Re:Google - what a great company
on
Google Code Jam 2004
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· Score: 4, Interesting
And it will help open source as well.
I thought the kind of exercises used in these competitions were rather contrived and "hard" computer science problems... I am not sure the concepts developed could be easily applied to, say, developing a better desktop or interoperating better with proprietary applications/file formats.
However some of the FOSS community best hackers could register and donate any prizes they net to their projects;)
My only gripe with Firefox was when they stopped shipping Qute as the default theme. Mind you, the screenshot on the new home page clearly shows that it was taken using Qute:)
This of course is not a big deal. I still get Qute whenever I have to install Firefox.
They could do all this and more, but I wonder if it really interests them to allow third-party notification software as opposed to their own? They can use all the brand recognition they can get, you know:)
I guess you're looking to be modded Funny:) If you're not...
Yeah, not only is the Google Office Suite better and more stable than MS Office; the GoogleOS is finally ready for prime time
And this may as well be why Google actually represents more than a threat to Microsoft. It is not about the desktop operating system anymore; a new breed of software companies is out there using the Internet as their distribution channel. Google, Amazon, eBay, etc., are all software companies in disguise. Typically, you don't pay to use their software; advertisement and special services takes care of that. But still, you access their servers to use their software in order to get your information processed.
As broadband becomes ubiquitous, we should expect more and more innovative uses of the Internet (note I said the Internet, not necessarily the Web...) As for MS, how much more can they really grow? New machines cannot sustain their level of growth forever, and the users will not migrate to their next version of Windows or Office suite just because; they are now finding themselves diverting towards new initiatives and into new markets where they actually have to (gasp!) compete, lest they lose relevance in the larger scheme.
I don't see MS disappering anytime soon, but certainly it is not the good ol' times where they could just crush away their competition, and they are worried about that. Whether they have reason enough to be worried or not is up for debate, but just like with people, stress can be more harmful to companies that the actual situation they're stressing about.
Most of these ideas have been said before many times, and that includes several Slashdotters. You can go look for the posts yourself.
Funny, I was just thinking of this a couple of hours ago...
We all know Google has been deemed to be the best positioned company to compete with Microsoft. The big fear of course is that MS will use their desktop monopoly to blur the barrier between the offline and online worlds and make sure their offerings overtake Google in market share terms.
Now, take a look at these videos (http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/productinfo/co nceptvid/default.aspx) and you'll see that Longhorn will have this standard pop-up notification API that can be used by applications to inform the user of events. It is used prominently in these demos to show email reception.
Naturally, I would expect this to work with Exchange and possibly Hotmail (but what if Outlook/Outlook Express use it... See below), but not with Gmail.
Why is this important? Because if Gmail takes over the Web mail market, which could very well happen by 2006 given their good feature set and experience with applications at this scale, users will become accustomed to this functionality. Google will fiercely market the notifier applet to their users and everyone will have it, and they won't care less when the Longhorn applet can't notify them about new messages in their Gmail. And considering how many people I know who only have a Web mail account, I think this would allow Google to prevail by meshing and extending their user experience right into their desktops.
Then again, given that they're thinking of implementing POP access and that MS mail clients may as well use this feature, this may all be a moot point...
Seriously, I have a laptop and have been thinking for quite a while about getting another portable device. If I get a Pocket PC (or say a Zaurus) and a CF drive, I could get all of the functionality you describe plus a fair bit more capabilities without having to carry around yet another device (i.e. could leave my laptop behind at times; and don't need PDA + player)
Granted, the PocketPC+CF disk solution is probably on a different price league than this player. And the player looks very sleek and interesting. But I keep wondering if getting such a specialised piece of hardware is really the way to go.
Especially chapters 4 through 7. Albeit, judging from the review, the contents of some other chapters seems to be obvious, to say the least (Internet marketing, Web site optimization...) I guess the business bits are what developers are missing, not the technical ones! Then again, image is quite important and most of us devs only really care about internal structure, good design, etc. Seems like the book deserves spending some hours reading it to find out about those topics and whether they're obvious or not.
Too bad the Google Doodle is taken up for a couple of weeks with the Olympics, otherwise Google should put up a penguin there to acknowledge this milestone.
That Google doesn't want to talk to the press now, I understand.
That the OS/browser stats would not be too reliable (I assume they are computed similarly, via the User Agent String) I can also easily understand.
That they took the stats off Zeitgeist, however, that's what I don't get. Wonder if they are now a bit paranoid about all things media after their recent faux pas?
BTW, those who don't like reading the articles would wish all stories were like this;)
On the KB article listing the products, there is mention of one "SQL" from Microsoft. I assume that's SQL Server; as if there were not enough confusion as it is with this name...
Then again maybe I mis-read it, not impossible at all after spending just a few seconds exposed to the IT section blinding colors.
Actually I was thinking of this:) Brutus is the predecessor of Hydra and is based on FPGAs. A card is inserted on a normal PC, but it is definitely custom-built chess hardware.
Actually I read an article in Reader's Digest many years ago, about a drug lord who had surgery, not to replace his fingerprints with different ones but to "mangle" his own, so to speak. He got away with that for a while...
But certainly, I wouldn't expect (and definitely wouldn't want!!) to have this become mainstream. I agree with you in that biometrics are not up to it yet, but I just think it's not practical, not that it'll never work or something like that.
This is going to be interesting. While Shredder is a software engine running on standard hardware, I recall reading in Chessbase sometime that Hydra is an FPG-based engine. So in a sense it is a return to the days of Deep Blue and it should be interesting to see how well it fares against the current crop of "standard" engines.
You have to give it that. Personally I think this is what the music industry should have done a long time ago.
However, in addition to technical and scale issues mentioned elsewhere, I can see some points of controversy:
Associating a digital certificate with a real life identity. How are they going to check this? Also raises a lot of privacy issues and so on
Micro-payments. Remains to be seen whether that's going to work. Will it use a credit card? A custom system? Has Bitmunk got enough of a name for people to trust them?
Minimum price. One has to assume that the system won't allow transactions where the artist's (and Bitmunk's!) share is not covered...
Hmm... Come think of it, there's something fishy here. Let's say I download the song and I get to play it as much as I want. Let's assume I can't share it over non-protected P2P, but hey, I can sell it again when I no longer want to listen to it (as if there's no way to copy to another, unencumbered format, but bear with me...) Why on earth should the artist get a piece of it every time the same copy is sold? I understand they are trying to appease to RIAA & Co with this but this is not fair. It's not like they get a dime if I re-sell my CDs.
Furthermore, it may well be that the label claims copyright over the songs, thus keeping any proceeds from methods like this and not really helping the artist.
Very interesting - I would really like to see it or some equivalent take off, but until then I'll wait with plenty of healthy skepticism.
Sorry... Just realized the page mentions a 70% correlation between QWERTY and their layout. And I felt so good because I figured it out by looking at the pictures:(
Interestingly enough, if you look closely at the images your fingers would rest quite closely to where they should (i.e. the 'right' letters) when using a QWERTY layout. I don't recall seeing this in previous alternative keyboards.
Then again your remark about the price pretty much summarizes my decision not to try it out:)
I appreciate everyone's comments regarding the ad blocker extension.
Certainly, I don't think people would shy away from such a feature (I particularly like the analogy with TV done by violet16).
What I fear is that we start seeing more and more FUD about this hurting $BIG_COMPANY interests. I mean, it is happening as we (figuratively) speak. Because it's so hard to attack F/OSS over its real weaknesses, everyone with a clear interest at stake chooses a different line: national security, patents, loss of jobs, destruction of the industry... You name it.
I am fully aware that the ad blocker is an extension (I did not know, OTOH, there were similar plug-ins for IE; thanks, natmsincome). My point is not so much the actual benefits of the ad blocker to the end user, but the perception that may be created about it and the importance I humbly think should be given to "politically correct" features.
We can't stop people from developing plug-ins, let alone installing them. But we should be careful to promote too much things that are inevitably considered against the "status quo". The system is rotten, but it must be overturned from within.
Finally, I'd like to repeat my comments about companies. As important or more than individual users migrating would be corporate "success stories" of massive, mandated migrations. Again, these companies are free to choose the browser and plug-in configuration they wish, but may come under fire if, on top of approving the "other browsers", can be accused of wrong-doing in the process, as unfair as it may be.
...for the F/OSS community to leap forward. If people really want to be able to say that F/OSS is where the innovation is, this is the time to start thinking hard of the features to be included in FireFox 1.0/1.1/1.2 (not 2.0... That's too far!) that will make evident that MS is playing catch-up here.
Otherwise, as another poster stated, people will simply wait for MS to level the field with the rest of the browsers and keep using what they have.
Interesting questions, interesting challenges... Are there enough resources? Is there enough people/creativity/motivation/discipline (no bickering, forking and what not) to keep MS at bay? Can the F/OSS community focus on the users and develop widely accepted, non-controversial(*) extensions?
Exciting times - I can hardly wait to see what happens!!
(*) The reason I mention this is because FireFox has this ad blocker... Which is good and all, but at some point someone will point that out as something bad. Even if it still hits the advertiser's servers... Joe Consumer will be under the impression that this is not a "good" browser, developed by "good" people. Remember, chances are Joe Consumer does not care about adverts. And companies may find an excuse to indulge in more yummy FUD:( Fear the media, people...
I feel the article focuses too much on technological problems. Developing software is not only hard because of technical reasons. Tools have been growing in expressive power and abstraction by leaps and bounds, despite what is implied.
They make the point for domain-specific frameworks by comparing them with SQL and GUI builders. But I feel they de-emphasize the importance requirements gathering and overall developer-stakeholder interaction has. It's not about better tools from a technical point of view, it's about tools that can speak and understand a particular business point of view.
I even think one could argue that the kind of software that seems amenable to this "factory" approach is the least common. We could challenge the article's premise with the tendence that open source is bringing to the market. If value is to be found in customising and adapting software to highly specific needs, as opposed to the traditional "software as a product", then the amount of technology you can reuse, whilst important, falls second to actually capturing the things that change and that make your application unique. That certainly has quite a bit of technology to it, but again there's much more than that.
Finally, even when focusing on the technical aspects I find it rare they made no mention of stuff like product line architectures and MDA, which seem to be all the rage these days when these topics arise.
Since we receive a bonus of $8000 per patent, if all goes well we'll share well over $150,000. And there seems no reason we can't keep this game up indefinitely. We should be able to manage around 50 a year, and this nice little earner will see the mortgage paid off in no time.
Now I think that's interesting... This comes from a software engineer, not from the lawyer. Most developers (and presumably the one from the article too) despise this whole mess, yet this guy is being "gently persuaded" by his employer to play the game.
I'd rather not find myself in such a situation, for it's easy to say what I am going to say without having to actually face it. But I'd like to believe that I can be part of the solution and not of the problem; that I can be brave enough to stand by my beliefs and refuse to be part of something like this and still manage to pay my bills.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the kind of exercises used in these competitions were rather contrived and "hard" computer science problems... I am not sure the concepts developed could be easily applied to, say, developing a better desktop or interoperating better with proprietary applications/file formats.
However some of the FOSS community best hackers could register and donate any prizes they net to their projects ;)
This of course is not a big deal. I still get Qute whenever I have to install Firefox.
They could do all this and more, but I wonder if it really interests them to allow third-party notification software as opposed to their own? They can use all the brand recognition they can get, you know :)
Yeah, not only is the Google Office Suite better and more stable than MS Office; the GoogleOS is finally ready for prime time
And this may as well be why Google actually represents more than a threat to Microsoft. It is not about the desktop operating system anymore; a new breed of software companies is out there using the Internet as their distribution channel. Google, Amazon, eBay, etc., are all software companies in disguise. Typically, you don't pay to use their software; advertisement and special services takes care of that. But still, you access their servers to use their software in order to get your information processed.
As broadband becomes ubiquitous, we should expect more and more innovative uses of the Internet (note I said the Internet, not necessarily the Web...) As for MS, how much more can they really grow? New machines cannot sustain their level of growth forever, and the users will not migrate to their next version of Windows or Office suite just because; they are now finding themselves diverting towards new initiatives and into new markets where they actually have to (gasp!) compete, lest they lose relevance in the larger scheme.
I don't see MS disappering anytime soon, but certainly it is not the good ol' times where they could just crush away their competition, and they are worried about that. Whether they have reason enough to be worried or not is up for debate, but just like with people, stress can be more harmful to companies that the actual situation they're stressing about.
Most of these ideas have been said before many times, and that includes several Slashdotters. You can go look for the posts yourself.
We all know Google has been deemed to be the best positioned company to compete with Microsoft. The big fear of course is that MS will use their desktop monopoly to blur the barrier between the offline and online worlds and make sure their offerings overtake Google in market share terms.
Now, take a look at these videos (http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/productinfo/co nceptvid/default.aspx) and you'll see that Longhorn will have this standard pop-up notification API that can be used by applications to inform the user of events. It is used prominently in these demos to show email reception.
Naturally, I would expect this to work with Exchange and possibly Hotmail (but what if Outlook/Outlook Express use it... See below), but not with Gmail.
Why is this important? Because if Gmail takes over the Web mail market, which could very well happen by 2006 given their good feature set and experience with applications at this scale, users will become accustomed to this functionality. Google will fiercely market the notifier applet to their users and everyone will have it, and they won't care less when the Longhorn applet can't notify them about new messages in their Gmail. And considering how many people I know who only have a Web mail account, I think this would allow Google to prevail by meshing and extending their user experience right into their desktops.
Then again, given that they're thinking of implementing POP access and that MS mail clients may as well use this feature, this may all be a moot point...
Seriously, I have a laptop and have been thinking for quite a while about getting another portable device. If I get a Pocket PC (or say a Zaurus) and a CF drive, I could get all of the functionality you describe plus a fair bit more capabilities without having to carry around yet another device (i.e. could leave my laptop behind at times; and don't need PDA + player)
Granted, the PocketPC+CF disk solution is probably on a different price league than this player. And the player looks very sleek and interesting. But I keep wondering if getting such a specialised piece of hardware is really the way to go.
Especially chapters 4 through 7. Albeit, judging from the review, the contents of some other chapters seems to be obvious, to say the least (Internet marketing, Web site optimization...) I guess the business bits are what developers are missing, not the technical ones! Then again, image is quite important and most of us devs only really care about internal structure, good design, etc. Seems like the book deserves spending some hours reading it to find out about those topics and whether they're obvious or not.
Too bad the Google Doodle is taken up for a couple of weeks with the Olympics, otherwise Google should put up a penguin there to acknowledge this milestone.
That the OS/browser stats would not be too reliable (I assume they are computed similarly, via the User Agent String) I can also easily understand.
That they took the stats off Zeitgeist, however, that's what I don't get. Wonder if they are now a bit paranoid about all things media after their recent faux pas?
BTW, those who don't like reading the articles would wish all stories were like this ;)
I regretted a lot not being able to watch it, but apparently they also did great broadcasting the Kasparov/X3D Fritz chess match late last year:
http://www.x3dchess.com/
Then again maybe I mis-read it, not impossible at all after spending just a few seconds exposed to the IT section blinding colors.
Incidentally, I just learned that Hydra took a 2:0 lead over Shredder! http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=185 4
Actually I read an article in Reader's Digest many years ago, about a drug lord who had surgery, not to replace his fingerprints with different ones but to "mangle" his own, so to speak. He got away with that for a while...
But certainly, I wouldn't expect (and definitely wouldn't want!!) to have this become mainstream. I agree with you in that biometrics are not up to it yet, but I just think it's not practical, not that it'll never work or something like that.
This is going to be interesting. While Shredder is a software engine running on standard hardware, I recall reading in Chessbase sometime that Hydra is an FPG-based engine. So in a sense it is a return to the days of Deep Blue and it should be interesting to see how well it fares against the current crop of "standard" engines.
However, in addition to technical and scale issues mentioned elsewhere, I can see some points of controversy:
Hmm... Come think of it, there's something fishy here. Let's say I download the song and I get to play it as much as I want. Let's assume I can't share it over non-protected P2P, but hey, I can sell it again when I no longer want to listen to it (as if there's no way to copy to another, unencumbered format, but bear with me...) Why on earth should the artist get a piece of it every time the same copy is sold? I understand they are trying to appease to RIAA & Co with this but this is not fair. It's not like they get a dime if I re-sell my CDs.
Furthermore, it may well be that the label claims copyright over the songs, thus keeping any proceeds from methods like this and not really helping the artist.
Very interesting - I would really like to see it or some equivalent take off, but until then I'll wait with plenty of healthy skepticism.
I got this SysCon editorial on my inbox this morning and thought it was one of the most stupid things I've read from them in months.
I think something along those lines is already possible in Java :)
Sorry... Just realized the page mentions a 70% correlation between QWERTY and their layout. And I felt so good because I figured it out by looking at the pictures :(
Then again your remark about the price pretty much summarizes my decision not to try it out :)
Certainly, I don't think people would shy away from such a feature (I particularly like the analogy with TV done by violet16).
What I fear is that we start seeing more and more FUD about this hurting $BIG_COMPANY interests. I mean, it is happening as we (figuratively) speak. Because it's so hard to attack F/OSS over its real weaknesses, everyone with a clear interest at stake chooses a different line: national security, patents, loss of jobs, destruction of the industry... You name it.
I am fully aware that the ad blocker is an extension (I did not know, OTOH, there were similar plug-ins for IE; thanks, natmsincome). My point is not so much the actual benefits of the ad blocker to the end user, but the perception that may be created about it and the importance I humbly think should be given to "politically correct" features.
We can't stop people from developing plug-ins, let alone installing them. But we should be careful to promote too much things that are inevitably considered against the "status quo". The system is rotten, but it must be overturned from within.
Finally, I'd like to repeat my comments about companies. As important or more than individual users migrating would be corporate "success stories" of massive, mandated migrations. Again, these companies are free to choose the browser and plug-in configuration they wish, but may come under fire if, on top of approving the "other browsers", can be accused of wrong-doing in the process, as unfair as it may be.
Otherwise, as another poster stated, people will simply wait for MS to level the field with the rest of the browsers and keep using what they have.
Interesting questions, interesting challenges... Are there enough resources? Is there enough people/creativity/motivation/discipline (no bickering, forking and what not) to keep MS at bay? Can the F/OSS community focus on the users and develop widely accepted, non-controversial(*) extensions?
Exciting times - I can hardly wait to see what happens!!
(*) The reason I mention this is because FireFox has this ad blocker... Which is good and all, but at some point someone will point that out as something bad. Even if it still hits the advertiser's servers... Joe Consumer will be under the impression that this is not a "good" browser, developed by "good" people. Remember, chances are Joe Consumer does not care about adverts. And companies may find an excuse to indulge in more yummy FUD :( Fear the media, people...
They make the point for domain-specific frameworks by comparing them with SQL and GUI builders. But I feel they de-emphasize the importance requirements gathering and overall developer-stakeholder interaction has. It's not about better tools from a technical point of view, it's about tools that can speak and understand a particular business point of view.
I even think one could argue that the kind of software that seems amenable to this "factory" approach is the least common. We could challenge the article's premise with the tendence that open source is bringing to the market. If value is to be found in customising and adapting software to highly specific needs, as opposed to the traditional "software as a product", then the amount of technology you can reuse, whilst important, falls second to actually capturing the things that change and that make your application unique. That certainly has quite a bit of technology to it, but again there's much more than that.
Finally, even when focusing on the technical aspects I find it rare they made no mention of stuff like product line architectures and MDA, which seem to be all the rage these days when these topics arise.
http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/share_mail.html
HTH :)
...yet ;)
Since we receive a bonus of $8000 per patent, if all goes well we'll share well over $150,000. And there seems no reason we can't keep this game up indefinitely. We should be able to manage around 50 a year, and this nice little earner will see the mortgage paid off in no time.
Now I think that's interesting... This comes from a software engineer, not from the lawyer. Most developers (and presumably the one from the article too) despise this whole mess, yet this guy is being "gently persuaded" by his employer to play the game.
I'd rather not find myself in such a situation, for it's easy to say what I am going to say without having to actually face it. But I'd like to believe that I can be part of the solution and not of the problem; that I can be brave enough to stand by my beliefs and refuse to be part of something like this and still manage to pay my bills.