I have read all of these (and agree, they're all excellent) except for _The New Turing Omnibus_. Ordered on Amazon because it sounds fantastic. - DeWitt Clinton
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Iron Sheik is not watching the RNC. He's far too busy getting super-fucked-up and slagging his old co-workers on video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...]. And Nikolai Volkoff is not a Russian communist, but rather a Croatian-American Republican. Seriously. - Chester
"Developers can expect the first handsets to be enabled with a beta version of Android Market. Some decisions are still being made, but at a minimum you can expect support for free (unpaid) applications. Soon after launch an update will be provided that supports download of paid content and more features such as versioning, multiple device profile support, analytics, etc." - Karl Rosaen
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Radiohead and Google teamed up to release the data for the innovative House of Cards video under a remixable Creative Commons license on Google Code. - DeWitt Clinton
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"Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages – Java, C++, or Python." - DeWitt Clinton
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And for ex-Googlers, come check out the version that we open sourced. All the awesome from before, but cleaned up and even tighter (see the Java apis now). - DeWitt Clinton
Of all the things to go open source since I've been at Google, this ranks near or at the very top of my list of favorites. A huge congrats to Kenton and everybody involved for pulling it off. May your data serialize efficiently and extensibly forevermore! - DeWitt Clinton
Thrift includes a whole RPC framework (including thread managers and so on). Protocol buffers are just a serialization mechanism. Otherwise, the differences are mostly in the details of the way things like versioning are handled. - ⓞnor
Yikes. That is a lot of info to give a site not ending in .gov or being one of the top 5 or 10 Net sites with well-known privacy policies. - Christopher Sacca
But it has a little icon that it says to hover over which, when hovered over, gives a little popup saying it's legit! How could that not be legit?! ;-) - Kevin Fox
i wonder who checks the opt-in option here. - peter
those who wish to soon be among the many consumers who can significantly benefit from having ready access to product information on credit and insurance products that may not be available to the general public - Robin Barooah
Please please do not build your business around LBS as its primary element. Yes, sometimes location information can add value to your service. But if you make the location positioning as the primary benefit of any mass market service, your service will fail in the market place. " - Adewale Oshineye
I like the way, 7 pages down, after having said nothing, he says, "Ha-ha, now we get to the meat of the issue. Yes, I've asked this question hundreds of times myself in 2001-2003, and have been answering those questions myself since 2002... I think I know most of why." - j1m
His point is clearly that location-based stuff on the phone is guaranteed not only to fail, but to be useless to users. To state the obvious: he is so completely wrong, it's shocking he managed to type in his article. The stuff about how people would rather look stuff up on a map beforehand is weird. - j1m
I think that way too many companies are building their dreams on the fact that that they have an LBS. It looks cool for about 10 minutes (which coincidentally is the length of time you'll need to demo your app) but none of the existing apps seem to solve real problems that real people have. The scenarios people like Loopt use always suggest that the world is composed of bar-hopping hipsters rather than complex family/friend groups. These apps need something beyond location but no-one knows what that is. - Adewale Oshineye
I'm very put off my the kind of reverse ad hominem in the opening: "hey, I'm really important. I know way more about this than you do. I had a best-selling book, you know. Two, in fact. I've been thinking about this since when you were in diapers. I am THE person who knows about this stuff, so you'd better believe that I'm right". This is then followed by "ah, except I was wrong in the beginning but NOW I'm right. Yes, THIS time. I just AM. You'd better believe that I'm right". Meh. - Isaac Hepworth
Well, obviously just adding location to some app won't make it successful. Not every LBS app will succeed, but I really couldn't disagree with this guy more. The part about how LBS isn't useful because we're never lost, oh, except in our cars, and car navigation will solve that... bollocks. If I had a dime for every time I wanted a quick way to search for some business or service near where I was, or to easily coordinate a group of friends at some outing, well, I'd probably have several hundred dimes. - ⓞnor
Good points. However once I have a map that shows me where I am with reasonable accuracy then what else is left? Location is a feature not a product but too often these services don't have any more depth than merely showing people on a map. - Adewale Oshineye
Showing you where the nearest (restaurant, drug store, bathroom, store which sells bath mats) is. Showing nearby friends in the mood to do something social. Listing nearby movies showing shortly (adjusted for travel time). Showing transit schedules for your location. Meeting up with your friends at the amusement park. Reminding you where your car was parked. Giving you personalized recommendations, with one-click thumbs-up/thumbs-down. One-click hailing a cab. - ⓞnor
Ordering take-out when you're at the beach or in the park (even if you move after ordering). Pinging you when traffic has thinned out enough that you can head home. Augmented reality games. Warning you when you enter high-crime areas. Guided walking tours with audio commentary. Geo-referenced message boards for tourists, backpackers, hikers, bikers, skiers, etc. to exchange tips. Short term notes and alerts ("watch out for that pothole!"). - ⓞnor
Pre-emptive traffic avoidance (it's not congested yet, but lots of people are getting guidance for this route, so it's going to be). Real-time aerial photos of you at events (taken from skywriting planes). Targeted coupons (opt-in and non-intrusive, of course). Real-time wait times and booking for a table at restaurants within a short walk. Entering your order at Starbucks or Shake Shack while you're in line. On line payment for parking (and finding a space in the first place). - ⓞnor
Universal collaborative point-and-click remote for lights, climate control, and A/V, even in public spaces (the lights in the square are dim by default, but anyone can turn them up for 30 minutes; people in a room can vote to bump the temperature up or down, or mute the TV; stream music from your phone to your cafe's sound system if the other patrons don't object). Facilitated dating/hookups/cruising. Emergency response (not just E911, but "this way out", "your family is there", "we need help over here"). - ⓞnor
Working my way through _Introduction to Algorithms_ and the _Algorithm Design Manual_ and implementing them in Python. I'm scratching two itches here -- one, I feel I suck at advanced algorithms, and two, I've found existing python libraries to be rather patchwork when I've needed them. Besides, as I get older and get to code (regretfully) less on the job, I need this stuff to stay (or rather, become) sharp. - DeWitt Clinton
Background being that I started working full time right after undergrad and never did a Masters or PhD, and it's amazing just how little you can study in four years, and how easy it is to rely on crutches (like standard libraries) for the fundamentals of computer science. Now I'm a bit obsessed with making up for that. - DeWitt Clinton
@amund - Nice, I'll check out both. Most of what I know about traditional (signal machine) parallel programming comes form Doug Lea's book _ Concurrent Programming in Java_, and most of what I know about distributed programming comes from mapreduce/bigtable-esque models, and the more classical models from past jobs (caching, layering, etc). I'm also picking up a fair bit in exploring Erlang (by way of papers, not writing the code). - DeWitt Clinton
The difference being that you get to do something useful all day, and I'm just overhead. : ) - DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt: hm, overhead, probably not (I am going in same direction.. :) since you look at Erlang and know Python I will recommend investigating Stackless Python (and Greenlet Python) - Erlangish by from my point of view somewhat more syntax-friendly (diplomatically said). Both Stackless and Greenlet are being used by MMOG companies, e.g. Greenlet (and Eventlet) by Second Life and Stackless by Eve Online. More info: http://amundblog.blogspot.com/... - Amund Tveit
@DeWitt: a warning — although I loved learning all the computer science stuff, and ended up writing better designed software, I got a lot less done after getting all that in my head. :( - Amit Patel
It's more like: electronics spreads faster than machinery. - ⓞnor
Dishwasher in 2005: same level of adoption as internet - Jason Kaneshiro
Radio's adoption back in the day looks like the Internet today. Our grandparents were pretty tech savvy, weren't they? - Hutch Carpenter
You could do a similar graph on social networking sites, but instead of decades, you'd have to use weeks. - Louis Gray
@ Louis - I don't think so. The bar on the left is % of us households, not people who are early adopters on the internet that read Techmeme :) You might have weeks on time scale but the height of those sites' lines would be very low. It would look quite different. - Jason Kaneshiro
Fine... then the vertical scale would go up to 2%. - Louis Gray
Strange how a few things have had big drops. - Tanath
Telephones and VCRs are starting their downward slope. I'd like to see charts for 8-track, cassette, and phonograph players. - Kevin Fox
What is the rate of adoption of Edward Tufte, I wonder... ;-) - Karim
Why is it that nothing has happened since 1990? Maybe portable MP3 players should be in there. - Neil Kandalgaonkar
there are so many other pretty things here too! Kevin, I mean its too late for you this time, but do you really want to give ME more Photoshop how-tos? Please remember your own sanity when giving me toys like this. - Rachel Lea Fox
"I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life." - Sanjeev Singh
wow, this article is fascinating (and the tips in the sidebar are helpful too: For optimal brain gain, regular tea breaks, as favored in the UK, are more effective than a 20-ounce French roast sucked down at Starbucks in lieu of breakfast.) - Adam Kazwell
"Wozniak gives close attention to the qualitative estimate of fatal risks. By graphing the acquisition of knowledge in SuperMemo, he has realized that in a single lifetime one can acquire only a few million new items. This is the absolute limit on intellectual achievement defined by death." - pretty limiting - the AIs will win :P - bob
They replayed this on last night's Colbert Report -- still hilarious. Skip to 3:59 for Colbert's Korean pop video (to prove he's more influential that Korean pop star Rain) - Tom Stocky
"In order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries--or, better yet, get inside [the] adversary's Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action time cycle or loop. ... Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (unpredictable) thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries--since our adversaries will be unable to generate mental images or pictures that agree with the menacing as well as faster transient rhythm or patterns they are competing against." - Paul Buchheit
I like this. Supports the argument to release as rapidly as possible and iterate. - tagami
If you get the chance you should read the books about John Boyd - Adewale Oshineye
I'm doing this at home now and there are a couple of great bits of software Jon Hicks points out that are essential. I'm hoping to write more on this set-up soon too. - Jason Shellen
Ditto. Nothing but oohs and ahhs from guests when they see the Front Row interface on a 50" plasma. I cant believe how happy I am with my Mini purchase and this set up..... - Bryan Power
except when you get caught by a cop and you are telling him/her "hmm...I thought I was doing 55, these CA roads are very well maintained you know" - kartik vaithyanathan
You'd get a ticket doing 55mph. It's a 65mph speed limit. :) - Chris White
you'd get a lot of fingers from the other drivers on the road (been there done that when i was new to 280, not anymore though) - kartik vaithyanathan
I got pulled over while going 80 on 280, but it was because I was also weaving between lanes a little (and apparently the cop was right behind me). He asked if I was ok, and I told him that I had just gotten momentarily distracted (which was true). He let me go and never even mentioned that I was going 80 :) - Paul Buchheit
@paul: Were you distracted by all the twinkle, twinkle lights? - April Buchheit
Only problem is, it requires some external libraries that aren't included on Windows. It's a very cool idea, though! - Voyagerfan5761
FWIW, in order to get it to run, I had to change the imports in messagethreading.py from email.utils to email.Utils and email.header to email.Header. I'm running 2.4, not sure if the library names changed between versions...of course, it also doesn't run to completion in 2.4 because Mihai's using the 'key' arg to max() - Jonathan Betz
It breaks on non-ASCII chars, too bad. But the idea is wonderful! - Alex Kapranoff
Non-ASCII characters where? It worked fine when I ran it on my own mail (with non-ASCII subjects and senders). - Mihai Parparita
