I think the better test will really be for when Froyo gets ported to the G1 and seeing how Flash performs then
Have you heard definitively that Froyo will be ported to the G1? I was under the impression that Froyo and even Eclair are too big to fit on the G1. I'd love to be proven wrong -- I have two old G1s sitting in a drawer and would love to put Froyo on them. Froyo arrived on my N1 last night, and I'm very happy with it so far; there are lots of nice incremental improvements. But as far as I know, nobody is working on shrinking Froyo down enough to fit the G1.
-- Laura
Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Google, but I have no inside knowledge of what the Android folks are doing. I didn't even know Froyo had been released until I saw the giant styrofoam frozen yogurt in front of building 44.
Can't we have a legal system that would just dismiss something so ridiculous and unreasonable???
This actually happened just the other day. A court in Washington state struck down the AT&T long distance Terms of Service. The court ruled that the TOS was "'unconscionable,' meaning that no reasonable individual would have agreed to them had he or she realized their full scope." (quoting from the Ars Technica story).
A PDF of the decision is here. The interesting bits seem to start around page 23 or so, though my eyes glazed over fairly quickly.
I almost ended up on the jury for a murder trial in California a few years ago. During the jury selection, the judge explained some of the rules of evidence, probably to see which jurors understood them. The rule for circumstantial evidence -- anything that's not eyewitness testimony, basically -- sounded pretty simple. For any given piece of circumstantial evidence, if there's a "reasonable" explanation for that evidence that supports innocence then the jury is supposed to accept that explanation even if it means erring on the side of innocence. If there isn't a reasonable explanation that supports innocence, then the jury can use it as evidence of guilt.
I'm not a lawyer and I probably have some of the details wrong, but those are the basics as I remember them. After I learned those rules, the verdict in the OJ case made a little bit more sense. I can see how a jury following those rules could have decided that some of the evidence supported him being innocent.
>Actually, Google developers have *Linux* boxes by default,
True, on the desktop.
>so many of these people are opting for Mac over *Linux*.
Not true, mostly. Most developers have Linux desktops, since most of us work on server-side applications. (Many of us have more than one, actually. I have an extra one that runs my group's continuous builds and tests.) But engineers who are working on Windows or Mac apps have a desktop box running one of those. Or maybe more than one if they work on multiple platforms. All of us also get a laptop if we want one. We can choose between a Mac or PC laptop. Most of the folks with PCs run XP on them, but some run various flavors of Linux. (I have an XP laptop because that's what I still use at home, mostly due to Photoshop and Lightroom. I dumped the Mach for NT 4.0 back in the days when Macs had no protected memory or hardware multitasking and crashed all the time. Next time I upgrade my home machine I may switch both back to the Mac.)
The reason I said "mostly" is that some people I know run their main monitors off of their Mac laptops and do remote X sessions on their Linux boxes so that they get the best of both worlds: the Mac UI and all the development tools on Linux.
One thing I love about working at Google is that they give us all the tools we need to do our jobs. You get all the computers you need, and primary workstations come with a 30" monitor or two 24" ones (your choice) and a ton of RAM. If you need another software package (say, an IDE) or more RAM, you just file a "ticket" asking for it, and it shows up on your desk a few days later. Most items don't need approval. I just asked for an 8 Gb RAM upgrade for one of my workstations recently (for analyzing insanely large heap dumps) and got it with no questions asked.
Other people have said most of this already, but the ones I've seen used the most are:
Swish-E: easy to set up, easy to script from Perl or whatever, but not very good results. I used this on a web site I ran about 7 or 8 years ago, and it worked pretty well, especially considering the state of the art at the time. I can't remember the licensing terms.
Lucene: Parses lots of document formats, easy to program in Java, works pretty well. Apache license
Google Mini: Easy to set up, good indexing, limited repository size. Closed source.
Google Search Appliance: Expensive, fast, big repository size. I don't know anything about administering it. Closed source.
Disclaimer: I work for Google but not on search. I definitely think you should use only as big a hammer as you need for the job, or maybe a little bigger to allow for growth. I've even seen Lucene used on small, internal, Java projects at Google where our full-blown web search infrastructure would have been the equivalent of a thermonuclear flyswatter.
...which during the course of the fight, the crystal ball falls over and shatters....
turns out that the destruction of the crystal ball did not destroy the world/universe/whatever, but instead ended up creating 'reflections' of the world identical to the original.
Interesting. I work at Google, and "shard" is Google-speak for one "partition" of a distributed system. It's also a verb: "shard it" is the usual response when someone has to write a system dealing with large amounts of data. And last year, some Google engineers open-sourced a sharded version of Hibernate (an ORM layer for Java) a year or so ago, and some of the papers on research.google.com talk about this technique too, I think. And on a lighter note, a couple of years ago someone replaced the "Shred-it" signs on some of our shredding bins with "Shard-it" signs.
I don't know what the derivation of Google's "shard" term is, because our internal glossary doesn't have an etymology section and I'm not enough of an old-timer to know the history. I'll have to ask around.
The original quote was from Gerald Ford's speech when he took the oath of office as President after Nixon resigned, believe it or not. Trudeau (or Zonk) was poking fun at Ford.
Marooned in Realtime and A Deepness in the Sky are both great reads on their own
Agreed.
but the first is a sequel and the other is a prequel, if I'm not mistaken.
Marooned in Realtime is a very long-range sequel to The Peace War and it definitely makes sense to read The Peace War first.
A Deepness in the Sky is set in the same universe as A Fire Upon the Deep, but about 30,000 years earlier. The two books have almost no plot elements or characters in common, however, and I don't think it really matters what order you read them in.
I keep hoping that Mr Vinge will write a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, which I consider to be his best book and definately top 10 SF all time.
I'm not sure whether I like this one or A Deepness in the Sky better. Both were excellent. Vernor Vinge is one of the best there is at inventing convincing, very non-human, and very alien aliens. C. J. Cherryh can be good at that too at times, but I think Vinge is better, at least in these two books.
So google might build a special distribution for it's data centre but it's desktops would be a default popular install i.e. Ubuntu.
You win the prize. Most engineers at Google use Ubuntu, though it's a somewhat customized Ubuntu that integrates features like good LDAP support, kerberized NFS, etc. that are important in a company this size. (I'm posting this from a workstation running Kubuntu right now, bored while waiting for a build to finish.) Our excellent internal IT folks have made it very easy to set up a new Linux box and get it on the internal network with all of this stuff configured correctly. I've actually got three Ubuntu boxes piled around my desk at the moment, plus one Windows (yuck) laptop because I'm too lazy to try to make Linux play nice on a laptop.
I'm not involved in much open source work (aside from using it) but as far as I know Google contributes back to a fair number of OSS projects and organizations including GNU/FSF and Linux, plus Webwork/Struts and various other Java projects. I don't know too many details, though. There are also a number of smaller OSS projects started by Googlers; the one I'm most familiar with is the Guice dependency injection framework for Java because I've been using it a lot in my work lately. You can browse around on code.google.com to find others.
Disclaimer: I (obviously) work for Google in engineering, but not on any open-source projects. Nothing I've said above is new or secret; you can find articles about this kind of thing with a bit of searching. There was an interview with Wayne Rosing in ACM Queue a couple of years ago that talked about some of it, and a more recent one with Douglas Merrill in another magazine or newspaper.
Unfortunately, in the U.S., it's quite common for stores to force you to show a receipt before they'll let you leave.
"Force" and "let" aren't quite correct, IMHO. Many electronics stores, here in the South Bay at any rate, do try this. Fry's Electronics is one of the worst offenders -- they always have one or two people stationed at the exit with pink highlighters who ask to see your recept and want to scribble something on it. (I always wondered : are these the Fry's employees who aren't good enough to work a cash register? Sad.) This pisses me off to no end. I just paid them my good money for something and now they're treating me like a suspected shoplifter!?
This doesn't annoy me quite enough to make me stop shopping at Fry's when I need something that only they have. (Though I do shop at Central Computer more than I used to.) But at Fry's I always just walk on by the "loss prevention" folks at the exit. If they get insistent, I say "no thanks" and keep walking. A friend who was with em one time was amazed the first time saw me do this, but what are the Fry's folks really going to do? They can't really "force" me to show them my recept, and I think they (or their management) aren't dumb enough to try to get the cops involved. I'm sure the Sunnyvale police have better things to do with their time. And I'm sure they'd be quite unamused if the Fry's folks tried to physically restrain someone for not showing a receipt.
Ken Thompson, that is in the "award winner" category deserves more than Linus to go in the Tech one.
Except Ken has won a Turing Award, which apparently trumps just being a techie.
FWIW, my favorite part of Meng's Presidential Gallery (the real one in B43 at Google, not the Picasa page) is the photo of his daughter labeled "Future President of the United States".
His wiki also states that he had some very racist and unfriendly things to say about Tiger Woods. He's not trying to get that taken out, oh no. He wants references to drug use taken out.
The difference is that he actually did say those things about Tiger Woods. He eventually apologized, publicly. I'm sure he wishes he could get a do-over for all-that, but he can't. But the references to drug use and wife-beating are (he says) untrue, so he's understandably upset. If it were me I'd be upset about the wife-beating accusations (if I had a wife), though I couldn't really care less about the drugs and alcohol.
Judging from he workspace pictures, it appears Google subscribes to the idea that cubicles without high walls promote communication and interworking among employees.
Yes. That's probably my #1 annoyance about working here. Almost nobody has a private office; it's all shared offices and big, shared cubicles, often with low walls. I think some of it is just because we're growing so quickly we're often out of space, but there's also the idea that it promotes collaboration. And of course the founders were grad students, who often work in crowded environments.
If you have a popular office- or cube-mate, it can be very distracting. I had private offices or cubes at my last few jobs, and it took me a while to get used to this environment. I've started listening to my iPod a lot when it gets noisy. But I figure that if this is the most annoying thing about my job, I'm doing pretty well.
Umm, last I checked, all Google engineers used dual 24" monitors.
True, mostly. Most of us have dual 24" monitors. (I just switched mine into portrait orientation because I was getting neck strain from my desktop being so wide.:-) I keep my IDE on one monitor and everything else on the other one. But I know some people who prefer to use just one, some who have three 20" monitors and so on. They'll give us anything we ask for, within reason. It's very nice, after working at companies that were either too cheap or too bureaucratic to give engineers the tools they needed to do their jobs.
I think you should go for the CS degree, but only if you're genuinely interested in some CS topics like algorithm analysis, language design, advanced data structures, distributed systems, machine learning, etc. If you like that sort of thing, then you'd probably enjoy the CS program and the kinds of jobs you could get with the degree afterward. But if you're thinking of going back for the degree just so your resume looks better, I'd recommend against it. Your years of experience as a developer should matter more than a degree for most jobs, at least at companies that you'd want to work for.
In a past life, I was a manager at IBM for a while, and I had a very good team of engineers. About half of them had a CS background, but the other half had degrees in things like percussion and philosophy. My degree is in geophysics. And one guy on the team was still working on his associates degree. A person's degree didn't seem particularly correlated with how smart they were or how much they got done. The percussionist and philosopher ended up writing some of our trickier, more algorithmic code.
On the other hand, here at Google where I work now we seem to have a pretty strong emphasis on degrees, especially for people without much industry experience. It makes some sense, given the huge volumes of data we work with and the interesting algorithms we have to use to do it. But still, it's possible to get into even this kind of environment without a CS degree if you have some knowledge and experience in the right areas.
Um, editors? She "is chief architect for next-generation systems software at IBM Systems Group's Quasar Design Center". (FTFA) She's not "IBM's Chief Architect". I don't think IBM even has a Chief Architect.
The OS is a commodity, $9.99 at Walmart with Office is the Windows future.
I wish this were true, and it probably is true in the enterprise market. But I think it's unlikely in the home or consumer market in the near term. Items become commodities (in the non-pork-belly sense) when there are many suppliers, producing nearly interchangeable products, competing mostly on price. We're not there yet in the OS world. There are still only a few major players: Windows, Linux, various flavors of Unix, and assorted niche OSs. Price doesn't seem to matter much to consumers and OEMs: Linux is mostly free but Windows still has huge market share.
Even more important, the OSs aren't yet interchangeable. With a commodity like wheat or gasoline, it doesn't matter what kind you buy, because they're all basically the same (marketing nonsense like "Techron" notwithstanding). With computers, the OS still matters: it affects the user interface, security, training, and the applications you can run. There's also the network effect, where people tend to use an OS, or any other kind of software, because all their friends use it and they can get free support.
For what it's worth, I use and like Linux (primarily Ubuntu) at work. I mostly develop in languages like Java and Python, where "write once, run anywhere" is now finally true. However, I still use XP at home. I'm almost to the point where I can dump it, but I still use Photoshop occasionally (I hate the Gimp's UI), plus a few other tools (EAC, Quicken, some MP3 tools, a few games) that either run only on Windows and Mac or don't have easy to use Linux equivalents.
Ditto. I've used Checkout for over a year (disclaimer: I work at google) and have never had any major problems. It seems pretty usable, and it's fairly easy to buy things.
The one problem I had was a time (a few months ago?) when Checkout wouldn't let me log in from certain browsers, but that's since been fixed. It was probably some sort of cookie confusion due to the fact that I have at least 3 Google accounts: an old Gmail account, my own domain that's hosted at Google, and my work google.com account.
The funny thing is that they do actually take months to decide. They seem to interview a lot of candidates, then make a decision. If you are one of the first ones to be interviewed in a batch, you can get to wait for a long time.
It can take a long time to decide, but I don't think it has anything to do with "batches", just a fairly long, involved, and somewhat bureaucratic hiring process. As far as I know, each candidate is considered solely on their own merits. The case you described (not being contacted after an interview) sounds like a plain old screw-up, and I can't think of any good excuses for it.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and am a bit involved in the hiring process, as is almost everyone in Google engineering.
It's not the sign of an expert programmer (something I'd say is very hard to discern from a resume or even an interview period) and it's not the sign of a bozo with no useful experience or skills, either. I've worked with my fair share of people who were, generally, smart programmers but who also spent weeks reinventing the wheel....
Good point. At work, I'm in the middle of writing a document on how to write Java code in our environment, because I got tired of seeing people reinvent the wheel when I reviewed their code. But I think you can probably tell whether someone has this sort of basic familiarity with the language and tools during the interview process, without worrying about certification. I agree that a certificate is probably an assurance that someone has been exposed to the basics of that technology; I'm just not sure that's a very useful data point since it's so easy to determine in other ways.
We have a good knowledge of the Java programming language itself but very little exposure to J2EE. Other teams in the company are using J2EE daily -- hence the push for certification. What would be the best approach to be successful in getting the J2EE certification knowing that we won't work or get formal training on J2EE? Is it a desperate cause?"
Er, get a new job? A company that cares about certification, especially in a technology that you're not even using, doesn't sound like a good one to work for. And I'm not sure certification will be good for your career. When I see it on a resume, my first thought isn't "Wow, here's an expert!"; it's "Why did this person need to get certification?" For J2EE in particular, I suspect certification is going to involve technologies like EJBs and JSF that aren't all that useful or popular anyway, at least in the companies where I've worked.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the better test will really be for when Froyo gets ported to the G1 and seeing how Flash performs then
Have you heard definitively that Froyo will be ported to the G1? I was under the impression that Froyo and even Eclair are too big to fit on the G1. I'd love to be proven wrong -- I have two old G1s sitting in a drawer and would love to put Froyo on them. Froyo arrived on my N1 last night, and I'm very happy with it so far; there are lots of nice incremental improvements. But as far as I know, nobody is working on shrinking Froyo down enough to fit the G1.
-- Laura
Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Google, but I have no inside knowledge of what the Android folks are doing. I didn't even know Froyo had been released until I saw the giant styrofoam frozen yogurt in front of building 44.
Can't we have a legal system that would just dismiss something so ridiculous and unreasonable???
This actually happened just the other day. A court in Washington state struck down the AT&T long distance Terms of Service. The court ruled that the TOS was "'unconscionable,' meaning that no reasonable individual would have agreed to them had he or she realized their full scope." (quoting from the Ars Technica story).
A PDF of the decision is here. The interesting bits seem to start around page 23 or so, though my eyes glazed over fairly quickly.
-- Laura
but look at it like a juror might....
I almost ended up on the jury for a murder trial in California a few years ago. During the jury selection, the judge explained some of the rules of evidence, probably to see which jurors understood them. The rule for circumstantial evidence -- anything that's not eyewitness testimony, basically -- sounded pretty simple. For any given piece of circumstantial evidence, if there's a "reasonable" explanation for that evidence that supports innocence then the jury is supposed to accept that explanation even if it means erring on the side of innocence. If there isn't a reasonable explanation that supports innocence, then the jury can use it as evidence of guilt.
I'm not a lawyer and I probably have some of the details wrong, but those are the basics as I remember them. After I learned those rules, the verdict in the OJ case made a little bit more sense. I can see how a jury following those rules could have decided that some of the evidence supported him being innocent.
>Actually, Google developers have *Linux* boxes by default,
True, on the desktop.
>so many of these people are opting for Mac over *Linux*.
Not true, mostly. Most developers have Linux desktops, since most of us work on server-side applications. (Many of us have more than one, actually. I have an extra one that runs my group's continuous builds and tests.) But engineers who are working on Windows or Mac apps have a desktop box running one of those. Or maybe more than one if they work on multiple platforms. All of us also get a laptop if we want one. We can choose between a Mac or PC laptop. Most of the folks with PCs run XP on them, but some run various flavors of Linux. (I have an XP laptop because that's what I still use at home, mostly due to Photoshop and Lightroom. I dumped the Mach for NT 4.0 back in the days when Macs had no protected memory or hardware multitasking and crashed all the time. Next time I upgrade my home machine I may switch both back to the Mac.)
The reason I said "mostly" is that some people I know run their main monitors off of their Mac laptops and do remote X sessions on their Linux boxes so that they get the best of both worlds: the Mac UI and all the development tools on Linux.
One thing I love about working at Google is that they give us all the tools we need to do our jobs. You get all the computers you need, and primary workstations come with a 30" monitor or two 24" ones (your choice) and a ton of RAM. If you need another software package (say, an IDE) or more RAM, you just file a "ticket" asking for it, and it shows up on your desk a few days later. Most items don't need approval. I just asked for an 8 Gb RAM upgrade for one of my workstations recently (for analyzing insanely large heap dumps) and got it with no questions asked.
-- Laura
Other people have said most of this already, but the ones I've seen used the most are:
Disclaimer: I work for Google but not on search. I definitely think you should use only as big a hammer as you need for the job, or maybe a little bigger to allow for growth. I've even seen Lucene used on small, internal, Java projects at Google where our full-blown web search infrastructure would have been the equivalent of a thermonuclear flyswatter.
...which during the course of the fight, the crystal ball falls over and shatters.... turns out that the destruction of the crystal ball did not destroy the world/universe/whatever, but instead ended up creating 'reflections' of the world identical to the original.Interesting. I work at Google, and "shard" is Google-speak for one "partition" of a distributed system. It's also a verb: "shard it" is the usual response when someone has to write a system dealing with large amounts of data. And last year, some Google engineers open-sourced a sharded version of Hibernate (an ORM layer for Java) a year or so ago, and some of the papers on research.google.com talk about this technique too, I think. And on a lighter note, a couple of years ago someone replaced the "Shred-it" signs on some of our shredding bins with "Shard-it" signs.
I don't know what the derivation of Google's "shard" term is, because our internal glossary doesn't have an etymology section and I'm not enough of an old-timer to know the history. I'll have to ask around.
The original quote was from Gerald Ford's speech when he took the oath of office as President after Nixon resigned, believe it or not. Trudeau (or Zonk) was poking fun at Ford.
-- Laura, feeling pedantic
Agreed.
but the first is a sequel and the other is a prequel, if I'm not mistaken.Marooned in Realtime is a very long-range sequel to The Peace War and it definitely makes sense to read The Peace War first. A Deepness in the Sky is set in the same universe as A Fire Upon the Deep, but about 30,000 years earlier. The two books have almost no plot elements or characters in common, however, and I don't think it really matters what order you read them in.
I keep hoping that Mr Vinge will write a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, which I consider to be his best book and definately top 10 SF all time.I'm not sure whether I like this one or A Deepness in the Sky better. Both were excellent. Vernor Vinge is one of the best there is at inventing convincing, very non-human, and very alien aliens. C. J. Cherryh can be good at that too at times, but I think Vinge is better, at least in these two books.
You win the prize. Most engineers at Google use Ubuntu, though it's a somewhat customized Ubuntu that integrates features like good LDAP support, kerberized NFS, etc. that are important in a company this size. (I'm posting this from a workstation running Kubuntu right now, bored while waiting for a build to finish.) Our excellent internal IT folks have made it very easy to set up a new Linux box and get it on the internal network with all of this stuff configured correctly. I've actually got three Ubuntu boxes piled around my desk at the moment, plus one Windows (yuck) laptop because I'm too lazy to try to make Linux play nice on a laptop.
I'm not involved in much open source work (aside from using it) but as far as I know Google contributes back to a fair number of OSS projects and organizations including GNU/FSF and Linux, plus Webwork/Struts and various other Java projects. I don't know too many details, though. There are also a number of smaller OSS projects started by Googlers; the one I'm most familiar with is the Guice dependency injection framework for Java because I've been using it a lot in my work lately. You can browse around on code.google.com to find others.
Disclaimer: I (obviously) work for Google in engineering, but not on any open-source projects. Nothing I've said above is new or secret; you can find articles about this kind of thing with a bit of searching. There was an interview with Wayne Rosing in ACM Queue a couple of years ago that talked about some of it, and a more recent one with Douglas Merrill in another magazine or newspaper.
"Force" and "let" aren't quite correct, IMHO. Many electronics stores, here in the South Bay at any rate, do try this. Fry's Electronics is one of the worst offenders -- they always have one or two people stationed at the exit with pink highlighters who ask to see your recept and want to scribble something on it. (I always wondered : are these the Fry's employees who aren't good enough to work a cash register? Sad.) This pisses me off to no end. I just paid them my good money for something and now they're treating me like a suspected shoplifter!?
This doesn't annoy me quite enough to make me stop shopping at Fry's when I need something that only they have. (Though I do shop at Central Computer more than I used to.) But at Fry's I always just walk on by the "loss prevention" folks at the exit. If they get insistent, I say "no thanks" and keep walking. A friend who was with em one time was amazed the first time saw me do this, but what are the Fry's folks really going to do? They can't really "force" me to show them my recept, and I think they (or their management) aren't dumb enough to try to get the cops involved. I'm sure the Sunnyvale police have better things to do with their time. And I'm sure they'd be quite unamused if the Fry's folks tried to physically restrain someone for not showing a receipt.
I suspect it has something to do with this.
Except Ken has won a Turing Award, which apparently trumps just being a techie.
FWIW, my favorite part of Meng's Presidential Gallery (the real one in B43 at Google, not the Picasa page) is the photo of his daughter labeled "Future President of the United States".
The difference is that he actually did say those things about Tiger Woods. He eventually apologized, publicly. I'm sure he wishes he could get a do-over for all-that, but he can't. But the references to drug use and wife-beating are (he says) untrue, so he's understandably upset. If it were me I'd be upset about the wife-beating accusations (if I had a wife), though I couldn't really care less about the drugs and alcohol.
Should CIO's stop using Verizon, ATT and XO until they clean up their act?
Yes
Yes. That's probably my #1 annoyance about working here. Almost nobody has a private office; it's all shared offices and big, shared cubicles, often with low walls. I think some of it is just because we're growing so quickly we're often out of space, but there's also the idea that it promotes collaboration. And of course the founders were grad students, who often work in crowded environments.
If you have a popular office- or cube-mate, it can be very distracting. I had private offices or cubes at my last few jobs, and it took me a while to get used to this environment. I've started listening to my iPod a lot when it gets noisy. But I figure that if this is the most annoying thing about my job, I'm doing pretty well.
True, mostly. Most of us have dual 24" monitors. (I just switched mine into portrait orientation because I was getting neck strain from my desktop being so wide. :-) I keep my IDE on one monitor and everything else on the other one. But I know some people who prefer to use just one, some who have three 20" monitors and so on. They'll give us anything we ask for, within reason. It's very nice, after working at companies that were either too cheap or too bureaucratic to give engineers the tools they needed to do their jobs.
God, I hope not!
Amen!
On a semi-related note, here's my favorite PowerPoint presentation, which someone posts a link to every time PowerPoint is discussed at work.
I'm replying a bit late, but what the hell...
I think you should go for the CS degree, but only if you're genuinely interested in some CS topics like algorithm analysis, language design, advanced data structures, distributed systems, machine learning, etc. If you like that sort of thing, then you'd probably enjoy the CS program and the kinds of jobs you could get with the degree afterward. But if you're thinking of going back for the degree just so your resume looks better, I'd recommend against it. Your years of experience as a developer should matter more than a degree for most jobs, at least at companies that you'd want to work for.
In a past life, I was a manager at IBM for a while, and I had a very good team of engineers. About half of them had a CS background, but the other half had degrees in things like percussion and philosophy. My degree is in geophysics. And one guy on the team was still working on his associates degree. A person's degree didn't seem particularly correlated with how smart they were or how much they got done. The percussionist and philosopher ended up writing some of our trickier, more algorithmic code.
On the other hand, here at Google where I work now we seem to have a pretty strong emphasis on degrees, especially for people without much industry experience. It makes some sense, given the huge volumes of data we work with and the interesting algorithms we have to use to do it. But still, it's possible to get into even this kind of environment without a CS degree if you have some knowledge and experience in the right areas.
Um, editors? She "is chief architect for next-generation systems software at IBM Systems Group's Quasar Design Center". (FTFA) She's not "IBM's Chief Architect". I don't think IBM even has a Chief Architect.
The OS is a commodity, $9.99 at Walmart with Office is the Windows future.
I wish this were true, and it probably is true in the enterprise market. But I think it's unlikely in the home or consumer market in the near term. Items become commodities (in the non-pork-belly sense) when there are many suppliers, producing nearly interchangeable products, competing mostly on price. We're not there yet in the OS world. There are still only a few major players: Windows, Linux, various flavors of Unix, and assorted niche OSs. Price doesn't seem to matter much to consumers and OEMs: Linux is mostly free but Windows still has huge market share.
Even more important, the OSs aren't yet interchangeable. With a commodity like wheat or gasoline, it doesn't matter what kind you buy, because they're all basically the same (marketing nonsense like "Techron" notwithstanding). With computers, the OS still matters: it affects the user interface, security, training, and the applications you can run. There's also the network effect, where people tend to use an OS, or any other kind of software, because all their friends use it and they can get free support.
For what it's worth, I use and like Linux (primarily Ubuntu) at work. I mostly develop in languages like Java and Python, where "write once, run anywhere" is now finally true. However, I still use XP at home. I'm almost to the point where I can dump it, but I still use Photoshop occasionally (I hate the Gimp's UI), plus a few other tools (EAC, Quicken, some MP3 tools, a few games) that either run only on Windows and Mac or don't have easy to use Linux equivalents.
Ditto. I've used Checkout for over a year (disclaimer: I work at google) and have never had any major problems. It seems pretty usable, and it's fairly easy to buy things.
The one problem I had was a time (a few months ago?) when Checkout wouldn't let me log in from certain browsers, but that's since been fixed. It was probably some sort of cookie confusion due to the fact that I have at least 3 Google accounts: an old Gmail account, my own domain that's hosted at Google, and my work google.com account.
I like this one better.
It can take a long time to decide, but I don't think it has anything to do with "batches", just a fairly long, involved, and somewhat bureaucratic hiring process. As far as I know, each candidate is considered solely on their own merits. The case you described (not being contacted after an interview) sounds like a plain old screw-up, and I can't think of any good excuses for it.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and am a bit involved in the hiring process, as is almost everyone in Google engineering.
Good point. At work, I'm in the middle of writing a document on how to write Java code in our environment, because I got tired of seeing people reinvent the wheel when I reviewed their code. But I think you can probably tell whether someone has this sort of basic familiarity with the language and tools during the interview process, without worrying about certification. I agree that a certificate is probably an assurance that someone has been exposed to the basics of that technology; I'm just not sure that's a very useful data point since it's so easy to determine in other ways.
Er, get a new job? A company that cares about certification, especially in a technology that you're not even using, doesn't sound like a good one to work for. And I'm not sure certification will be good for your career. When I see it on a resume, my first thought isn't "Wow, here's an expert!"; it's "Why did this person need to get certification?" For J2EE in particular, I suspect certification is going to involve technologies like EJBs and JSF that aren't all that useful or popular anyway, at least in the companies where I've worked.