> (and I say this as an avid gmail user ...)
- Nicole Simon
Switched to Gmail from Outlook and never looked back.
- Roberto Bonini
didn't Bucheit invent Gmail according to Louis G? The opening shot in the downfall of Microsoft...?
- sofarsoShaw BAZINGA!
He was on the team, yes - and did the prototype for the Gmail Ads, i belive. Don't be modest Paul.
- Roberto Bonini
As much as I love gmail (I've got several accounts), I couldn't use it an office environment yet. Want to covert an email to an appointment or task just drag it to the calendar or task list in Outlook. Outlook also has search folders so I can set up folders for emails I got today. I know there are GreaseMonkey extensions to support search folders but Gmail's date searching is just crummy.
- Andy Davies
I wish people would stop killing the aps I use...I hate that.
- John D Reasor
Nice. I still have more trust in self-administered PKI; is that naive? Are they using asymmetric or symmetric crypto?
- coldbrew
Outlook destroyed Outlook the way MS destroys it's other products (and I have been an Outlook fan since '97): it became bloated and slow.
- Peter Ghosh
I'll still use thunderbird since I have to centralize many different mail accounts (and want them to be clearly separated), but I must admit that Gmail made a good point here :-)
- stanjourdan
Jourdan: Do you use PGP? We should have a key-signing party room on FF. Maybe I'll make one now...
- coldbrew
Gmail is far from destroying Outlook. I still have to use Outlook for plenty of things. It is just a different tool. Feature by feature Google is way way behind Outlook.
- Patrick Allmond
Gmail is the small business solution. Major corporations are way too private to be communicating outside the Outlook box. Yet Outlook has been shown in the past to have vulnerabilities. Security is less of an issue with smaller databases. Suits prefer the worn path, the grey rut.
- Phil Boiarski
Sorry, I meant gmail's encryption. I don't think it has any PKI option. does it?
- coldbrew
I don't understand that argument, Mark. By the same logic, Google couldn't be anything more than a niche search provider because nobody would trust a search engine that everyone uses.
- Kevin Fox
"When Outlook fails on one computer, only one computer and one user is affected." Right, because a software vulnerability in Outlook is programmed and rolled out on a per customer basis.
- virtually
There's just no way I'll use email software that uses the one-message-per-row paradigm again. The productivity gains from Conversations are just enormous.
- jakebf
@mark: that's entirely true, if kind of a moot point based on the probability. If visa went down tomorrow, nobody would be able to pay for much of anything. If Comcast went down, most of us would have no internet connection. It's clearly your prerogative to run all your own software infrastructure, but I'd rather have the convenience of web based software.
- Joel Webber
A lot of commentators are discussing chalk and cheese. Outlook is an email CLIENT / Application. GMail is another Client / Application. How you use each one is entirely up to each user. Most non-technical people think of Gmail as something they access via their browsers, whereas Outlook is a Microsoft Application that runs on their PC. Not entirely true. you can access GMail servers using any client (Outlook/Thunderbird).
- Chris Wright
from twhirl
Gmail+Gcal is an Outlook killer, no doubt about it. The day Gcal started sending SMS to my mobile with the reminders it also killed my old Palm Treo.
- Jordi Soler
What Gmail does is make using Email for the normal non techie person easy. The reality is most home users do not use the power of Ouitlook. The issue with Gmail is good lick syncing a pda or smart phone to it it works well for the calendar but not for contacts. Also Gmail does not give you an e asy way to store messages in tact offliine. Outlook has a PST file for offline storage and backup.
- Rob Cairns
As has been touched on in this thread. Gmail and Outlook are largely orthogonal. Outlook is a client. Gmail is a mail provider with a client. You can use Outlook with Gmail or another mail provider, but either way if that provider goes belly-up you're going to stop getting your mail for a bit. If you're concerned about your mail archives being hosted with someone else, then you should keep a local copy using a POP client, no matter what mail provider you happen to put your trust in.
- Kevin Fox
I went from using internal gmail at google to using Outlook at my new job, and while I think there are good things and bad things about the two platforms, I miss the speed and portability of gmail, but I like some the task/calendar features in Outlook. If I had my druthers, I'd use gmail.
- Ginger Makela Riker
"Gmail+Gcal is an Outlook killer, no doubt about it." Afraid not, Jordi, because GMail Contacts is a big ol' steaming cup of FAIL. When Google gets their act together on Contacts, then Outlook will be threatened.
- John Craft
Outlook is a platform for working with "items"... countless times I have dropped into the built-in macro language to do things with my email, tasks, appointments, contacts, etc., that I could never do with a webmail application like Gmail. I wish I could stop using it, because I'll admit it's a hog on resources, but there is no alternative that will do EXACTLY what I want to do like Outlook will with my custom scripts in it. :)
- Kenneth LeFebvre
GMail via a web browser is just using IMAP to access/control the mail on the mail server. You can set up Outlook/Thunderbird to access GMail using IMAP. It would be more accurate to say that using the GMail web interface has reduced the number of people using other client applications for accessing their email.
- Chris Wright
Why are people comparing apples with oranges here? Client vs service? Thunderbird may beat Outlook, but not Gmail itself. I do recognize the web client is good, but is not nearly as flexible as a standalone. Plus, as has been mentioned by others, I need multiple account processing. Gmail fails at this. Gmail will remain my service of choice in the end. Tbird at home, Outlook at work.
- Vince DeGeorge
@Enver: One example is automatically filling out my weekly timesheet from my calendar. Another example is automatically searching our company's online directory to grab mugshots for all my contacts, so I have their pictures to help me remember who's who... :) This is why I say Outlook is a *platform*. It seems to me that it would be an extraordinary amount of work to use something like Greasemonkey to actually add significant new functionality into Gmail, rather than just enhancing the user experience.
- Kenneth LeFebvre
BTW, I'm not knocking Gmail. I actually use it to host my own email domain... I'm just making the case that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison to put Gmail and Outlook in the same category.
- Kenneth LeFebvre
Hotmail offline access has been available for over a year now with Windows Live Mail client. Can't make out why the same feature for Gmail is that exciting. They are not the first one to enable this feature. Zoho and Hotmail has been having these for a long time.
- Amar Shah
Gmail rocks... hate when some old relatives still write to my hotmail and I gotta go in there to get it, just because microsoft won't allow automatic forward to gmail.
- Peter Efland
"In this talk I'll give some background of Google's existing hardware and software infrastructure. I'll then discuss what works well and what does not, and I'll highlight some areas where we see interesting unsolved research problems. The problems span a wide range of topics, including processor design, distributed systems, machine learning, information retrieval, text processing and many other areas. This talk is meant to cover a sampling of interesting problems/areas, not a comprehensive treatise."
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
"On Sept. 13, 1985, Nintendo released Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo Entertainment System; the game would sell over 40 million copies, and become one of the most popular video games of all time."
- Dan Hsiao
from Bookmarklet
@ Sean ditto, as far as NES was concerned it was either that or Tetris, I couldn't tell you which.
- Aaron Krug
My most hours logged definitely has to be The Legend of Zelda. I don't remember getting the NES callouses, but the NES hand cramps were the worst.
- Joe "Brrzzzzzzt" Pierce
Wait, there was a Mario rock opera? w. tf.
- Eric Rice
About time! "I asked if Picasa for Mac was coming, and as luck would have it I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of media training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year."
- Paul Buchheit
This is a video of 100 people, aged 1 through 100, hitting a drum, some saying their age. If you think it sounds silly, you should take a look, and if you think it sounds interesting then you don't need any prodding from me. 100 is my favorite.
- Kevin Fox
That's amazing that in the report at the end Fox is 'completely vindicated' by a ruling that says it's okay to distort the news, therefore they didn't do anything wrong. Legal != Okay
- Kevin Fox