Interesting. I wasn't aware anyone had implemented the RDP protocol on X. Cool, I'll look into it. How well does it perform on low-bandwidth connections?
I don't follow how a machine that phones home to do anything is "more secure"
Really?
Care to point out all of the NYT articles about Google's cloud being a vector for malware, or data stored in Google's cloud being leaked?
If your concern is privacy, in the sense of not wanting to share data with Google because they've established a track record of doing an excellent job of not intentionally or inadvertently sharing it within anyone else, then you have a point. But from a pure security perspective, all evidence is that your data is perfectly secure in Google's cloud, that ChromeOS machines aren't very vulnerable to malware, and that they don't expose their contained data when lost or stolen. And, for that matter, you don't lose access to your data if your Chromebook is lost or stolen, in fact you can easily work on pretty much any random computer.
I switched to delivering resumes in PDF format years ago. I write my resume with LaTeX so getting it into Word format would mean a fair amount of work, and I've yet to come across any potential employer who both demanded Word format and was interesting enough to me that I was willing to put in that effort.
Google faked at least one picture. Take a look at this picture.
The left-hand side is exact copy of the right-hand side. Take a look at the details: The halos from the lights and the texts in the white labels.
If you read the link with the interview with the photographer you'll find that she's into heavy post-production editing. Arguably, *all* of the images are "faked" to some extent. She takes many shots of each scene and layers them together selectively to get the effect she wants. She clones out stuff she doesn't want (e.g. she mentions removing an exit sign) and clones in stuff she feels is needed to make the image symmetric, and therefore more beautiful. She doesn't worry about barrel, pincushion and perspective distortion in the original shots and does heavy correction of the final images to straighten the lines and make the angles pleasing to the eye. She shot almost all of the images with long exposures in a darkened room, which makes the relatively small LEDs appear to glow intensely and makes their cast light powerful enough to be very visible when in reality it's not very visible at all.
In short, she's interested in beauty more than in fidelity, and does whatever it takes to achieve it. Personally, I think her results are fantastic.
That would make sense, but it contradicts the claims of several others that the.NET CLR hasn't been ported to RT. Or perhaps I'm missing something. I know basically nothing about any Windows platform newer than Win2K, so that wouldn't be surprising.
Nope. Native code is extremely easy to call through P/Invoke. It's the.NET equivalent of Java's JNI.
Except that Sun had the foresight to make JNI an error-prone pain in the ass.
Well, I'm not sure that it was exactly "foresight", but in hindsight it seems to have been the right choice. Most people avoid JNI like the plague, even when they aren't worried about cross-platform compatibility.
No "native" apps would be a fine limitation, but they really should have the.NET CLR available for developers.
I think my head just nearly asploded.
Are you serious? You can't build.NET apps with C# that run on both RT and Windows 7/8? That's... beyond stupid.
We all know it's perfectly possible to run interpreted bytecodes with a JIT compiler and get very acceptable performance on ARM... Android has been doing it for many years, on much slower processors than the current generation of ARM CPUs. In fact, there's basically no significant difference between Java running on Dalvik on Android and native binaries running on iOS. Works Just Fine. And I know Microsoft has plenty of people who are just as talented as anyone at Google.
Just goes to show that anyone can be stupid, I guess. Or maybe Microsoft really does have enough influence with the world's developers that they can make it work. A few years ago I'd have said they did. Today... I'm less certain. Android, iOS, OS X and the Web (as a platform) have all eaten into Microsoft's developer mindshare. They're still the biggest kid on the block, but not nearly as dominant as they were, and they're also going to be asking developers to split their attention between Windows x86 and Windows RT.
Install CloudRDP into Chrome. Admittedly it does cost a small amount, but provides a proper RDP client (all of the others require a middle man somewhere). Then just enable remote desktop on your desktop.
Google+ Hangouts work perfectly on the x86 Chromebooks I've used (including the one I'm typing this on). I would expect they'll work just fine on the ARM devices as well. And Hangout is better than Skype anyway; equal quality, just as easy to set up, but more flexible (multi-user, invite-by-phone, Hangout On Air for broadcasting and/or recording, schedulable via Google+ Events, integration with Docs, plus lots of add-on apps).
what non-IT office workers normally do on their notebooks? Web, outlook, and office suite.
That's what I do on my Chromebook. I use my desktop to write code, but the Chromebook is what I cart around to meetings, take to the couch to work on design docs and spreadsheets, do e-mail on, do presentations, etc. Works great. Especially since it has 3G and so works lots of places a normal laptop wouldn't.
The only other devices in the same category as Chromebook are eReaders like Kindle and Nook (both running a modified version of Android), and "actual" Android Tablets like the Google Nexus.
I have a Chromebook, and I have a Nexus 7 tablet (and, actually, I also have a Galaxy Tab 10.1 which doesn't get much use since I got the 7), and they are *not* in the same category. The Chromebook is a laptop. It looks and feels and works like a laptop, except that it only "runs" web apps (which isn't quite the same as saying it only runs a browser, but close enough). However, given that 95% of what I do with a laptop is web apps, that's plenty. The tablet is a tablet; it's good for (very) light e-mail and docs, plus entertainment (games, video, books, etc.).
I need to see if I can get Chrome Remote working on my desktop. If I can do that, then I can also code on my Chromebook (albeit painfully, due to the difference between one 11" screen and two 24" screens), and it'll go from 95% of a laptop to 99%.
So, not counting lunch hours, that's 42 hours per week.
Hehe. I'm surprised no one has called me on my math. 8*3+10*2 = 44 hours per week. Sshh, don't tell my wife. She didn't catch my mistake when I went through it with her, and I like having those extra four hours.
[I] worked from home from 10 PM until 3 AM [...]. That sort of thing seems to happen once per month[.]
So what I actually do is leave home every day at 6:00 AM and arrive home at 6:00 PM.
The way I read it you devote more like 55-60 hours per week to work on average.
5 * 12 = 60 hours that I'm away from home, yes. Of that, five hours is commuting (30 minutes each way), six is working out, and five hours is for lunch. If I wanted to give up on the cycling and work through lunch I could easily reduce that away time to something more like 45-50 hours, but I like the exercise and I like to take a nice break in the middle of the day. And I suppose I could move closer to the office, but I also like being out where my house is surrounded by farms, where I have rabbits, foxes, coyotes and deer running around.
So... if you sleep for six-eight hours, you actually only spend six-four hours with your family?
About that, plus weekends, holidays, etc.
That astrix is incredibly deceiving unless you read it.
Huh? What's deceiving about it? In a week I spend 42 hours working, five hours eating lunch, five hours commuting, six hours working out and 49 hours sleeping, which leaves 61 hours for personal and family time.
It's actually quite amazing how many people don't add up hours in their life and instead just continue the day in and out grind. We all have a finite amount of time, you are no different.
I don't understand what your point is. I know perfectly well where the hours in my day go.
I work at Google and don't have long hours. I am on an on call rotation, but for a lot of teams, there are dedicated people on call, with a resulting salary bonus. (And the work load for being on call is really very minimal.)
+1.
I'm not on an on-call rotation at the moment (though I'm thinking about asking to get back on it, because the extra cash is quite good). I typically work 7:30 AM to 4:30 PM, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and 6:30 AM to 5:30 PM Tuesday and Thursday(*). So, not counting lunch hours, that's 42 hours per week. On occasion I put in some extra hours during crunch time, but that's not common. For example, two weeks ago I worked a normal day, then got home, spent some time with the family and then worked from home from 10 PM until 3 AM to get some stuff done to meet a deadline before an internal release (dogfood release). That sort of thing seems to happen once per month or so, but outside of that I pretty much work a 40-hour week.
So, no, the hours at Google aren't insane. Now, *lots* of Google employees do work very long hours, but that's because they want to. I would actually like to work more myself, because I really enjoy what I do, but I also like time at home with the family and I have church responsibilities. Perhaps in a few years when my kids have all moved out I'll ramp up my hours. In the meantime, no one is putting the slightest pressure on me to work more. Now, I could probably do more if I worked more, and maybe eke out a slightly higher performance rating, which might translate into more money... but I'm already pretty comfortable with my compensation, and my manager is quite happy with my current performance.
As for cost of living... I'm at the Boulder, Colorado office (which is hiring, BTW:-)).
(*) The reason for my MWF / TTh schedule split is that I ride my bicycle to work MWF. It's a 25-mile ride so when you include showering time it takes me about 90 minutes each way. So what I actually do is leave home every day at 6:00 AM and arrive home at 6:00 PM. The days I ride that works out to a 7:30-4:30 work schedule. The days I drive, I work the two hours "saved" from my bike commute.
It's probably completely unrelated to the fact that Google has a huge presence in Boulder, CO now.
As part of said presence, I'd have to disagree with the "huge" characterization (which isn't stated in the article). It's growing, but still a fairly small office. Certainly dwarfed by the nearby IBM presence, as well as that of many other large tech companies (many storage companies in particular have huge presences here). To give you an accurate idea of the size, the space mentioned in the article is an old Circuit City store, remodeled for Google's use, and it constitutes 90% of the Google office space. There's also a small building shared with a Key Bank branch and another small building shared with a local law firm.
On the scale of the large tech company campuses in the Boulder area, Google is barely noticeable. Its most notable characteristic is that it is in Boulder City proper, while most other companies have built in less expensive surrounding areas. Should Google Boulder ever grow to the point where it needs serious space it will almost certainly also move out of the city, since real estate in Boulder is crazy expensive.
Polis is probably aware of Google's presence in Boulder, but I doubt it has much to do with his position, since it's strictly small potatoes compared to other area tech companies.
(*) I should mention that Google Boulder is aggressively hiring software engineers. If you live in the area, or would like to, and have the talent Google looks for, send me an e-mail and I'll hook you up with the recruiters. Boulder's primary projects are billing/payments, Docs/Drive and electronic couponing (the Zavers acquisition), plus various other small teams.
I've never felt like I have been wronged by Google
Right now Google's not hurting, so they can be more selective in what thy do with that data. But when times get tough, and they probably will, Google will resort to all sorts of tricks to keep that cash cow mooing.
Why do you think that? Please keep in mind that due to the structure of the stock voting rights, the shareholders have zero power to force Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt to do anything, and given that the terms laid out in Google's IPO make clear that Google will sacrifice short-term profits for long-term profits and will focus on treating users well even at the expense of profitability, there's no way to pressure them via the SEC or courts, either, since shareholders already bought into all that. Also, Page, Brin and Schmidt all already have more money than they could ever spend, and none of them appear to be motivated by money as a way to keep score, so hard times won't materially affect them on a personal basis.
What you're saying is possible, certainly, but I see no indication that it's likely.
and do not forget to use different computers for each site as well because they track your use and know if you are using a different name on each site. So you need one computer for Google, one for Gmail, one for Youtube, etc.
Alternatively, don't log in (which means don't use Gmail, at least not via the web UI), and use the "keep my opt outs" add-on which Google provides so that Google is kept aware that you don't want to be tracked. Unless you're looking for a way to justify to your wife that you really have to have a dozen computers.
It is false to claim that an algorithm is neutral because algorithms can be discarded until a favourable algorithm is found.
Assuming there's some evidence that such a selection criterion was used. And I doubt there's *that* much freedom in algorithm selection... remember that the chosen algorithm has to work for all of the rest of the cases in a fashion that's not too sub-optimal.
Slashdot Mirror
Nearly the entire seismologic community including Dr. Jordan thinks the court decision was wrong.
Nearly?
I really think that discussions should be based on facts and not on unfunded allegations
Darned right. The only allegations worth discussing are funded allegations. Preferably well-funded.
https://plus.google.com/103125075016130428003/posts/j5yHU4U1ssA
Interesting. I wasn't aware anyone had implemented the RDP protocol on X. Cool, I'll look into it. How well does it perform on low-bandwidth connections?
I don't follow how a machine that phones home to do anything is "more secure"
Really?
Care to point out all of the NYT articles about Google's cloud being a vector for malware, or data stored in Google's cloud being leaked?
If your concern is privacy, in the sense of not wanting to share data with Google because they've established a track record of doing an excellent job of not intentionally or inadvertently sharing it within anyone else, then you have a point. But from a pure security perspective, all evidence is that your data is perfectly secure in Google's cloud, that ChromeOS machines aren't very vulnerable to malware, and that they don't expose their contained data when lost or stolen. And, for that matter, you don't lose access to your data if your Chromebook is lost or stolen, in fact you can easily work on pretty much any random computer.
I switched to delivering resumes in PDF format years ago. I write my resume with LaTeX so getting it into Word format would mean a fair amount of work, and I've yet to come across any potential employer who both demanded Word format and was interesting enough to me that I was willing to put in that effort.
Google faked at least one picture. Take a look at this picture.
The left-hand side is exact copy of the right-hand side. Take a look at the details: The halos from the lights and the texts in the white labels.
If you read the link with the interview with the photographer you'll find that she's into heavy post-production editing. Arguably, *all* of the images are "faked" to some extent. She takes many shots of each scene and layers them together selectively to get the effect she wants. She clones out stuff she doesn't want (e.g. she mentions removing an exit sign) and clones in stuff she feels is needed to make the image symmetric, and therefore more beautiful. She doesn't worry about barrel, pincushion and perspective distortion in the original shots and does heavy correction of the final images to straighten the lines and make the angles pleasing to the eye. She shot almost all of the images with long exposures in a darkened room, which makes the relatively small LEDs appear to glow intensely and makes their cast light powerful enough to be very visible when in reality it's not very visible at all.
In short, she's interested in beauty more than in fidelity, and does whatever it takes to achieve it. Personally, I think her results are fantastic.
That would make sense, but it contradicts the claims of several others that the .NET CLR hasn't been ported to RT. Or perhaps I'm missing something. I know basically nothing about any Windows platform newer than Win2K, so that wouldn't be surprising.
Nope. Native code is extremely easy to call through P/Invoke. It's the .NET equivalent of Java's JNI.
Except that Sun had the foresight to make JNI an error-prone pain in the ass.
Well, I'm not sure that it was exactly "foresight", but in hindsight it seems to have been the right choice. Most people avoid JNI like the plague, even when they aren't worried about cross-platform compatibility.
So was java. How many corporate apps in the office that require Java only work on Windows or IE 6/7? 90% of them.
In my experience it's more like 10% of them. And I'm not sure how IE fits into Java desktop apps.
No "native" apps would be a fine limitation, but they really should have the .NET CLR available for developers.
I think my head just nearly asploded.
Are you serious? You can't build .NET apps with C# that run on both RT and Windows 7/8? That's... beyond stupid.
We all know it's perfectly possible to run interpreted bytecodes with a JIT compiler and get very acceptable performance on ARM... Android has been doing it for many years, on much slower processors than the current generation of ARM CPUs. In fact, there's basically no significant difference between Java running on Dalvik on Android and native binaries running on iOS. Works Just Fine. And I know Microsoft has plenty of people who are just as talented as anyone at Google.
Just goes to show that anyone can be stupid, I guess. Or maybe Microsoft really does have enough influence with the world's developers that they can make it work. A few years ago I'd have said they did. Today... I'm less certain. Android, iOS, OS X and the Web (as a platform) have all eaten into Microsoft's developer mindshare. They're still the biggest kid on the block, but not nearly as dominant as they were, and they're also going to be asking developers to split their attention between Windows x86 and Windows RT.
I don't see any way that works well for them.
Install CloudRDP into Chrome. Admittedly it does cost a small amount, but provides a proper RDP client (all of the others require a middle man somewhere). Then just enable remote desktop on your desktop.
My desktop runs Linux.
I think the big question mark would be Skype.
Google+ Hangouts work perfectly on the x86 Chromebooks I've used (including the one I'm typing this on). I would expect they'll work just fine on the ARM devices as well. And Hangout is better than Skype anyway; equal quality, just as easy to set up, but more flexible (multi-user, invite-by-phone, Hangout On Air for broadcasting and/or recording, schedulable via Google+ Events, integration with Docs, plus lots of add-on apps).
what non-IT office workers normally do on their notebooks? Web, outlook, and office suite.
That's what I do on my Chromebook. I use my desktop to write code, but the Chromebook is what I cart around to meetings, take to the couch to work on design docs and spreadsheets, do e-mail on, do presentations, etc. Works great. Especially since it has 3G and so works lots of places a normal laptop wouldn't.
The only other devices in the same category as Chromebook are eReaders like Kindle and Nook (both running a modified version of Android), and "actual" Android Tablets like the Google Nexus.
I have a Chromebook, and I have a Nexus 7 tablet (and, actually, I also have a Galaxy Tab 10.1 which doesn't get much use since I got the 7), and they are *not* in the same category. The Chromebook is a laptop. It looks and feels and works like a laptop, except that it only "runs" web apps (which isn't quite the same as saying it only runs a browser, but close enough). However, given that 95% of what I do with a laptop is web apps, that's plenty. The tablet is a tablet; it's good for (very) light e-mail and docs, plus entertainment (games, video, books, etc.).
I need to see if I can get Chrome Remote working on my desktop. If I can do that, then I can also code on my Chromebook (albeit painfully, due to the difference between one 11" screen and two 24" screens), and it'll go from 95% of a laptop to 99%.
So, not counting lunch hours, that's 42 hours per week.
Hehe. I'm surprised no one has called me on my math. 8*3+10*2 = 44 hours per week. Sshh, don't tell my wife. She didn't catch my mistake when I went through it with her, and I like having those extra four hours.
[I] worked from home from 10 PM until 3 AM [...]. That sort of thing seems to happen once per month[.]
So what I actually do is leave home every day at 6:00 AM and arrive home at 6:00 PM.
The way I read it you devote more like 55-60 hours per week to work on average.
5 * 12 = 60 hours that I'm away from home, yes. Of that, five hours is commuting (30 minutes each way), six is working out, and five hours is for lunch. If I wanted to give up on the cycling and work through lunch I could easily reduce that away time to something more like 45-50 hours, but I like the exercise and I like to take a nice break in the middle of the day. And I suppose I could move closer to the office, but I also like being out where my house is surrounded by farms, where I have rabbits, foxes, coyotes and deer running around.
It's all about tradeoffs.
So... if you sleep for six-eight hours, you actually only spend six-four hours with your family?
About that, plus weekends, holidays, etc.
That astrix is incredibly deceiving unless you read it.
Huh? What's deceiving about it? In a week I spend 42 hours working, five hours eating lunch, five hours commuting, six hours working out and 49 hours sleeping, which leaves 61 hours for personal and family time.
It's actually quite amazing how many people don't add up hours in their life and instead just continue the day in and out grind. We all have a finite amount of time, you are no different.
I don't understand what your point is. I know perfectly well where the hours in my day go.
As for cost of living... I'm at the Boulder, Colorado office (which is hiring, BTW :-)).
Sadly, I'm used to my 5 minute commute from Highlands Ranch. Boulder is pricey too, but I guess if you live in Broomfield, it's cheap.
Or go north, east or west. Doesn't matter which direction, prices drop rapidly.
Any engineer would loved to be paid 127,001
The future is bleak, then, with IPv6 on the horizon.
I work at Google and don't have long hours. I am on an on call rotation, but for a lot of teams, there are dedicated people on call, with a resulting salary bonus. (And the work load for being on call is really very minimal.)
+1.
I'm not on an on-call rotation at the moment (though I'm thinking about asking to get back on it, because the extra cash is quite good). I typically work 7:30 AM to 4:30 PM, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and 6:30 AM to 5:30 PM Tuesday and Thursday(*). So, not counting lunch hours, that's 42 hours per week. On occasion I put in some extra hours during crunch time, but that's not common. For example, two weeks ago I worked a normal day, then got home, spent some time with the family and then worked from home from 10 PM until 3 AM to get some stuff done to meet a deadline before an internal release (dogfood release). That sort of thing seems to happen once per month or so, but outside of that I pretty much work a 40-hour week.
So, no, the hours at Google aren't insane. Now, *lots* of Google employees do work very long hours, but that's because they want to. I would actually like to work more myself, because I really enjoy what I do, but I also like time at home with the family and I have church responsibilities. Perhaps in a few years when my kids have all moved out I'll ramp up my hours. In the meantime, no one is putting the slightest pressure on me to work more. Now, I could probably do more if I worked more, and maybe eke out a slightly higher performance rating, which might translate into more money... but I'm already pretty comfortable with my compensation, and my manager is quite happy with my current performance.
As for cost of living... I'm at the Boulder, Colorado office (which is hiring, BTW :-)).
(*) The reason for my MWF / TTh schedule split is that I ride my bicycle to work MWF. It's a 25-mile ride so when you include showering time it takes me about 90 minutes each way. So what I actually do is leave home every day at 6:00 AM and arrive home at 6:00 PM. The days I ride that works out to a 7:30-4:30 work schedule. The days I drive, I work the two hours "saved" from my bike commute.
It's probably completely unrelated to the fact that Google has a huge presence in Boulder, CO now.
As part of said presence, I'd have to disagree with the "huge" characterization (which isn't stated in the article). It's growing, but still a fairly small office. Certainly dwarfed by the nearby IBM presence, as well as that of many other large tech companies (many storage companies in particular have huge presences here). To give you an accurate idea of the size, the space mentioned in the article is an old Circuit City store, remodeled for Google's use, and it constitutes 90% of the Google office space. There's also a small building shared with a Key Bank branch and another small building shared with a local law firm.
On the scale of the large tech company campuses in the Boulder area, Google is barely noticeable. Its most notable characteristic is that it is in Boulder City proper, while most other companies have built in less expensive surrounding areas. Should Google Boulder ever grow to the point where it needs serious space it will almost certainly also move out of the city, since real estate in Boulder is crazy expensive.
Polis is probably aware of Google's presence in Boulder, but I doubt it has much to do with his position, since it's strictly small potatoes compared to other area tech companies.
(*) I should mention that Google Boulder is aggressively hiring software engineers. If you live in the area, or would like to, and have the talent Google looks for, send me an e-mail and I'll hook you up with the recruiters. Boulder's primary projects are billing/payments, Docs/Drive and electronic couponing (the Zavers acquisition), plus various other small teams.
Right now Google's not hurting, so they can be more selective in what thy do with that data. But when times get tough, and they probably will, Google will resort to all sorts of tricks to keep that cash cow mooing.
Why do you think that? Please keep in mind that due to the structure of the stock voting rights, the shareholders have zero power to force Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt to do anything, and given that the terms laid out in Google's IPO make clear that Google will sacrifice short-term profits for long-term profits and will focus on treating users well even at the expense of profitability, there's no way to pressure them via the SEC or courts, either, since shareholders already bought into all that. Also, Page, Brin and Schmidt all already have more money than they could ever spend, and none of them appear to be motivated by money as a way to keep score, so hard times won't materially affect them on a personal basis.
What you're saying is possible, certainly, but I see no indication that it's likely.
and do not forget to use different computers for each site as well because they track your use and know if you are using a different name on each site. So you need one computer for Google, one for Gmail, one for Youtube, etc.
Alternatively, don't log in (which means don't use Gmail, at least not via the web UI), and use the "keep my opt outs" add-on which Google provides so that Google is kept aware that you don't want to be tracked. Unless you're looking for a way to justify to your wife that you really have to have a dozen computers.
It is false to claim that an algorithm is neutral because algorithms can be discarded until a favourable algorithm is found.
Assuming there's some evidence that such a selection criterion was used. And I doubt there's *that* much freedom in algorithm selection... remember that the chosen algorithm has to work for all of the rest of the cases in a fashion that's not too sub-optimal.