Inside Google's London Complex

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has some interesting pictures of Google's new London office which is incidentally looking to boost its 200-man headcount. Also, a Doodle 4 Google contest was held in conjunction with the office opening for schoolchildren."

Datacenter pictures

[this great guy]

We have often read about Google's datacenters on /. but AFAIK we have never seen any picture of their datacenters. So if somebody has something to say/show about this (even insiders :P), please reply to this post.

Great doodles

[Lewisham]

I love these doodles! Google should have a user-submitted doodle every day; spice it up a bit.

Maybe there's a Greasemonkey script here...

Re:200-man headcount?

[Anonymous Coward]

would you be upset if it said 200 woman headcount (but of course that would include men as well) ?

Yes, because it would be far from normal english.

From the dictionary.com's usage notes about man:

Traditionally, many writers have used man and words derived from it to designate any or all of the human race regardless of sex. In fact, this is the oldest use of the word. In Old English the principal sense of man was a human, and the words wer and wyf (or wæpman and wifman) were used to refer to a male human and a female human respectively. But in Middle English man displaced wer as the term for a male human, while wyfman (which evolved into present-day woman) was retained for a female human. Despite this change, man continued to carry its original sense of a human as well, resulting in an asymmetrical arrangement that many criticize as sexist. Nonetheless, a majority of the Usage Panel still accepts the generic use of man, although the women members have significantly less enthusiasm for this usage than the men do. For example, the sentence "If early man suffered from a lack of information, modern man is tyrannized by an excess of it" is acceptable to 81 percent of the Panel but a breakdown by sex shows that only 58 percent of the women Panelists accept it, while 92 percent of the men do.

While women are less accepting of the general use, at least according to that information, a majority still is.

Re:PICS - MIRROR

[Jugalator]

http://www.eightyford.com/google/02-googleplex.jpg [eightyford.com]

What the... Oh right, this is England. :-s
Anyway, where's the male kids?

http://www.eightyford.com/google/06-googleplex.jpg [eightyford.com]

Cute, the trademark sign in a heart!
I'm sure they'll grow up to become good business(wo)men. :-)

Re:200-man headcount?

[essence]

I do focus on lots of real issues. I'm not a slashbot. It took me 2 minutes to write that comment, in the hope that it would make some people think. Sure, most people are used to using man to mean both men and women, including allot of women. But writing person instead of man does make it more accessible to women (and men) who might be offended or alienated. It's not that hard to change the little things like that. I find it interesting that so many people get upset that i pointed it out.

and no, i wouldn't want to make it a crime to disagree. Creating laws for this sort of thing doesn't work. People don't like being forced to do things. The only solution is discussion and action by people, not the state.

Aghh

[t_allardyce]

Why do all modern buildings have to look so cheap? That's nearly as bad as a 60's concrete monstrosity.

Re:All the children drew "tm"

[badevlad]

In Soviet Russia the TM sign was not used. We began to use it when USSR was broken. May be because of this the Soviet Union was broken?..

Re:Datacenter pictures

[Anonymous Coward]

The video from this link has amazing info and pictures of the datacenters.
http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid= 2459 [uwtv.org]

Re:200-man headcount?

[Moses_Gunn]

Feeding a troll here, but this irks me. I haven't researched this DEEPLY, so I may be wrong, but this is my understanding of the issue. Most languages (including those that I have studied: German, Spanish, and Arabic) have gendered nouns. For instance, in German the word for "the" is der, die, or das for masculine, feminine, and neuter respectively. Somewhere along the line, English lost this feature, and nouns no longer have gender. However, originally, the word "man", in the context of referring to "mankind" was of NEUTRAL gender. Thus, not only is today's use of the word "man" to mean "people" NOT sexist, but is actually gender correct.

Read more here under the "Etymology" section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man [wikipedia.org]

Not to mention the fact that it doesn't sound STUPID like "200-person". ;)