I actually like that they give a specific time to expect the next update down to the minute
"We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 4:53:00 PM UTC-4 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change."
This is one of those things that is extremely helpful for a sysadmin taking heat from employees looking for answers.
US date order always makes me laugh - it's like people looked at date order and thought if the day comes before the month that will be the European way, lets flip it. Then they realised that would be YYYY-mm-dd and so be ISO standard order, dang can't have that, hey lets have a mixture.
I know it didn't happen this way but some sort of logical order would be good.
The order is logical, it maps to the way many americans speak. E.g. July 4th, 2000, which is always spoken as ... er... the 4th of july, 2009. Well. uh. Bad example.
I've taken to writing %d %b %Y when possible. It's unambiguous and provides sane ordering. And somehow I find it easier to map from %b to an ordinal than vice versa.
It would be good to hear a logical justification for the mm-dd-yyyy. I'm not sure I can come up with one. It makes it hard to search and it doesn't follow any sequential order. yyyy-mm-dd actually goes up by one each day. Try it next time you have to number give files a date stamp and you'll find it makes your life a lot simpler.
Of course I meant a justification for the mixed up ordering as being of greater utility (more easily parsed, understood, less confused, more easily read, better sorted, more standardised with other users) than the other common orderings.
Let the word go forth ... your logical justification please?
Interestingly, GMail has failed twice in the last few weeks since they removed it from beta. Before that, I can only remember one large-scale outage over the previous few years.
All those articles warning against having all your data in the cloud are coming to mind. On the bright side, without email, there's temporarily one less distraction to worry about. http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html
But if you stored it locally you would still have downtime. Downtime (problems) are inevitable. It's just that only you would notice, so it might not get on the news.
I doubt the actual uptime would be that different for any one person.
The difference is that you can know what's wrong and fix it (assuming you're able). Also, over the past 2+ years, my mail server has had less downtime than GMail, and any outages were easy for me to diagnose and fix. I like feeling in control over critical pieces of my business (at least as much as possible - I'm in no position to build my own DC for instance).
I know google hires some people who are better than me, but that doesn't mean the gmail system is better than something I could engineer.... For one thing, google needs to have a much lower cost per user than I do, forcing them to make some choices that I don't have to. I have no problem paying $50 a month for email service, and that level of cost per user would be untenable on a free email service.
(I host most of my email myself, and I'm trading a free co-lo to mark perkel of junkemailfilter.com to do my filtering. between that and my time, I'd guess $50/month)
iGoogle has the chat feature enabled by default, IIRC. You can shut it off via Options (at the bottom of the widget) > Hide (I think, this is off the top of my head).
Strange, I just did a search for movie show times in my area earlier and just now, and it seems that some cinemas are missing.
The timing lines up exactly with the gmail outage.
Since those theaters have always been listed in the movie showtime search as long as I can remember, this could be part of a larger service outage. What else is down that they aren't telling us?
Works via iGoogle for me as well, and I've received a couple e-mails from GMail users from their iPhones. So presumably it's just the web front-end that's busted.
they do fail, often, in fact, but the difference is that its a decentralized system and several towers being down isn't a big deal, its just a normal day. They contract with many carriers to carry data and often a single cell site is multihosted so any one carrier switches to another provider, who now has them over a barrel so charges them more. Cell tower failures affect the mobile carriers profits, and not necessarily the users service.
