[This post is dedicated to Vivek who gave me permission to blog this (it was his discovery) under the condition that I send some PageRank to his photoblog]
GMail has been sporting a counter on its homepage since April 1st, counting upwards from 2 GB. I saw blogposts calculating that counter to hit 3GB on Jan 1st 2006. But the interesting part is - that the counter is hardcoded to hit certain sizes by certain dates (take a bow,Vivek).
The hardcoded values changed very frequently (every few hours is what Vivek reported). So to see what the counter is programmed to hit,follow these steps.
1. Go to the Gmail homepage and view the source code.
2. Find something similar to this
var CP = [
[ 1112439600000, 2050 ],
[ 1114308000000, 2125 ]
]
You'll almost definitely have different numbers and/or different number of elements. The 2xxx number on the right is the size and the long number on the left is the time at which the counter is supposed to hit that size (in milliseconds).
3. Type this into the address bar of your favourite browser
javascript:alert((new Date(1114308000000)).toString());
replacing the long number by the one you saw inside the CP array.
You should see a popup telling you a date. In my case, due to my clairvoyant Javascript powers, I now know that GMail will have 2125 MB of space on April 24th.
Who says predicting the future is Nostradamus' monopoly?