The last one I got (SD950) is just a bit too big for me, so I'm planning to get a smaller / less capable one the next time I buy a camera. - Amit Patel
do you like the sd950? i was thinking about buying it. - Jess Lee
The SD950 is fine except that it's slightly too big to fit comfortably into my pocket. I would've been better off with something smaller that I have with me all the time than with the SD950, which I mostly got for the larger sensor size. The one Paul's looking at (SD880) looks nice. - Amit Patel
"I'll look into the <description> element and should have a good ping solution soon. As for MediaRSS, if you include multiple media groups containing thumbnails with width and height small enough to fit multiple images, then they should display horizontally just like Flickr." - Paul Buchheit
So the problem with the <description> tag in RSS feeds is that it generally contains the full or partial content of the blog post. It would be useful to make this content available in friendfeed, but stuffing it into a comment probably isn't the right ui. - Paul Buchheit
So... don't stuff the text into the a comment. Just display the description indented under the title. I would only show the first N characters, and provide a link to read the rest of the text. Might as well use a comment, btw, and truncate. If you want the rest, click the link. The current situation is just wrong for all the reasons I outlined in my post. - Dave Winer
Doesn't that depend on the length of the post? April's blog, for example, generally contains posts with text appropriate for an initial comment. - Bruce Lewis
The problem is that the "description" is not really a description in most cases, it's the content, and automatically stuffing a prefix of all blog posts into the first comment may not be the best experience. I think perhaps the right solution is to provide a "generic rss" service that has options for all this. (and to provide a more elegant way of viewing the feed content inline) I completely agree with your objectives though -- all services should have equal access via feeds. - Paul Buchheit
Would love it if when I include images or videos in my WordPress posts they showed up in FriendFeed. Is there a trick to making that happen? - Patrick Lightbody
We already pick up on MediaRSS tags Patrick. If you do a search, there are several discussions of how to get it working with WordPress. - Paul Buchheit
Paul, thanks for the tip. Trying it out now. Very exciting times :) - Patrick Lightbody
“STAT cmd_get 38248121900
STAT cmd_set 1544054351
STAT get_hits 37035899096
STAT get_misses 1212222804
STAT evictions 6
STAT bytes_read 2052884502987
STAT bytes_written 19164794478662”
"So there you have it. If you want to achieve 50 years of almost continuous growth, you now know what you have to do: abolish management and get rid of all the employees." - Paul Buchheit
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cause and effect are not what they seem, in one sense there have never been managers and employers, they have all been sailing to the same wind, not caused by any of them - Gregory Lent
What's interesting is that they were sustainably this way for 50 years. My theory is that this can only happen if you grow slowly (i.e., not at VC-funded rates) - Piaw Na
off-topic: If you change the authorised = false to true in the URL, you don't have to register to read the article. Just a time and hassle saver if anyone's interested. :} - vijay
"Harvard University's endowment suffered investment losses of at least 22% in the first four months of the school's fiscal year, the latest evidence of the financial woes facing higher education.
The Harvard endowment, the biggest of any university, stood at $36.9 billion as of June 30, meaning the loss amounts to about $8 billion. That's more than the entire endowments of all but six colleges, according to the latest official tally." - bob
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"But as San Francisco police combed over the evidence Tuesday, investigators said this is what appears to have happened: Dr. Daniel J. Kliman, an Alameda physician and one of the Bay Area's foremost pro-Israel activists, stepped into an open elevator shaft by accident last week and died.
His body was found Monday by workers inspecting an elevator in the historic, nine-story Sharon Building at 55 New Montgomery St., where Kliman apparently plunged to his death Nov. 25." - bob
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@Paul - It looks like the hard drives are just kind of sitting on top of the motherboards (maybe with some carboard in between). Is that right? - Robert Felty
Umm, how do I get to see the picture? I just see the posted comment. - Clare Dibble
I watched the youtube video that is linked from the comment - Robert Felty
Yeah, unfortunately these comment entries from news.yc are a little confusing because they link to the comment, not the story. The "story" was just a link to http://friendfeed.com/e/a2e7bd... - Paul Buchheit
The original Google datacenter in '99 :) - Paul Buchheit
One of the consequences of factoring in component failure in your every move: you can save the cases, stuff's going to break anyway ;) - Mustafa K. Isik
This design turned out to be somewhat nightmarish. It was eventually cleaned up (we had a "cabling fest") and by now the designs are quite slick, though still very unconventional. I wish Google would publish more about their hardware, because it's very interesting. - Paul Buchheit
i have! it was even color coded, cables of different colors - Joelle Nebbe
WHEN CABLES GO BAD! I used to have a similar problem and the only way to trace cables was to put a small binder clip over the wire and push it along. - Stephen Pierzchala
Cables Gone Wild! woo hoo! gees that is bad. Paul YES I too wish Google published their IT Infrastructure / hardware info - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)
pretty sure their current IT infrastructure involves genetically-modified human brains soaking in some kind of nutrient bath. - Karim
yap i seen so much worser than this pic .... :D - zos
BTW, I believe this is the same generation of hardware found in the Computer History Museum (they have the jj rack, as I recall). - Paul Buchheit
Paul: I've been inside a Google datacenter. They are a thing of beauty now. I've always wanted to interview the team that is responsible for doing those and get some video. - Robert Scoble
That's how it would look if it was set up at my house. - Gabe
I worked in a server room that look like that too - all those spagetti cabling craziness. - imabonehead
Robert - YES do video interview with Google DC Infrastructure brains! :) - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)
How long would it take to fix if you pulled out just one cable?Or plugged it into the wrong socket? - Alistair
Here are some pics of a datacenter I put together for a client back in 2003 with some pretty insane cabling. With this much cabling, it was too hard to manage without automation. So I built some tools that allowed me to plan for rapid growth (i.e 20 server SAN jumped to 120+ while we were building out) http://bit.ly/9Q7O - Jauder Ho
Grunt: OK boss, I've got a new cable crimped. Where do you want it? Boss: Server 99,9999 port 1. See it? I'll see you in a week. Grunt: &^* - Shane
"Employees dismantling sections of Google's original data center discovered the decaying corpse of an engineer tangled in a web of network patch cables, police reported today. The mostly-skeletal remains have not been conclusively identified, though the victim appeared to have been wearing a 'Banyan Vines' t-shirt. While forensic tests have yet to be completed, the County Medical Examiner has estimated the date of death to be 'sometime around the 1999, 2000 timeframe.'" - Karim
"A police spokeperson said foul play was not suspected, adding, 'Unfortunately, this is not the first time we've seen this. The Internet was growing so rapidly back then, these things just happened. Someone goes in to work on a patch panel, and they get tangled up. It's sad. And I don't blame Google for not noticing -- their headcount was growing rapidly too. One or two engineers go missing, nobody notices. I bet the poor bastard is still getting direct deposit on his paychecks.'" - Karim
A spokesperson for Google referred to the grisly discovery as "a regrettable loss, but not a single point of failure," and added that engineers are currently required to use "the buddy system" to work in pairs when cabling servers. - Karim
Most datacenters I've ever been in don't allow photography. The exception was the Stanford Linear Accelerator data center that Scoble got me into: http://www.flickr.com/photos/t... - Thomas Hawk
AJ, we're trying to avoid spending too much money, so our datacenter pictures would be a lot less interesting than Google's. Here's a photo of one of our servers though: http://friendfeed.com/e/136525... - Paul Buchheit
"So with the U.S. economy in a recession, Google is ratcheting back spending and cutting new projects. "We have to behave as though we don't know" what's going to happen, says Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt. The company will curtail the "dark matter," he says, projects that "haven't really caught on and aren't that exciting." He says the company is "not going to give" an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. "When the cycle comes back," he says, "we will be able to fund his brilliant vision."" - Bret Taylor
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"Many others [services], such as experiments with offering digital music and an online data-storage service, never took off" > What are they talking about? - Jérôme Flipo
I can only assume that by "online data-storage service" they mean Google Base. - Mihai Parparita
@Tanath Horrible headline! I too was worried "Google Gears" was being taken down - Pat Hawks
"Jules Klar, founder of Phoenix, AZ-based RocketShip Tours, has announced that his company will immediately begin selling rides to the edge of space for $95,000 per flight. Participants will fly aboard the Lynx, a two-seat suborbital vehicle being built by California-based XCOR Aerospace." - bob
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"Unfortunately I didn't get a digital camera until 2002, so I don't have many pictures from early Google.
Here's a closeup of a nic on one of the machines: http://friendfeed.com/e/e7bc81... took this picture two months ago at the Computer History Museum, where the jj rack is on display." - Paul Buchheit
awesome!! :) highly amused, thanks! :D ... ok, damn I need a wikipedia page...that's cool :) Hey I did NOT know you grew up in Rochester, NY! wow - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)
