04.01.05

April Foolishness

Posted in Uncategorized at 6:23 pm by GaZ

Today’s that day of the year when we’re bombarded with various “April Fool’s” jokes, but, more importantly, it’s also GMail’s 1st Birthday! Here’s a copy of the text / picture from the site, as it’ll probably disappear by tomorrow:

A Google approach to math.

On the eve of Gmail’s one-year birthday, our engineers were toiling away furiously. Notes scribbled all over the walls. Complex calculations on napkins and empty pizza boxes. Millions of M&Ms.

The result?… starting today, we’re beginning the roll-out of our new and top secret Infinity+1 storage plan. The key features are:

* Write, don’t worry.
You want to stop caring about storage. We want to keep giving you more. Today, and beyond.

* The gift that keeps on giving.
1463.501150 megabytes of storage (and counting) for every user.

* No complicated equations. No tough algorithms.
Just this one graph:

The “megabyte” counter is run by a bit of Javascript that was initialised at midnight last night with a value of 1000, and is due to continue increasing until it reaches 2000 (rather than continuing to infinity as the text above jokingly implies), because now every G-Mail user has TWO gigabytes of storage to use!! If you somehow still don’t have a G-mail invitation, and you’re interested in trying it out, then just send me an e-mail. Also, as featured yesterday on the GoogleBlog, Google Ride has been released! All these Google services are really cool and very handy if you live State-side, but I wish Google would pay a bit more attention to the rest of the world. It’s like we’re living in a third-world country over here!

I’ve been thinking about making a web-based GPS tracker for some time now (obviously in a password-protected area or something) so people can see where I am, but the technology is still a bit too expensive. When GPS devices get REALLY cheap I might try to plant a bug on other people and track their every move! Mwahahaha!!

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