Also don't underestimate the value of having control over your data, you do not want to be reliant on some random person/company being up, not go bankrupt, or change its terms and conditions on you.
On the Ts & Cs, you have a point, but for the rest of it, I ran my own mail server for years. My uptime never came close to matching gmail, and I'm far more likely to go bankrupt than Google or Amazon. Gmail's spam filtering is better than anything I ever achieved, too.
Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are. They'll be better-equipped to deal with it than we are -- and it's a much easier problem for them to solve than a planetary climate that has been pushed to extremes.
Yeah, it'd be nice if solar, wind and wave energy could address all of our needs, but at present they can't provide the baseload coverage needed to eliminate coal and oil burning.
The reason Facebook has any advertising income, and therefore value as a company, is that the people purchasing FB advertisements believe it has the ability to provide very directed advertising.
Actually, online advertisers know exactly how effective the directed advertising is. Unlike traditional advertising, where the old saw goes "I know 50% of my advertising budget is working, I just don't know which 50%", online ads can very often be linked precisely to specific sales. This is actually the biggest factor in Google's success as an advertiser; good targeting was important, too, but the real breakthrough was being able to help advertisers quantify very precisely what return they were getting on their advertising spend.
If you like programming, that's fine, but don't expect to be able to stay in it for more than 15 or so years. Have a Plan B.
Your experience is completely at odds with mine. I'm 45 and have been a professional programmer since I was 18 (I started writing code at about 12). I work with many guys who are in their 50s and 60s... they're excellent engineers, and compensated very well for their experience and knowledge.
Granted that I work with the upper tier of professional programmers, but it is far from impossible to have a long, satisfying and financially rewarding career writing code. You have to love it, you have to be good at it (which is pretty closely correlated with loving it), and you have to have the talent, intellect and education (which needn't be formal, but formal CS education is generally best).
In the job market right now, if you're good it doesn't matter how old you are, or in many cases even what you smell like, the industry is absolutely desperate for talent.
It's a lot more than that. Coding is very different from the sort of process thinking you use to build processes executed by people, because computers are completely incapable of filling in any gaps or exercising any initiative. If you build company processes the way you write code, they'll be very ineffective, and if you write code the way you build company processes, your code will rarely work.
In addition, outside of code that defines business rules, coding involves huge numbers of details and abstractions of those details which are different from anything we encounter in the "real" world.
Getting people to code early as a core skill, rather than as a specialism, would have knock-on effects in all organisations employing more than a few dozen people.
If that were true, then former programmers would make outstanding managers and executives. I do know some software engineers who are outstanding managers or executives, and I know plenty who were great coders but lousy at management and leadership. Further, in my experience the correlation between coding effectiveness and managerial effectiveness is negative, though close to zero.
if you are going to sell diagnostic services in the USA then you will need to get FDA approval
I don't think so. I don't think there's any requirement that people have FDA approval in order to issue opinions on medical issues. You have to be an MD to call yourself a doctor, but if you just want to tell people stuff and aren't claiming to be a doctor and aren't doing any sort of medical procedures on them, go nuts. Likewise, if you're producing medical devices or performing medical tests (like 23andme), then you need approval but if you're not, do what you like.
I know here in Australia where we burn brown bloody coal an electric car produces more emissions than a V6.
Are you sure? Coal is dirty, yes, but big coal generation plants can and do make it much cleaner than you might expect. The nature of a big facility makes it possible to ensure a very complete burn, and many coal plants also scrub the output. In addition, large power plants are much more efficient at extracting the energy than a small ICE, which also helps them with the emissions/work ratio. Whether or not what you say is true depends less on the type of coal and more on the type and configuration of the power plant.
The actual spying isn't the biggest issue I have with the NSA (and GCHQ and ASIO and the others), the biggest issue is the way that these agencies are doing things that deliberately weaken computer security in the name of making it easier to spy on people
+1. This particular aspect of the Snowden revelations shocked and staggered me.
The NSA has always had two missions around signals intelligence (1) spy on the rest of the world and (2) make sure the rest of the world can't spy on us. And that second mission covered all communications important to national security, not just government comms. A few years ago I build an important commercial system that protected stuff related to credit card payments, and I had NSA oversight for the whole project because they (rightly) consider the payment infrastructure to be important to national security. And the NSA guys were clearly working to ensure that the system was highly secure; they never once suggested anything that would in any way compromise it, and they had some valuable insights about how to make it better. Over the years the NSA has done a lot to contribute to the security of important commercial security infrastructure -- because it's their job.
So, what the Snowden revelations made clear is that the NSA has decided mission 2 takes a back seat to mission 1, and in fact that mission 2 is so unimportant that they're actively working to undermine it.
heck Yahoo and Bing still don't use SSL for search
Out of curiosity I just went and tried it. Not only do they not use SSL by default, but you can't use SSL at all for searches on either site. Yahoo will serve the home page via HTTPS, but trying to search from it gives you first a big error message from your browser due to a certificate name mismatch, and if you click through that you get a 403. If you try to go to http://www.bing.com/ you get a blank page.
I didn't try either site while logged in, so it's possible that you can do secure searches if you have an account.
My understanding with Google was that it was always SSL for all logged-in searches, but that logged-out users could still use via HTTP. At some point that appears to have changed, because signed in or signed out, regardless of browser, any attempt to go to google.com via HTTP gets redirected to HTTPS. If you construct a query like http://www.google.com/search?q=foo you can force Google to receive your query terms over HTTP, but it still immediately redirects to HTTPS rather than returning any data. I suppose if you used a browser that indicated it could not handle HTTPS, Google would probably allow you to do searches over HTTP.
How long did it take Google to finally get around using https and secure logins? A long fucking time
You don't know what you're talking about.
Google provided the option for SSL on all Google services back in 2008. At that point in time it was considered infeasible for large web services to do always-on SSL, because it would increase the load too much; SSL was only used for login pages, pages where financial information was entered, etc. In 2010 Google turned it on by default for all users for Gmail and other key services, long before any other major webmail providers did. In 2011 they turned it on by default for everything, including search. Google did this long before any of the other big web companies... heck Yahoo and Bing still don't use SSL for search.
Google was also the first major web service to provide two-factor authentication, in 2010. Yahoo didn't do it until 2012, and Microsoft didn't offer it for Outlook until little more than six months ago. AFAIK, Google is still the only major webmail provider to offer and use secure SMTP when communicating with other mail servers. Most SMTP traffic to and from Google is unencrypted, but only because the other end won't do encryption.
Google also designed SPDY without any unencrypted mode at all. The W3C committee standardizing SPDY as HTTP/2.0 is struggling a little bit with that, though it appears they're going to accept it as encrypted-only. Google's next-gen web protocol, QUIC, not only doesn't have a unencrypted mode, but encryption is baked so deeply into the protocol that when it gets to standardization there will be no question about removing it... you'd have to completely redesign the protocol.
Google has been serious about encrypting everything for a long time and has consistently led the industry.
Bill Gates is on the ground giving billions to eradicate disease -- something that actually improves peoples' lives in a meaningful way
The work of the Gates foundation is fantastic, I completely agree. However, I disagree that providing universal access to useful information, which is Google's stated mission, doesn't "improve peoples' lives in a meaningful way". In fact, I'd say that universal Internet access is one of the most powerful tools we can offer the developing world, enabling them access to the information needed to lift themselves out of poverty and corruption. Of course, Internet access doesn't help when you're dying of malaria, so eradicating, or at least suppressing, disease is critical.
None of the major IT companies gave a rats ass about user privacy until Snowden leaked his information.
You can debate about whether or not they would have without it (I argue they would), but Google has had to care seriously about user privacy for years now, because privacy assurance, including annual privacy audits performed by a third-party auditor, are required by the FTC consent decree. If there's any hint that some design or implementation detail threatens to expose user data, or even put it where it shouldn't be, the privacy team comes down with both feet until it's fixed. I really think that would be the case even without the consent decree, though because of it the privacy team is supervised by legal which undoubtedly gives it even more clout than it would have otherwise.
I realize that/. groupthink paints Google as an enemy of privacy, because the bulk of its business model is based on targeted advertising which means that Google's users give Google permission to learn about them and target ads to them (unless they opt out), but I doubt there are any companies of substantial size that care more or work harder to protect user privacy, precisely because Google's business model places it in such a precarious position. If there were ever any leaks of user data from Google, or if there were any reports of Google employees misusing user data, it would severely damage the company.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer. I work on the security infrastructure, which is related to but not the same as the privacy infrastructure.)
note that essentially all [...] Google servers (I expect that they probably do run the odd Microsoft server, although I have no evidence of this) run Linux
Ah, no. There may, perhaps, be some systems Google got via acquisition which are on Windows boxen, but you can bet the teams' top priority is to get them migrated. Google runs on Linux. You have to get special approval to have Windows on your laptop -- Goobuntu (Google's tweaked Ubuntu), OS X or ChromeOS? No one will even blink. But Windows will get you asked "why"? And if anyone seriously suggested building something on a Microsoft server, I think everyone in the room would pinch themselves.
Anecdotal evidence: we hired a guy who moved about 1000 miles for this job. He was a fantastic employee, and we made the right choice hiring him, but after about a year, he said he decided to move back home.
Heh, another anecdote: I moved about 500 miles for my current job, and the company seems pretty happy with me... but after about two years, I'm going to move back home.
I've found that same problem before: recruiters look at the place where you currently live, not where you've said you're interested in working.
+1
I'm quite happy with my job in Colorado, but my family really wants to be in Utah (where we're from and where all the extended family is). So for the last year I've been trying to get various recruiters and jobs sites to look for stuff in Utah for me. There's lots of software in Utah, so it's not like opportunities should be hard to find, but all I get is (a) stuff in the Denver/Boulder metro area, where I live and (b) stuff for random locations everywhere else in the country.
Maybe I should send out some resumes with my dad's address (I actually still have a Utah area code phone number).
Actually, as it turns out it looks like I might be able to convince my current employer to let me telecommute (though likely on a different team), even though it's not generally allowed. If that works out it'll be ideal, so maybe all of those recruiters did me a favor by ignoring my requests.
In house, Google developed Google Wave and Google Buzz.
And Chrome V8, Gmail, Google+ (including Google+ video Hangouts), Google Wallet, Google Offers, Google News, Google Books, Google Music, Google Now, Google Keep, Google Art, Google Cloud Print, Google Image Search, Google Video Search, Google Music Search, Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Google Flights, Picasa, Google Translate, Google Knowledge Graph, Google Shopper, Google Currents, etc., etc., etc. (I got tired of copying entries from the Wikipedia page). And of course there's now all of the hardware -- various tablets and phones, Chromecast, Chromebooks, Google Glass, self-driving cars, and more. Oh, and Google Fiber. Plus a bunch of other Google X projects, most of which not even Google employees know anything about.
In addition, nearly all of the properties that began as acquisitions have been substantially, if not totally, rewritten to provide more features and to enable them to scale to massive volumes. For example, Google Maps was acquired when it was a standalone program written by two guys. It's unlikely that there is a single line of code remaining from that original app in the modern multi-platform, massively scaled system that incorporates many different data layers, including all of the StreetView imagery (another purely Google-originated endeavor).
Actually, even if Google had simply acquired everything, it would still take a lot of innovation to rearchitect it all so it can scale for a billion users. There's a lot of purely internal innovation that is required to make all of this stuff work, like Bigtable (and now Spanner), Borg, MapReduce (and now Flume), plus all of the libraries/dev tools -- including many which have been open sourced like Guava, protobuf, Gson, Gerrit, Keyczar, and many, many more.
"Google doesn't actually invent anything" is a popular/. meme, but it's completely untrue.
As for why this patent legislation matters to Google, Google has always hated the patent arms race; it costs software companies money and agility, and gives them basically nothing in return.
Google is a company of software engineers, right to the very top, and nearly all software engineers hate the ridiculousness of software patents, and the way patent trolls stifle extract cash from the people who are actually doing cool stuff to give it to worthless do-nothings. For a long time Google simply refused to play the patent game at all, until it got seriously burned. So then Google began lobbying hard for patent reform, spending millions per year, and this is just one piece of that large, multi-pronged effort. At the same time, Google realized that it had to get into the patent game itself to survive, and so purchased Motorola and some other large piles of patents, and began rewarding engineers for writing patents. But Google would really prefer to fix the system.
(arguably it was never really successful. I'll reference Bill Hicks for that)
"Now I'm no bleeding heart, okay? But, when you're walking
down the streets of New York City and you're stepping over
a guy on the sidewalk who, I don't know, might be dead...
does it ever occur to you to think 'Wow, maybe our system
doesn't work?' Does that thought ever bubble up out of you?"
The guy on the sidewalk will be there regardless of the economic system, because with few exceptions the homeless aren't homeless because of economic reasons. Nearly all of them are where they are because of various forms of mental illness, and the fix for that isn't dumping capitalism, it's reinstating the system of state hospitals to care for the mentally ill, treating them to the degree we know how, and just keeping them reasonably comfortable where we don't. Of course, we need the hospitals to be much, much better than they were; the reason they were largely shut down is because they were houses of horror and it was easier for activists in the 70s to get courts to shut them down and put the patients on the street than to actually get them cleaned up.
Not coincidentally, those hospitals also used to hold a fair number of people who are still in state care, but at much higher cost because they're in prison.
I will grant that state hospitals and similar systems are socialist, so to that extent perhaps socialism is the solution to the guy on the sidewalk. That doesn't mean socialism is the right answer for those who aren't mentally ill.
With respect to people whose jobs are automated away, IMO the right level of socialism isn't to give them a basic living stipend, but instead to help retrain. One thing that most people worried about automation removing jobs don't consider is that the cost reductions due to automation go primarily to reduce the cost of goods, and therefore to lower the cost of living and raising the standard of living, which opens up all sorts of new opportunities for work, in two ways. First, by lowering the cost of living, the disposable income of the (working) masses increases and they start buying services that were previously out of reach, thereby increasing the demand for -- and jobs in -- those services. For example, in the 18th century there were very, very few professional hairdressers. In the latter half of the 20th century it became a very common profession.
Second, the lowered cost of living opens up possibilities for living doing work whose value previously simply wasn't sufficient to support life. It's not often that we think about cost of living decreasing. It seems like it's always going up, but that's because we measure it with devaluing currency, and because our standard of what constitutes an adequate lifestyle is constantly increasing. If instead we fix a particular standard of living and then look at how much time must be put in to earn it, the cost of living has been on a long downward slide for centuries, and automation is going to accelerate that.
I'm not saying that everyone is going to be a hairdresser, and I have no idea what all of the jobs of the future will be. I think the major growth will be in the service sector, because people do like receiving service from people not machines, no matter how competent the machines become. It wouldn't surprise me if the biggest growth areas are all around non-essentials, like art and entertainment. What I am certain of, though, is that as long as people have disposable income they will find things to spend that money on, and that will involve paying other people for goods and services. Many of those goods and services will seem ridiculous fripperies to us today, but much of what we spend our money on today would seem silly to people 100 years ago.
Oh, one other thing I'm certain of: people need to feel that they're earning their own way. Life earned is better than life given, regardless of how it is earned. Welfare is a fast road to unhappy dependency. That's not to say that providing short-term support to people who are transitioning isn't a good idea, but long-term unearned subsistence is a recipe for angry, unhappy people.
I completely disagree that it was "consumers" who first broke the contract. Oh, there were always small numbers of infringements, but copyright has become so one-sided that hardly any average people even understand what the social contract is. Given that it appears to most people to be a completely one-sided grant, with no significant harm caused by infringement, why not infringe? The content owners have done it to themselves. Reduce copyright to a reasonable duration (say, 10 years for most works) so that people can see that copyright actually does end and stuff does flow into the public domain, and I argue that most people will have greatly-increased respect for it. They'll actually be in a position to think "Well, I could pirate this now, but if I wait a few years I'll be able to obtain it legally". I also think a shortened copyright term would result in an explosion of mashup-based creativity -- which big media would hate but would enrich the public tremendously.
As for extending beyond expressions, both US copyright law and the Berne Convention see elements such as plot and characters as protectible. So if Greek courts fight that, good for them. But I'm not sure they do, because Greece is a Berne signatory.
It is very badly broken. The goal of proper copyright law is to increase the flow of material into the public domain. The social contract underlying it is basically "We'll all agree to arbitrarily limit what we can do for a short period of time in order to encourage the creation and publication of works". But in what twisted universe does it encourage creation and publication to restrict copying long after the creator has died? Do you seriously believe that authors, for example, might think "Well, if copyright doesn't last at least until my great grandchildren are born, there's just no point in writing." Not to mention the egregious way it's been extended to control not just expressions but ideas (e.g. plot), and the way that Fair Use has been hammered almost out of existence.
I stand by my statement that copyright is very badly broken. Big content owners have pushed for extensions of the duration and scope to the point that the social contract is gone. If modern copyright law were evaluated under the rules applied in contract law, it would be ruled inequitable and therefore invalid.
The images of the ancient texts are marked "Copyright Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana".
Copyright is seriously out of control. People don't even know what it is any more.
Only the images (for the work of digitizing the manuscripts) - not the texts
That's correct. They own copyrights on the photos, but no one owns the texts.
Copyright is under control and works as it is supposed!
Hold your horses there, that doesn't necessarily follow. Just because there's nothing egregiously screwy in this case doesn't mean copyright isn't pretty badly broken. It is.
The counter-counter measure to this is to break the encryption so you can control the craft. Flash back to those supercomputers that hobbyists were building by clustering lots and lots of game consoles.
If you use decent encryption in your counter measure, this counter-counter measure is useless. It doesn't matter even if the attacker has a cluster of real supercomputers.
My company prides itself on an office environment that follows a modern design aesthetic: open floor plan, bold colors on the walls, cool lamps in the corners.
My lame company only prides itself on stupid shit like making good products and pleasing its customers.
I wouldn't say I love Perforce. It's okay. I prefer DCVS systems, particularly Git and Mercurial, but neither of them can scale like Perforce can, and since Google uses a single company-wide respository (all engineers have access to all code, with some small, isolated exceptions), it's really the only game in town.
Yes, 2^n is just the keyspace size. I expressed it that way for analogy with the AES keyspace size, and used 'n' rather than specifying a value because it obviously depends on how many words you use and what size dictionary. I suppose I could have written 2^(word_count * log_2(dict_size)).
The point is that Valdrax was wrong; you can certainly achieve entropy in an XKCD-style key.
Slashdot Mirror
Also don't underestimate the value of having control over your data, you do not want to be reliant on some random person/company being up, not go bankrupt, or change its terms and conditions on you.
On the Ts & Cs, you have a point, but for the rest of it, I ran my own mail server for years. My uptime never came close to matching gmail, and I'm far more likely to go bankrupt than Google or Amazon. Gmail's spam filtering is better than anything I ever achieved, too.
Any suggestions for a good launcher for this application? I have a similar issue with my grandfather.
+5 insightful
Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are. They'll be better-equipped to deal with it than we are -- and it's a much easier problem for them to solve than a planetary climate that has been pushed to extremes.
Yeah, it'd be nice if solar, wind and wave energy could address all of our needs, but at present they can't provide the baseload coverage needed to eliminate coal and oil burning.
A small clarification:
The reason Facebook has any advertising income, and therefore value as a company, is that the people purchasing FB advertisements believe it has the ability to provide very directed advertising.
Actually, online advertisers know exactly how effective the directed advertising is. Unlike traditional advertising, where the old saw goes "I know 50% of my advertising budget is working, I just don't know which 50%", online ads can very often be linked precisely to specific sales. This is actually the biggest factor in Google's success as an advertiser; good targeting was important, too, but the real breakthrough was being able to help advertisers quantify very precisely what return they were getting on their advertising spend.
If you like programming, that's fine, but don't expect to be able to stay in it for more than 15 or so years. Have a Plan B.
Your experience is completely at odds with mine. I'm 45 and have been a professional programmer since I was 18 (I started writing code at about 12). I work with many guys who are in their 50s and 60s... they're excellent engineers, and compensated very well for their experience and knowledge.
Granted that I work with the upper tier of professional programmers, but it is far from impossible to have a long, satisfying and financially rewarding career writing code. You have to love it, you have to be good at it (which is pretty closely correlated with loving it), and you have to have the talent, intellect and education (which needn't be formal, but formal CS education is generally best).
In the job market right now, if you're good it doesn't matter how old you are, or in many cases even what you smell like, the industry is absolutely desperate for talent.
Coding is a matter of process-thinking
It's a lot more than that. Coding is very different from the sort of process thinking you use to build processes executed by people, because computers are completely incapable of filling in any gaps or exercising any initiative. If you build company processes the way you write code, they'll be very ineffective, and if you write code the way you build company processes, your code will rarely work.
In addition, outside of code that defines business rules, coding involves huge numbers of details and abstractions of those details which are different from anything we encounter in the "real" world.
Getting people to code early as a core skill, rather than as a specialism, would have knock-on effects in all organisations employing more than a few dozen people.
If that were true, then former programmers would make outstanding managers and executives. I do know some software engineers who are outstanding managers or executives, and I know plenty who were great coders but lousy at management and leadership. Further, in my experience the correlation between coding effectiveness and managerial effectiveness is negative, though close to zero.
if you are going to sell diagnostic services in the USA then you will need to get FDA approval
I don't think so. I don't think there's any requirement that people have FDA approval in order to issue opinions on medical issues. You have to be an MD to call yourself a doctor, but if you just want to tell people stuff and aren't claiming to be a doctor and aren't doing any sort of medical procedures on them, go nuts. Likewise, if you're producing medical devices or performing medical tests (like 23andme), then you need approval but if you're not, do what you like.
I know here in Australia where we burn brown bloody coal an electric car produces more emissions than a V6.
Are you sure? Coal is dirty, yes, but big coal generation plants can and do make it much cleaner than you might expect. The nature of a big facility makes it possible to ensure a very complete burn, and many coal plants also scrub the output. In addition, large power plants are much more efficient at extracting the energy than a small ICE, which also helps them with the emissions/work ratio. Whether or not what you say is true depends less on the type of coal and more on the type and configuration of the power plant.
The actual spying isn't the biggest issue I have with the NSA (and GCHQ and ASIO and the others), the biggest issue is the way that these agencies are doing things that deliberately weaken computer security in the name of making it easier to spy on people
+1. This particular aspect of the Snowden revelations shocked and staggered me.
The NSA has always had two missions around signals intelligence (1) spy on the rest of the world and (2) make sure the rest of the world can't spy on us. And that second mission covered all communications important to national security, not just government comms. A few years ago I build an important commercial system that protected stuff related to credit card payments, and I had NSA oversight for the whole project because they (rightly) consider the payment infrastructure to be important to national security. And the NSA guys were clearly working to ensure that the system was highly secure; they never once suggested anything that would in any way compromise it, and they had some valuable insights about how to make it better. Over the years the NSA has done a lot to contribute to the security of important commercial security infrastructure -- because it's their job.
So, what the Snowden revelations made clear is that the NSA has decided mission 2 takes a back seat to mission 1, and in fact that mission 2 is so unimportant that they're actively working to undermine it.
heck Yahoo and Bing still don't use SSL for search
Out of curiosity I just went and tried it. Not only do they not use SSL by default, but you can't use SSL at all for searches on either site. Yahoo will serve the home page via HTTPS, but trying to search from it gives you first a big error message from your browser due to a certificate name mismatch, and if you click through that you get a 403. If you try to go to http://www.bing.com/ you get a blank page.
I didn't try either site while logged in, so it's possible that you can do secure searches if you have an account.
My understanding with Google was that it was always SSL for all logged-in searches, but that logged-out users could still use via HTTP. At some point that appears to have changed, because signed in or signed out, regardless of browser, any attempt to go to google.com via HTTP gets redirected to HTTPS. If you construct a query like http://www.google.com/search?q=foo you can force Google to receive your query terms over HTTP, but it still immediately redirects to HTTPS rather than returning any data. I suppose if you used a browser that indicated it could not handle HTTPS, Google would probably allow you to do searches over HTTP.
How long did it take Google to finally get around using https and secure logins? A long fucking time
You don't know what you're talking about.
Google provided the option for SSL on all Google services back in 2008. At that point in time it was considered infeasible for large web services to do always-on SSL, because it would increase the load too much; SSL was only used for login pages, pages where financial information was entered, etc. In 2010 Google turned it on by default for all users for Gmail and other key services, long before any other major webmail providers did. In 2011 they turned it on by default for everything, including search. Google did this long before any of the other big web companies... heck Yahoo and Bing still don't use SSL for search.
Google was also the first major web service to provide two-factor authentication, in 2010. Yahoo didn't do it until 2012, and Microsoft didn't offer it for Outlook until little more than six months ago. AFAIK, Google is still the only major webmail provider to offer and use secure SMTP when communicating with other mail servers. Most SMTP traffic to and from Google is unencrypted, but only because the other end won't do encryption.
Google also designed SPDY without any unencrypted mode at all. The W3C committee standardizing SPDY as HTTP/2.0 is struggling a little bit with that, though it appears they're going to accept it as encrypted-only. Google's next-gen web protocol, QUIC, not only doesn't have a unencrypted mode, but encryption is baked so deeply into the protocol that when it gets to standardization there will be no question about removing it... you'd have to completely redesign the protocol.
Google has been serious about encrypting everything for a long time and has consistently led the industry.
Bill Gates is on the ground giving billions to eradicate disease -- something that actually improves peoples' lives in a meaningful way
The work of the Gates foundation is fantastic, I completely agree. However, I disagree that providing universal access to useful information, which is Google's stated mission, doesn't "improve peoples' lives in a meaningful way". In fact, I'd say that universal Internet access is one of the most powerful tools we can offer the developing world, enabling them access to the information needed to lift themselves out of poverty and corruption. Of course, Internet access doesn't help when you're dying of malaria, so eradicating, or at least suppressing, disease is critical.
None of the major IT companies gave a rats ass about user privacy until Snowden leaked his information.
You can debate about whether or not they would have without it (I argue they would), but Google has had to care seriously about user privacy for years now, because privacy assurance, including annual privacy audits performed by a third-party auditor, are required by the FTC consent decree. If there's any hint that some design or implementation detail threatens to expose user data, or even put it where it shouldn't be, the privacy team comes down with both feet until it's fixed. I really think that would be the case even without the consent decree, though because of it the privacy team is supervised by legal which undoubtedly gives it even more clout than it would have otherwise.
I realize that /. groupthink paints Google as an enemy of privacy, because the bulk of its business model is based on targeted advertising which means that Google's users give Google permission to learn about them and target ads to them (unless they opt out), but I doubt there are any companies of substantial size that care more or work harder to protect user privacy, precisely because Google's business model places it in such a precarious position. If there were ever any leaks of user data from Google, or if there were any reports of Google employees misusing user data, it would severely damage the company.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer. I work on the security infrastructure, which is related to but not the same as the privacy infrastructure.)
note that essentially all [...] Google servers (I expect that they probably do run the odd Microsoft server, although I have no evidence of this) run Linux
Ah, no. There may, perhaps, be some systems Google got via acquisition which are on Windows boxen, but you can bet the teams' top priority is to get them migrated. Google runs on Linux. You have to get special approval to have Windows on your laptop -- Goobuntu (Google's tweaked Ubuntu), OS X or ChromeOS? No one will even blink. But Windows will get you asked "why"? And if anyone seriously suggested building something on a Microsoft server, I think everyone in the room would pinch themselves.
Anecdotal evidence: we hired a guy who moved about 1000 miles for this job. He was a fantastic employee, and we made the right choice hiring him, but after about a year, he said he decided to move back home.
Heh, another anecdote: I moved about 500 miles for my current job, and the company seems pretty happy with me... but after about two years, I'm going to move back home.
I've found that same problem before: recruiters look at the place where you currently live, not where you've said you're interested in working.
+1
I'm quite happy with my job in Colorado, but my family really wants to be in Utah (where we're from and where all the extended family is). So for the last year I've been trying to get various recruiters and jobs sites to look for stuff in Utah for me. There's lots of software in Utah, so it's not like opportunities should be hard to find, but all I get is (a) stuff in the Denver/Boulder metro area, where I live and (b) stuff for random locations everywhere else in the country.
Maybe I should send out some resumes with my dad's address (I actually still have a Utah area code phone number).
Actually, as it turns out it looks like I might be able to convince my current employer to let me telecommute (though likely on a different team), even though it's not generally allowed. If that works out it'll be ideal, so maybe all of those recruiters did me a favor by ignoring my requests.
Google Talk (Grand Central)
Actually, that's Google Voice, not Google Talk.
In house, Google developed Google Wave and Google Buzz.
And Chrome V8, Gmail, Google+ (including Google+ video Hangouts), Google Wallet, Google Offers, Google News, Google Books, Google Music, Google Now, Google Keep, Google Art, Google Cloud Print, Google Image Search, Google Video Search, Google Music Search, Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Google Flights, Picasa, Google Translate, Google Knowledge Graph, Google Shopper, Google Currents, etc., etc., etc. (I got tired of copying entries from the Wikipedia page). And of course there's now all of the hardware -- various tablets and phones, Chromecast, Chromebooks, Google Glass, self-driving cars, and more. Oh, and Google Fiber. Plus a bunch of other Google X projects, most of which not even Google employees know anything about.
In addition, nearly all of the properties that began as acquisitions have been substantially, if not totally, rewritten to provide more features and to enable them to scale to massive volumes. For example, Google Maps was acquired when it was a standalone program written by two guys. It's unlikely that there is a single line of code remaining from that original app in the modern multi-platform, massively scaled system that incorporates many different data layers, including all of the StreetView imagery (another purely Google-originated endeavor).
Actually, even if Google had simply acquired everything, it would still take a lot of innovation to rearchitect it all so it can scale for a billion users. There's a lot of purely internal innovation that is required to make all of this stuff work, like Bigtable (and now Spanner), Borg, MapReduce (and now Flume), plus all of the libraries/dev tools -- including many which have been open sourced like Guava, protobuf, Gson, Gerrit, Keyczar, and many, many more.
"Google doesn't actually invent anything" is a popular /. meme, but it's completely untrue.
As for why this patent legislation matters to Google, Google has always hated the patent arms race; it costs software companies money and agility, and gives them basically nothing in return.
Google is a company of software engineers, right to the very top, and nearly all software engineers hate the ridiculousness of software patents, and the way patent trolls stifle extract cash from the people who are actually doing cool stuff to give it to worthless do-nothings. For a long time Google simply refused to play the patent game at all, until it got seriously burned. So then Google began lobbying hard for patent reform, spending millions per year, and this is just one piece of that large, multi-pronged effort. At the same time, Google realized that it had to get into the patent game itself to survive, and so purchased Motorola and some other large piles of patents, and began rewarding engineers for writing patents. But Google would really prefer to fix the system.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer.)
(arguably it was never really successful. I'll reference Bill Hicks for that)
"Now I'm no bleeding heart, okay? But, when you're walking down the streets of New York City and you're stepping over a guy on the sidewalk who, I don't know, might be dead... does it ever occur to you to think 'Wow, maybe our system doesn't work?' Does that thought ever bubble up out of you?"
The guy on the sidewalk will be there regardless of the economic system, because with few exceptions the homeless aren't homeless because of economic reasons. Nearly all of them are where they are because of various forms of mental illness, and the fix for that isn't dumping capitalism, it's reinstating the system of state hospitals to care for the mentally ill, treating them to the degree we know how, and just keeping them reasonably comfortable where we don't. Of course, we need the hospitals to be much, much better than they were; the reason they were largely shut down is because they were houses of horror and it was easier for activists in the 70s to get courts to shut them down and put the patients on the street than to actually get them cleaned up.
Not coincidentally, those hospitals also used to hold a fair number of people who are still in state care, but at much higher cost because they're in prison.
I will grant that state hospitals and similar systems are socialist, so to that extent perhaps socialism is the solution to the guy on the sidewalk. That doesn't mean socialism is the right answer for those who aren't mentally ill.
With respect to people whose jobs are automated away, IMO the right level of socialism isn't to give them a basic living stipend, but instead to help retrain. One thing that most people worried about automation removing jobs don't consider is that the cost reductions due to automation go primarily to reduce the cost of goods, and therefore to lower the cost of living and raising the standard of living, which opens up all sorts of new opportunities for work, in two ways. First, by lowering the cost of living, the disposable income of the (working) masses increases and they start buying services that were previously out of reach, thereby increasing the demand for -- and jobs in -- those services. For example, in the 18th century there were very, very few professional hairdressers. In the latter half of the 20th century it became a very common profession.
Second, the lowered cost of living opens up possibilities for living doing work whose value previously simply wasn't sufficient to support life. It's not often that we think about cost of living decreasing. It seems like it's always going up, but that's because we measure it with devaluing currency, and because our standard of what constitutes an adequate lifestyle is constantly increasing. If instead we fix a particular standard of living and then look at how much time must be put in to earn it, the cost of living has been on a long downward slide for centuries, and automation is going to accelerate that.
I'm not saying that everyone is going to be a hairdresser, and I have no idea what all of the jobs of the future will be. I think the major growth will be in the service sector, because people do like receiving service from people not machines, no matter how competent the machines become. It wouldn't surprise me if the biggest growth areas are all around non-essentials, like art and entertainment. What I am certain of, though, is that as long as people have disposable income they will find things to spend that money on, and that will involve paying other people for goods and services. Many of those goods and services will seem ridiculous fripperies to us today, but much of what we spend our money on today would seem silly to people 100 years ago.
Oh, one other thing I'm certain of: people need to feel that they're earning their own way. Life earned is better than life given, regardless of how it is earned. Welfare is a fast road to unhappy dependency. That's not to say that providing short-term support to people who are transitioning isn't a good idea, but long-term unearned subsistence is a recipe for angry, unhappy people.
I completely disagree that it was "consumers" who first broke the contract. Oh, there were always small numbers of infringements, but copyright has become so one-sided that hardly any average people even understand what the social contract is. Given that it appears to most people to be a completely one-sided grant, with no significant harm caused by infringement, why not infringe? The content owners have done it to themselves. Reduce copyright to a reasonable duration (say, 10 years for most works) so that people can see that copyright actually does end and stuff does flow into the public domain, and I argue that most people will have greatly-increased respect for it. They'll actually be in a position to think "Well, I could pirate this now, but if I wait a few years I'll be able to obtain it legally". I also think a shortened copyright term would result in an explosion of mashup-based creativity -- which big media would hate but would enrich the public tremendously.
As for extending beyond expressions, both US copyright law and the Berne Convention see elements such as plot and characters as protectible. So if Greek courts fight that, good for them. But I'm not sure they do, because Greece is a Berne signatory.
I find if I go to plug in a USB connector, it's best to change your mind at the last minute and turn it over because you're *always* wrong first time.
The clickclickdrone rule: The first attempt to connect a USB plug is always upside down, even when you take the clickclickdrone rule into account.
It is very badly broken. The goal of proper copyright law is to increase the flow of material into the public domain. The social contract underlying it is basically "We'll all agree to arbitrarily limit what we can do for a short period of time in order to encourage the creation and publication of works". But in what twisted universe does it encourage creation and publication to restrict copying long after the creator has died? Do you seriously believe that authors, for example, might think "Well, if copyright doesn't last at least until my great grandchildren are born, there's just no point in writing." Not to mention the egregious way it's been extended to control not just expressions but ideas (e.g. plot), and the way that Fair Use has been hammered almost out of existence.
I stand by my statement that copyright is very badly broken. Big content owners have pushed for extensions of the duration and scope to the point that the social contract is gone. If modern copyright law were evaluated under the rules applied in contract law, it would be ruled inequitable and therefore invalid.
The images of the ancient texts are marked "Copyright Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana".
Copyright is seriously out of control. People don't even know what it is any more.
Only the images (for the work of digitizing the manuscripts) - not the texts
That's correct. They own copyrights on the photos, but no one owns the texts.
Copyright is under control and works as it is supposed!
Hold your horses there, that doesn't necessarily follow. Just because there's nothing egregiously screwy in this case doesn't mean copyright isn't pretty badly broken. It is.
The counter-counter measure to this is to break the encryption so you can control the craft. Flash back to those supercomputers that hobbyists were building by clustering lots and lots of game consoles.
If you use decent encryption in your counter measure, this counter-counter measure is useless. It doesn't matter even if the attacker has a cluster of real supercomputers.
Go? Dart?
Or are those not used much on the inside?
Some. Go is gaining in popularity. I'm not sure about Dart, but I don't really have a lot of interaction with front-end developers.
My company prides itself on an office environment that follows a modern design aesthetic: open floor plan, bold colors on the walls, cool lamps in the corners.
My lame company only prides itself on stupid shit like making good products and pleasing its customers.
The two aren't in opposition to one another.
I wouldn't say I love Perforce. It's okay. I prefer DCVS systems, particularly Git and Mercurial, but neither of them can scale like Perforce can, and since Google uses a single company-wide respository (all engineers have access to all code, with some small, isolated exceptions), it's really the only game in town.
Yes, 2^n is just the keyspace size. I expressed it that way for analogy with the AES keyspace size, and used 'n' rather than specifying a value because it obviously depends on how many words you use and what size dictionary. I suppose I could have written 2^(word_count * log_2(dict_size)).
The point is that Valdrax was wrong; you can certainly achieve entropy in an XKCD-style key.