Mahmoudoh no, all the lifehacks stored therein!
Yahoo is pulling the plug on 8-year old Yahoo Pipes , the service that creates custom web feeds through powerful filters. Pipes will run until September 30th in read-only mode but you should probably download your Pipe definitions as soon as possible. Check the announcement here.
China’s growing crowd of moviegoers and their interest in Hollywood has recently given many high-budget films a chance to recoup losses after they bombed in America and Europe. The phenomenon has become a sort of insurance policy for filmmakers, who use the Chinese market as a backup plan. In the past it has saved movies like Bait and The Expendables 3. Chinese netizens chalked up the success of bad movies in China to the extremely low quality of many Chinese-made movies, saying “They could be much worse and still be better than China’s awful movies.” and “The people are stupid and have a lot of money, come quickly.”
Source: Netease
"Foreign Media Claims China “Fertile Ground” for Bad Hollywood Movies"
Originally posted on chinaSMACK - Hot internet stories, pictures, & videos in China
Mahmoudreproductive capabilities retained throughout
Degenerative Cubism afflicts 12% of Spanish cattle. If the disease were ever to become airborne, it’s estimated that all beef cattle in the country would be little more than a few lines leaving the impression of cattle within one month.
A realism vaccine was developed in 1994 but has occasional surrealist side effects, turning 2% of cattle injected into two arguing mimes and a waffle.
Mahmoudfuck
It's called Skunk, a type of "malodorant," or in plainer language, a foul-smelling liquid. Technically nontoxic but incredibly disgusting, it has been described as a cross between "dead animal and human excrement." Untreated, the smell lingers for weeks.The Israeli Defense Forces developed Skunk in 2008 as a crowd-control weapon for use against Palestinians. Now Mistral, a company out of Bethesda, Md., says they are providing it to police departments in the United States. [...]
The Israelis first used it in 2008 to disperse Palestinians protesting in the West Bank. A BBC video shows its first use in action, sprayed by a hose, a system that has come to be known as the "crap cannon."
Mistral reps say Skunk, once deployed, can be "neutralized" with a special soap -- and only with that soap. In another BBC video, an IDF spokesman describes how any attempt to wash it via regular means only exacerbates its effects. Six weeks after IDF forces used it against Palestinians at a security barrier, it still lingered in the air.
MahmoudJessica Alba is a shoo-in for Alibaba spokesperson. Frankly if the price is right she should just go whole-hog and add a few letters to her last name.
China’s biggest online retailer Alibaba called together the first “Global Women Entrepreneurs Conference” in Hangzhou. 1000 women from all kinds of professions were invited to attend, with special guests including Hollywood star Jessica Alba and Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post. Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma believes: “Before Internet, male entrepreneurs had more opportunities, there wasn’t as much that women could do. In the era of Internet and the Experience Economy, where user experience, emotions and communication are emphasized, the work happens to be very suitable to the special talents of women.
Source: Qdaily
"Online Giant Alibaba Holds Global Women Entrepreneurs Meeting"
Originally posted on chinaSMACK - Hot internet stories, pictures, & videos in China
Mahmoudtsktsktsk, too many chinese netizens let the western media get to them
When Zhang Xinyu wore a traditional Northeastern Chinese cotton dress to the Cannes film festival, it caused a huge stir online, with many criticizing the dress and lambasting its designer. Hu Sheguang, the designer of the dress, said “It’s cheap to make, and doesn’t take much time. If a dress can stir up the world like this, is that fashion? I think that’s exactly what fashion is.” Some netizens had other opinions, with the top voted commenter saying “It’s not that Chinese people think it’s plain, it is plain. The people who wear it are plain, and the dress is plain.
Source: Netease
"Zhang Xinyu Wears Traditional Cotton Northeastern Dress to Cannes"
Originally posted on chinaSMACK - Hot internet stories, pictures, & videos in China
Mahmoudjoin the katamary
by @__jvasallo__
Chinese cloud hosting company Aliyun is growing faster than ever, with more than 8,000 more web-facing computers found in the May 2015 survey than in April's. This growth has launched Aliyun's parent company, Alibaba Group, into position as the 4th largest hosting company in the world, as well as the largest in China.
This reflects a positive change in Aliyun's fortunes, whose earlier impressive growth had started to stagnate towards the end of 2013. However, growth later resumed in earnest, coinciding with Aliyun's partnership with rival cloud computing company Inspur in July 2014. The growth has continued ever since, with the largest absolute growth being seen between April 2015 and May 2015.
Aliyun now accounts for 38% of the web-facing computers hosted by Alibaba Group, while 44% are operated by HiChina, which was acquired by Alibaba in 2009. If the latest growth trends continue, Aliyun will soon account for the majority of web-facing computers at Alibaba.
All of the web-facing computers at Aliyun are located in China, which offers significant advantages for the local market. Hosting a website close to its end-users generally results in faster page loads, but increased reliability is the most crucial factor in this case. Connectivity between China and other countries is often slow, unstable or even blocked, making China the most practical location for hosting websites aimed at local consumers.
However, this also means that Aliyun would be a troublesome choice for any company that has a significant user base outside of China. This is exemplified by the following graph, which shows the performance and reliability of www.aliyun.com when accessed from the Netherlands:
This connectivity problem has so far proven to be insurmountable, and is likely to be a showstopper for most companies with customers outside of China. Unfortunately, this problem only seems to be getting worse: Nearly half of the requests made from the Netherlands over the past 20 days failed, whereas only 4% failed during a similar 20-day period in 2013.
Globally, Amazon continues to dominate the hosting arena with nearly three times as many web-facing computers as Alibaba Group. DigitalOcean recently usurped OVH Net to become the second largest hosting company. Amazon, DigitalOcean and Aliyun are all similar in that they provide relatively low-cost virtual servers, but Aliyun's growth is likely restricted by the impracticalities of using it to serve content outside of China.
Considering this rather significant restriction, it is impressive that Aliyun's current growth rate is almost on par with DigitalOcean's (in fact, Alibaba Group as a whole exceeded DigitalOcean's absolute growth in May 2015). This growth perhaps demonstrates the scale of the Chinese market, and if it were practical to use Aliyun to host websites for a global audience, Aliyun could well give Amazon a run for its money.
Amazon and DigitalOcean are likely to remain ahead for a fair while, particularly as they both provide a variety of hosting locations in several different countries. This gives customers flexibility over where a website can be hosted, providing not just performance benefits, but also regulatory ones — for example, German data protection laws limits where companies can store personal data, in particular making it unappealing to do so outside of Germany or the EU.
Amazon is perhaps still best known for its retail operations, but recently surprised some analysts by announcing that its Amazon Web Services segment is profitable. This segment generated sales of $1.57bn in the first quarter of 2015, and operating income of $265m, demonstrating that it can now operate without having to fall back on Amazon's other revenue streams.
Aliyun operates under a similar safety net, with its parent, Alibaba Group, having significant revenue from other business areas, including business-to-business trading via alibaba.com and an eBay-like consumer-to-consumer marketplace on taobao.com. Both Aliyun and Amazon Web Services have had opportunities to grow in this relatively risk-free environment, where – if necessary – they can be supported by the parent group's other business areas.
With this safety net in place, Aliyun is well placed to continue its growth within China, and could even contemplate adding datacenters abroad. Notably, its ability to invest in new datacenters is not likely to be a problem: Alibaba Group (NYSE:BABA) has a higher market capitalisation than Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).
Aliyun has already tried to attract foreign customers by offering support and site content in English, and aliyun.com also mentions that it is "preparing to support more languages to improve user experience". New customers must provide their phone number when creating an Aliyun account, which is verified by text message in the 23 supported countries. Customers in other countries can also register an Aliyun account by following a slower offline registration process.
However, any plans for global expansion could be scuppered unless Aliyun can solve the connectivity issues and also match the low prices offered by DigitalOcean, where the cheapest virtual machine costs only $5/month, including up to 1TB of data transfer. A somewhat-similar Elastic Compute Service instance at Aliyun (1-core, 512MB memory, 20GB storage, bandwidth limited to 3Mbps) costs ¥109/month, making it more than three times as expensive. This instance costs only ¥38/month if the customer chooses Aliyun's pay-as-you-go option for bandwidth (which would cope better with bursts of traffic), but this could work out far more expensive for heavy users — at ¥0.80 per GB of outbound public network traffic, 1TB of traffic would cost over $120 at Aliyun, whereas it is included in the price of DigitalOcean's $5 droplet.
Mahmoudtruuuue
Mahmoud2 joie 2 vivre
Mahmoudthis is crazy. at first i thought oh ok the price is part of a statement and prolly won't sell, but at least one sold for $90,000.
Mahmoudyeah it's a fun road to stroll down
MahmoudI just noticed the first dude to fall has a cast on. Somehow I've got a funny feeling this is a couple to watch!
Mahmoudhaaaa gottim (got tim)
A China Central Television (CCTV) reporter seized an opportunity during the network’s first exclusive interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook to mock the battery life of its trademark watch. Cook, boasting that he only sleeps four hours a night due to his hard work ethic, was met with the suggestion that according to that logic he would need two Apple Watches, being that they only have an 18 hour battery life. A stumped Cook said that his watch’s battery was ample to his needs. Many Chinese Netizens were riled by the reporter’s conduct.
Source: Netease
"Chinese Reporter Mocks Apple CEO Cook Over Watch Battery Life"
Originally posted on chinaSMACK - Hot internet stories, pictures, & videos in China
Mahmoudi rewatch these at least once a month. i should get some done for me.
Mahmoudawwwww yes another magic man ep
I’m posting this way early because I made it just now and I’m too excited to wait. The week of June 1 will premier new eps of Adventure Time every night, ending with the 2 part season FINNALE on Friday. The week starts off with this ep that I seeded the idea of and boarded solo.
I figure it’ll be best if I don’t talk about what’s up with this episode, so I made this drawing with a lot of stuff to chew on.
SOME RANDOM POST EPISODE NOTES:
– The pool scene was inspired by the guest house/pool area of the place I stayed at when I first moved to Los Angeles. I stayed with the extended family of my brother’s (Justin) then girlfriend. That’s the actual pool in that promo picture with Magic Man. They let me stay there for 2 months or so which was really nice. Especially because they have a pool and a jacuzzi! Anyway, I had this idea about looking over the fence into your neighbor’s yard. I could maybe connect it to the feeling of Tim Allen’s neighbor in Home Improvement. I know that’s in there somewhere. The mystery of this guy who only lets you see his hat. That always stuck with me, even though that show was complete shit. It was like, this one magic thing in that super shitty show.
So I had this feeling about looking into your neighbor’s yard. I imagined looking into the yard of the family’s guest house I was staying in: Looking over the fence at night and seeing a black pool of water. That was the place where, if you’re brave and crafty enough, you can draw out some serious power, or you can be destroyed. It’s also that feeling of swimming in a lake at night and being afraid of what you can’t see swimming around in there with you.
– I remember saying somewhere that I would never explain what happened to Magic Man on Olympus Mons, and that maybe Ako and I had already explained too much in Sons of Mars. Tom Herpich and I talked about it on several occasions. That was definitely his feeling at the time, and after watching Sons of Mars, I agreed with him. Unfortunately, one of my personality traits seems to be that the more I say I’ll never do something, the more I think about how I could do it. I think that’s why I wanted to bring back Xergiok and Tiffany despite Pen thinking they were both crappy characters. So me saying, “I’ll never go into Magic Man’s backstory,” was REALLY me saying, “I will DEFINITELY figure out a way to tell Magic Man’s backstory!” The process of coming up with it had a lot to do with waiting and seeing how all the other episodes and character arcs were playing out, and how Magic Man’s story could fit in there.
It’s interesting to me how Adventure Time’s character arcs happen on their own time, rather than in a direct, continuous line. I think this is because all the pieces are falling all over the place, and you have to wait and see how they land. Then you gage where your ideas maybe fit in that landscape. It can take a long time to get an idea through at the moment where it’ll work harmoniously with everything else that’s going on. The philosophy of Adventure Time I feel, is that life is moving along without a “story”. Life is just life. The story part is the pieces that viewers put together. I don’t know if that’s a perfect description but maybe it’s a loose template for how our story threads work. My views do not reflect everyone else’s on the production obviously.
Mahmoudthe inescapable safety net
Prepare to flinch. This ‘Rent-a-Foreigner’ 7-minute opinion-documentary from the New York Times may seem unbelievable, but as someone once said: April Fool’s Day is really hard in China because so much is so plausible. And I’m telling you as someone who’s lived in 2nd and 3rd-tier Chinese cities for six years: they aren’t making this stuff up.
Mainland Chinese have this incredible capacity, on occasion, to tell it straight, to just name a thing or situation for what it is:
The real value of a house or any product doesn’t really matter. As long as there is a good image, people will be willing to buy. For the time being, the image has become the reality.
It’s painful, but oddly refreshing — like picking off a big scab that you should have left alone when you were in elementary school.
I can’t embed the video so you’ll have to click here. My favourite bits are the dialogue with a potential client at 1:53:
“We have high-, middle- and low-grade ones. Now it is true that the price of white people is expensive, but it makes the place feel classier. If you truly can’t squeeze out the funds but still want to project an international atmosphere, I suggest using black people. They have a very open personality, yet are quite cheap.”
“Do you have any Indians?”
“We would need to look for them… we use them very rarely.”
“If we use them would they be cheaper?”
“About the same as blacks.”
And then the woman’s glance at 6:14 — I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
You might wonder: Who are these white boy expats doing these “jobs”? The expat scene is China is kind of… special, especially among the “English teacher” crowd. I’m not saying all English teachers are… a certain way… but I’ve certainly met a few who fit the stereotype.
And sometimes, the line between being an “English teacher” and being a “rent-a-foreigner” is very difficult to find.
In the same vein is Mamahuhu’s Being Black in China (Youku / YouTube):
VICE News has a similar report in the works: Rent a White Guy: Sneak Peek
Aside from English teaching and some random charity stuff, this is the closest I’ve come to renting out my white face in China:
For us these days, most of the overt racial attention we get revolves around our kids:
Mahmoudwhoa, new gazorra edit!!! pretty sure this is a louie reference or something
Mahmoudwhich movie/show had this premise
A businessman from Dalian who was called upon by police every time he checked into a hotel, has received an apology. Mr Li’s troubles began after a namesake was arrested for drug dealing, and an officer made an error with the offender’s details. Despite the offender being in jail, each time Mr Li took a room and gave his details, police were alerted who promptly arrived to arrest him. On producing his ID, officers realized his date of birth was different to his incarcerated namesake’s. The error has since been rectified and Mr Li has been apologized to, but he just wants his reputation restored.
Source: Netease
"Businessman Arrested Wherever He Went Receives Apology"
Originally posted on chinaSMACK - Hot internet stories, pictures, & videos in China
Mahmouddid i mention youtube didn't get rid of RSS, but made it better? also there is a band called BIG DATA with a new album 2.0, very timely, very topical, very.. you know, ok.
Mahmoudthat's kind of an intense crossover...
