That is just atrocious. Pictures do speak a 100 words. - Mathew A. Koeneker
How can you tell whether the haze is caused by pollution or mist? - Gabe Schaffer
@Stupid Blogger: So "Like" that it was posted. ;) - Tanath
@Gabe: depends how much you cough/eyes water. I didn't find Beijing to be that bad, Shanghai was much worse; and Shenzhen is very close. When you're up high you see the hazy skies worse then when you're in Beijing, on the ground you don't notice that much - visually. - clarke thomas
what time was this shoot taken ? CO2 levels I think the most is SFO /NYC for cities.. next come cities in .cn.. not sure.. - Peter Dawson
hm gov says not bad than athletic committee says to bad to perform - Fred Grott
It will take years for the air quality to improve. Communisim cannot dictate the physical laws of nature. Hope it does not affect the Games. - Roberto Bonini
cool! if that was smog...I wouldn't go outside and I live in Los Angeles! - Pokai
Ecellent Catch Philpp !! :)- seems that the Posted pic is 404 status - Peter Dawson
It's not all bad. In the grand(er) scheme of things, this major public FAIL raises awareness about air quality, and maybe it will give the Chinese government (and others) the kick in the pants that they need. - Tudor Bosman
Ana's original must have been removed by the Chinese government. There was smog but now it's gone. - Kevin Fox
looks a lot like Mexico city from my hotel window too - Josue Salazar
What's all this 404 talk? Is this pic actually being blocked somewhere? (oh, Bret points out that they're referring to the image on picasa, not the thumbnail here) - Paul Buchheit
Only if you click on the link, it still shows up fine as the actual image on the Friendfeed site. It's like magic that way. - Steve Craft
Looks like the picture is no longer at Picasa/Google. Ana or somebody else removed it? - Brian Sullivan
No need to fear anything... this was a problem w/ Picasa Web Albums. I'd added comments to the photos from Picasa and deleted the previous web album album so I could upload the photos anew. But then PWA flaked on me and it was getting late so I went to bed. Here's the new album (http://picasaweb.google.com/an...), complete with the latest picture of the morning: http://picasaweb.google.com/an... - Ana
"The authors of this paper claim to show that other terms can be added to the quantum mechanical action that are consistent with current theory and experiment. However, some of these possible terms include conditions in the future that need to be taken into account and summed over. That is to say, what happens in the future could (according to this paper) affect what happens in the present.
Why the LHC? The authors argue that these sorts of time-violating interactions could be associated with whatever new particles we create at the LHC. For example, the production of a large number of Higgs particles in the future could have a backwards-in-time causal effect on the machine that produced them, stopping the machine from ever running." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
I've been thinking about this issue of the future effecting the past for some time. I think it's true, but impossible to prove. I even wrote a blog post about it, but I'm not sure if anyone understood: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.c... - Paul Buchheit
This would account for the observer bringing the universe into existence, even though the creation of the universe pre-dates the observer. - Bret Treasure
It seems like there are some people working on making the future effecting the present possible to prove. Impossible is such a strong word. - Clare Dibble
Really? There are so many things that have been impossible to prove for so long! But that might not be the same impossible you're thinking of. - j1m
Not impossible, just currently unimaginable. - Stupid Blogger
I made you post this. But I can't prove that I did. - Louis Gray
WOw! This changing the present stuff really works! :) - Brad Fitzpatrick
Schroedinger called, wants his Cat back. - Toby Graham
Sorry, tell him his cat died when we opened the box. - Jason Carreira
so what's the period of time involved here? are we dealing in units of Planck time? do Higgs bosons show up a couple of picoseconds at the target before they are supposed to? Or is the LHC spewing Higgs NOW, before it has been turned on, before it is even finished? What if some CERN janitor holds up a bucket to the LHC, collects all the Higgs bosons before it has even been turned on, and wins the Nobel Prize? - Karim
Very cool! Science fiction meets real life... - Mitchell Tsai
also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.... now i'm wondering if what the janitor is collecting in his bucket is not Higgs bosons, but rather *anti-Higgs* moving *backwards* in time. if mass is a result of Higgs, then does anti-mass and anti-gravity come from an anti-Higgs field? ;-) - Karim
Please ignore the previous comment if it has mistakenly appeared on FriendFeed prior to the year 2093. - Karim
++Karim :) Meanwhile "The world's most powerful particle accelerator, aimed at unlocking secrets of the universe, will be launched on September 10" http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/200... - Eugene
I always find it amusing when I walk past the labs at uni and all the second year CS students with really cool customised window managers are leaning forward and squinting at the screen because they can't see a thing. - Michael C. Harris
I thought it was clever the way Vista blurs the background behind the transparency to provide clear fore/back separation. But now I think the whole transparency thing is useless in the first place. Who likes reading magazines where you can see through the page to the stuff on the other side? - Gabe Schaffer
This is a dollar bill taped to the floor of FriendFeed's headquarters. It's a bit of social engineering. They figured out it kept people from tripping on the cord cover because people noticed the money on the floor. - Robert Scoble
The dollar bill trick doesn’t work with strippers though ;) - Earl E Morningwood
@Earl: Consider it a stripper-filter, then. You know someone's a stripper if they trip over it. - April Buchheit
for some reason i expect a "stripper filter" to be something coded using regular expressions. sad, i know. - Karim
The message here is that Web 2.0 companies are so ignorant of money and revenue that they even step over a dollar on the floor - Jason Carreira via twhirl
Interesting. The photo has been viewed more than 500 times, but has only earned 62 likes and 19 comments. So, for every 1 thing we can see here there's another 9 people hanging out lurking in the shadows. - Robert Scoble
@Scoble the old 90-9-1 rule :) (well almost) - Naor
You could always just superglue some road kill to those things. Nothing gets people's attention more than a dead opossum. - Andrew Leyden
anything chocolate rain is gold!!! err chocolate you know what i mean! :) - (jeff)isageek
Ugh! I don't even want to see this video. It's bad enough I saw the first version. That's one action (of many) for which I would very much like an "undo" button. - April Buchheit
Big deal, I take my mac charger with me _everywhere_! :) - Robert Konigsberg
Mine must always be in my lap or on my shoulders if I work from home. It's cute but annoying. Sometimes I can convince them to sit in a chair next to me. - xero
CUTE kitty!!!!!!! I love cats... cool buddy!! - Susan Beebe
They are a constant reminder of what is important in Life. - Thomas T. Panto
My one-year-old kitty is totally my co-worker at home. Every once in a while she has a meeting elsewhere, but for the most part she is somehow near me or on me a good chunk of the day. She also sleeps on my back at night and purrs in my ear - soothing, adorable and occasionally annoying. - Rachel L Fisher
My work buddy is my shih tzu who loves to lay perilously close to the switch on my power strip. She also has to follow me around and be no further than 10 feet away from me at all times... She's a great foot warmer when the weather is cold. - Tad Donaghe via fftogo
How did I miss this one? Pets make working at home awesome. - Benjamin Golub
nice coloring - one of ours like to sleep on my sons 17" macbook pro's keyboard :-p - mike "glemak" dunn
Nubbles: a puppy who was born with only her two hind legs and nubs for front legs. A prosthesis was made for her, using model airplane wheels and shoulder joints, natch. - Jess Lee via Bookmarklet
WOW... a BABY Buchheit entered the world while I wasn't looking...amazing! great secret there Paul!! Congratulations on your new addition to your family!! :-) - Susan Beebe
Go Gmail! "The cost savings are substantial. The Outlook/Exchange platform involved a AU$33 million contract and took four years to go live, although it’s unclear why it took so long. The Gmail/Google Apps rollout, which is being completed by subcontractors, will cost just $9.5 million and should be live by the end of 2008. User storage will increase from 35 MB to 1 GB." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
This is small compared to the rest of Gmail, so scaling isn't an issue. - Paul Buchheit
Has anyone ever played Warcraft and clicked on a sheep until it exploded? That's what I want to do with the "like" button on this link. - J. Phil
My guess is that the Exchange contract involved having many local servers and administrators (managed by Unisys), while the Gmail contract involves just letting Google do all the work in the US with SMS only doing the local integration. This is all fine and dandy until some ship cuts the submarine cable to your continent and your email doesn't work for a week. - Gabe Schaffer
I work tangentially to this stuff.. the next step has to be a Apps rollout (or at least replacing Office with OpenOffice) - Nick Lothian
Of course, if the submarine cable gets cut, email won't work anyways. - Jim Norris
Presumably they're spending millions of AU$ so the students can email teachers and other students. One would hope the Exchange-based system wouldn't require transoceanic cables for teachers to email their students. With Gmail you can't even edit a draft without a decent Internet connection to some Gmail datacenter. - Gabe Schaffer
There may be datacenters in Australia by now. - Paul Buchheit
Australia has something like a dozen undersea cables connecting it to a variety of destinations in Asia and the Americas. Events that would disconnect Australia from the world, or shut down Google's data centers, are so much more rare than Exchange downtime that it's not even worth talking about. There are plenty of valid reasons to prefer locally served email over a hosted solution, but undersea cable cuts aren't one of them. - ⓞnor
Gmail is a great choice, but the funny thing is that Exchange seems like a really awful choice for this situation. To give email to a million students, it seems like some big-ass conventional IMAP servers would be a lot cheaper and easier to manage. Maybe they were sold a bill of goods about how Exchange/Outlook would integrate with educational courseware? - ⓞnor
The problem really comes down to local vs. hosted services. The article techcrunch incorrectly quoted said the email would be hosted by Google overseas, meaning there are dozens more points of failure (a submarine cable being merely one). My guess is that it was Unisys (the low bidder in 2003) that chose Exchange as the platform, and that SMS (the low bidder this year) chose Gmail. I would also guess that there is no SLA in the contract. - Gabe Schaffer
gmail is so much more reliable then anything microsoft could ever manage in underfunded corporate IT environments - why even try and compare - ben rogers via twhirl
What does a GMail/Google Apps "rollout" involve? I'm assuming it must be some sort of customisation/integration? - Mike Gardiner
Gmail may be 100% reliable, but that doesn't matter because the Internet isn't even close to reliable. All it takes is one kid running BitTorrent to make every student in the school (or district) unable to access email. - Gabe Schaffer
Does it frequently happen that you can't get to Google because some kid is running BitTorrent? - ⓞnor
Kids these days are spoiled. I remember using 'ed' and 'mail'. We used to have to get up at 5am and lick the street clean wi't toungue but we were 'appy. - Andy C
Of course, if the University was really clever, they could have secured 1.5 million free Gmail invites and saved a further $9.5 million. - Andy C
@ⓞnor - bittorrent isn't too much of a concern AFAIK in most schools. What is the big concern is the cost of bandwidth. Telstra (the incumbent duopolist) signed a lot of schools up to very expensive contracts with capped bandwidth (esp in remote areas). It's expensive enough that at some schools they disconnect the internet once the cap is reached (although this isn't in NSW AFAIK) - Nick Lothian
@Andy C: Google Apps has features that not possible with unaffiliated accounts: integration with organizaton's user directory, single sign on and more. - Gary Burd
@Gary: I know. It was a weak attempt at humour. Next time I will append a smiley. - Andy C
It doesn't matter whether it's a broken cable, BitTorrent, a misbehaving router, or any of the dozens of other causes that could make the Internet unreliable; the point is that the Internet is inherently unreliable. Anything that relies on the Internet will eventually fail, and at some point it will fail the day before the big project is due or the final exam, and there won't be anything the school will be able to do about it. - Gabe Schaffer
Yeah, but it's all about failure rates. Everything fails sometimes, including Exchange servers. Microsoft themselves, for example, have suffered *weeks* long company wide email outages while they struggle to repair broken Exchange installations. If I cared about reliable access to my mail, I know which one I would pick. And there's no secret mystery failure here: you can just ask people "is it OK if your email is approximately as available as Google?". They know how available that is to them. - ⓞnor
I don't know about you, Onor, but I check Gmail dozens of times each day; I use the rest of Google perhaps 3 times a day. The reason I still use Outlook (instead of forwarding that email to Gmail) is that some mail I need access to even when there's no Internet. - Gabe Schaffer
@gabe: imap with gmail. you can get a local snapshot if you want without the hassle of having to manage an email system. - Ashwin Bharambe
It's also missing that modal 'death from above' version. :-) - Kevin Fox
Google Talk is the worst product Google has created so far. It's product managers should be fired. - sebmos
It skips one interesting step. The idea for chat moles (named after 'whack-a-mole') came from notifications. We had little yellow notifications that would show up in the bottom corner of Gmail when you got a new IM. We wanted to be able to reply from the notification without having to open a big chat window. So inline reply was added to the notification and then that led to the first mole (3rd screenshot on that page). But then the bright yellow color didn't make as much sense...hence the 4th screenshot. - Keith Coleman
I like Gmail chat a lot... Would be nice to have something like that on Friendfeed - Bindu Reddy
Sebmos' note: Grammar, tact, and usefulness FAIL. - Adam Lasnik
Anything that requires me to press ENTER is too inconvenient to use on my tablet. All UIs should give me the option to press a button. - Kenneth LeFebvre
