As a westerner in beijing, i think everyone is affected the same by air pollution, though the difference is the "choice" of being here vs. not.
You can see first hand the difference between the Beijing sky and that in Boston. http://sdrv.ms/10T8oof
I feel more depressed in the summer time when the air pollution is high. In the summer, the pollution feels smothering and then the oppressive heat of the city can be overwhelming.
Beijing summer high AQI is nowhere near winter high AQI! Summer, you have rain, wind, and all the nice stuff that blows out the pollution. Summers in Beijing just feel bad because its hot and muggy + some pollution mixed in.
We are all affected the same sure enough, but our* expectations might be higher since back home we think "90" is high, when in Beijing that is almost a clean air day. The rest of north and central China is pretty much the same, while the southerners and definitely the westerners (like, west of LanZhou) will complain about the AQI in Beijing just as much as the foreigners do.
* There are many countries with problems as bad or worse than China. If you come from one of those countries, then Beijing might not seem so bad.
Agreed, about the pollution levels. My personal view is that the summer is far more depressing (heat, muggy, pollution) then the air in the winter. After 3 years in beijing, most Beijing people talk about the pollution far less, than housing prices, getting a Beijing hukou...
I am not sure i would consider this good news and if the past 50 years are any indication, China is not going to take action based on the will of the outside world
As i arrived in beijing today, i looked out the window and saw the sky completely gray. Having spend two years in Beijing, this site is not uncommon. I remember in the summer of 2010 some days the air was so thick you could not see a half mile.
But today, the air is really bad and even in my apartment now, i can smell it. The best i can describe the smell is that of a campfire.
EDIT -> A campfire that someone threw a plastic bottle into.
I have to wonder about the testing results that were obtained. Testing the improvements of optimizations need to be done carefully; you need to make sure capture sufficient data to draw conclusions.
#1 -> You need to capture enough data samples for each location and browser
#2 -> You need to capture data from a set of global locations
#3 -> You need to capture data from the commonly used web browsers.
You can see a test run from a single location and browser using one sample (2.873) second for the time to interact.
There is a big difference between the one location and the multiple locations with 5 samples. Looking at just Washington with 5 samples; the time to interact is (4.1) seconds.
(Disclosure, I work at yottaa.com the provider of websitetest.com) For those people looking to verify optimizations are working (automated or hand-tuned) you should use websitetest.com to simplify the testing process. It makes running tests (multiple locations, multiple browsers, multiple connectivities) possible with one click and test results make it easy to draw conclusions.
--- All test data for the information in the comment is available through these links
An old bad idea -> Many years ago i thought up an idea of creating a FEC - A self contained unit that would convert heat from a forest fires, etc... into energy. The units would be taken by helicopter and dropped into forest fires. Once the fire was over move the units into a grid that could supply energy to millions of homes.
I'm sorry but that does not sound feasible. Large scale forest fires are accidents and not energy generation stations. The logistics would be prohibitive and absent any forest fires (usually considered a good thing) you'd be babysitting a pile of rust. Also, the heat produced by a forest fire would handily destroy your equipment.
Forest fires at scale tend to be pretty much unmanageable, people are more than happy just to put them out without having to think about extracting energy from them.
10 points for out of the box thinking, minus several for a lack of feasibility. But keep at it, maybe one day you'll hit the jackpot!
My own crazy green energy idea is . . . harvest energy from lightning! Apparently other people have thought of this too, and it doesn't look like it'd work. But if someone could figure it out, it might not be the most steady source of energy, but it'd be the awesomest.
There is one thing that twitter and facebook have that no one else in the history of... well... anything i can think of.
> They have an unlimited product placement budget.
Every TV Show, News program, Commercial, Website, Company... places the "Go to facebook.com/ford" or "tweet us @nbcnews".
This results in billions of dollars of advertising and they need to pay nothing. This helped build both twitter and facebook. Google should figure out how to get this for Google Plus. Once they do they can expand as quickly as twitter and facebook.
A good comment but I think you have it backward. When NBC puts "tweet this story" in the HTML frame that isn't advertising for twitter per se, that is NBC hoping that you will give NBC free advertising by spreading awareness of a story around the web. When the Tahoe ski resorts say "Take Interstate 80 to Truckee" they aren't advertising I80, but they are causing a lot of traffic to be generated, and that traffic is going to cause road damage that needs repair.
This is what I mean by "figuring out their (Twitter's) value."
Imagine that their API is really a bunch of method calls into the Twitter 'object'. They could, as an example, make their simple API 'free' and as you tried to do more complex things charge for those things. Presumably they would structure it so that folks could make 'useful' twitter clients for free, but they would have to pay some price for making more full featured clients.
Of course the challenge there is that you can't really charge for features that can be built out of the free protocol stubs, because people will just scrape those free ones and get around your code.
Why did MySpace fail? Users are known to be sticky - they tend to stay with the same newspaper, brand of chocolate, chewing gum, household cleaning products and so on. But they are only sticky up to a point. If something is better by a sufficiently significant margin, then they will switch (or some will). You can keep those customers just by just matching your competitor's improvements. For many things, the pace of change is reasonably slow. Also, many people just like that specific taste (even if they don't think it tastes as nice - like Coke and New Coke). There is some change (e.g. sugar-free gum), but it's easy for the leaders to keep pace. Perhaps in some cases, the scope for possible improvement is less than the margin needed for users to switch - so you ever fail.
MySpace had that huge advantage of many sticky users, but they stopped improving it, and a competitor (Facebook) made an improved experience.
Twitter is safe for as long as there isn't a sufficiently better competitor - "better" being in terms of the benefit to users, not any engineering quality in itself.
MySpace grew from music. Every single band was MySpace—all of them. This is what they leveraged to go from Friendster-level early adopter popularity, to mainstream youth popularity. This was huge, but they never got past this because MySpace always felt like an Internet underbelly sight. For the same reason that 50 years ago, grownups did not spend hours gabbing away on the telephone like teenagers, MySpace could never make inroads into the 25+ market segments.
Facebook rolled through phase 1 by being exclusive, then phase 2 by first saturating college students, then they exploded beyond what any social network had ever known by offering a clean, curated and controllable experience that steadily roped in older people by being the place to stay in touch with younger friends and family.
I always laugh when people trot out MySpace as a cautionary tale for Facebook, because it's irrelevant. MySpace was the 500lb gorilla in 2004, but Facebook is the only 5000lb gorilla that ever existed. Whatever bring them down won't be for the same reasons that MySpace failed.
People joined Facebook because they could connect to all their old schoolmates on Facebook. And this was because they started out as a school network. Myspace would have failed even if they kept improving it, if that one feature was missing.
But aren't those "free ads" a result of their large userbase, not a cause? I think FB and Twitter were already very big and influential before those started popping up.
Facebook definitely had a large user base, but twitter was still relatively small. Also for the mass market, you need advertising and reinforcement of the product. The free product placement through traditional media has given both facebook and twitter that for free.
This may all be true but Microsoft has something that neither Google or Apple has... that is skype. Once skype is integrated fully into Windows Phone; it will be the best communication device off all of them. Skype is the communication tool of businesses. Once skype in rolled into the basic functionality in the same way as: MSN messager, facebook and text messaging, it will be dropdead simple to make a skype call or message with someone as if you are text. Microsoft will steal the market share from Blackberry and the other mobile phones for business and then expand from there.
I am currently using the Windows Phone 7 (Mango) and this is built into the phone and it works awesome. If they can do it for other phones it will be useful.
inequality is freedom. equality is not! So... if you believe in a free society and open markets then inequality is neither good or bad, it is what happens.
I'm not convinced that inequality is freedom, or that equality prevents freedom. Can you explain what you mean by freedom?
Imagine that a group of people, a nomadic tribe perhaps, wanted the freedom to live in a non-hierarchical society. If someone imposed inequality--that the best hunter/gatherer in the group should receive a "fair" share of resources--that would be restricting the freedom of the people, would it not?
You can see first hand the difference between the Beijing sky and that in Boston. http://sdrv.ms/10T8oof
I feel more depressed in the summer time when the air pollution is high. In the summer, the pollution feels smothering and then the oppressive heat of the city can be overwhelming.
In the winter Beijing somedays just feels smokey.