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Google Programming Contest Winner
asqui writes "The First Annual Google Programming Contest, announced about 4 months ago has ended. The winner is Daniel Egnor, a former Microsoft employee. His project converted addresses found in documents to latitude-longitude coordinates and built a two-dimensional index of these coordinates, thereby allowing you to limit your query to a certain radius from a geographical location. Good for difficult questions like "Where is the nearest all-night pizza place that will deliver at this hour?". Unfortunately there is no mention whether this technology is on its way to the google labs yet. There are also details of 5 other excellent project submissions that didn't quite make it."
Interesting write up -- of course Apple had a relativley robust OS that would only crash three or four times a day and would eat itself regularly.
DOS was ugly. It worked and was reliable. It was even much faster than the MAC dreamed of being.
Bill G. didn't write it. He bought it. He grew it from what it started from to the #1 OS in the world for a long time.
Of course, Steve didn't think up the idea behind the original MAC GUI on his own either. He borrowed it from Xerox (note: borrowed it, not illegal but also not licensed, purchased or in any other way paying homage to the creators).
Or you could go to Yahoo! Yellow Pages and search for pizza places sorted by proximity to your house. I do it all the time with all sorts of locations.
For more information, click here.
Don't know where you live, but Pizza Pizza allows you to go to their site and order pizza online (after you register) for some regions, most notably Toronto. Unfortunately their app is some POS Oracle thing that takes forever to do even the slightest thing like adding a topping (good 10-30 seconds between clicking a button and seeing the order frame change - with my cable connect and decent comp (733 w/ 384 megs), so it can take 10 minutes or longer for a complex order, plus delivery.
BTW, this isn't O/T in the context of this thread.
My other sig is funny!