I came across this problem when looking to install Google Apps on a domain. It gives me this problem on both of my computers as well as some VMs I have. I don’t know why I’m having this problem–I don’t know a single thing in Chinese and have never selected that for a language.
I wanted information on what they would provide for a non-profit, but this affects the links to pages for schools and ISPs also. A Google search took me to the landing page at http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html . When I scroll down to the bottom and click on “schools,” “non-profits,” or “ISPs,” I get taken to a Chinese page. When I click on the language drop-down and select “English,” I get taken back to the Google Apps landing page, not the pages with information for schools, non-profits, or ISPs. I got around this by just doing a Google search instead and avoiding the Google Apps landing page. This isn’t a mission-critical problem, but definitely an annoyance. Here are some screenshots:
I came across an interesting article on Data Center Knowledge. It compiled a few statistics about Facebook usage. Here’s a quick overview:
Total users: 140 million
New users: over 600,000 per day
Users outside the US: 70%
User profiles updated: 13 million per day
Average friends: 100 per user
Photos hosted: 10 billion
Photos added: 700 million per month
Videos added: 4 million per month
Active user groups: 19 million
I showed these stats to my wife, who said “wow, that’s a lot of time wasted.” The Facebook statistics page says that 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day. Calculated out, this amounts to a collective 4,947 human years being wasted every day on Facebook. If we assume it takes one minute to update your Facebook status, that amounts to almost 25 human years being wasted each day just to announce that you’re “watching tv” or “staying inside tonight” (those are the statuses displayed at the top of my Facebook news feed right now).
I just tried the new Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin. My experience so far has been flawless. I shut off Pidgin, ran the Windows Installer and started Pidgin back up. Then I created an account in Pidgin’s “manage accounts” area. I didn’t have any trouble at all. So far, it’s worked 100%. I really like how it doesn’t show me my friends’ screennames, but just shows me their full (First, last, sometimes middle) name. It’s extremely clean. Now I don’t need to log in to Facebook to talk with certain friends, and I get to use the Pidgin interface that I love.
Note: My friend’s virusscanner picked up the installer as a virus. I used Symantec, with the latest virus definitions (October 28, 2008 rev 4) to scan the install and it didn’t detect anything wrong.
