At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter ‘a’ for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters ‘a,’ ‘e,’ ‘i,’ ‘o,’ and ‘u.’ As a result, we’re experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage. (We’re still investigating whether the letter ‘y’ is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)

Over the last hour we’ve received numerous reports of this issue via our help forums, from colleagues at Google, and via email you’ve sent us. Some of you have already found creative workarounds for communicating without vowels, like Aaron, who sent us this:

Having 80.8% of the alphabet available is significantly below the 99.9% full letter uptime reliability we strive for. Since identifying the root case of this issue, we’ve started bringing vowels back to Gmail, so you should see them back in your account within the next few hours if you don’t already. In the meantime, while you may still see this issue in Gmail’s web interface, both IMAP and POP access are functioning normally. We’ll post an update as soon as things are fully resolved and, again, we’re v3ry s0rry.

Update (7:30 am): We’ve determined that the letter ‘y’ is not impacted.

Source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/

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New Invention from Google following are content from Google.

Making the world’s information universally accessible is a key goal for Google. Language is one of our biggest challenges so we have targeted our efforts on removing language barriers between the species. We are excited to introduce Translate for Animals, an Android application which we hope will allow us to better understand our animal friends. We’ve always been a pet-friendly company at Google, and we hope that Translate for Animals encourages greater interaction and understanding between animal and human.

Translate for Animals is an application for Android phones that recognises and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example. To develop Translate for Animals, we worked closely with many of the world’s top language synthesis teams, and with leaders in the field of animal cognitive linguistics, including senior fellows at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Read more Fact http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/ Enjoy the post and please comment