Tag: google

Crimes Against Humanity

If you think you’ve seen bizarre lawsuits before, check this one out. Pennsylvania resident Dylan Stephen Jayne is suing Google for crimes against humanity and is asking the court for $5b in damages. The charge: his social security number, when turned upside down and scrambled spells Google. I don’t think Google will have a lot to worry about with this case, but it does make you wonder why mental health services aren’t more readily available in the United States.

and i wonder why my tax money is wasted on clowns like this

Inside Google Zurich

Bernhard Seefeld then (using the just-released Google Presentations, their online competitor to MS’ PowerPoint) described the 10 principles of Google engineering/software development: Single-source code repository for all Google code (G has a rather big repository, and all engineers have access to the source code) Developers can checkin fixes for any Google product (an “open-source” approach) You can build any Google product in 3 steps (get, configure, make) Uniform coding standards (how should code “look”) across the company Mandatory code reviews before checkin (if a developer fixes a bug in Gmail, the fix needs to be approved by the Gmail team) Pervasive unit testing (a “unit” is the smallest testable part of a program; unit testing validates that it works properly) Test run continuously, emails get sent (automatically) to developers if any failure is spotted Powerful tools that are shared companywide Rapid project-cycles, developers change projects often, and can devote 20% of their time to pursuing whatever idea/project they want (if it gets somewhere, Google will then throw some more engineers at it and turn it into a product or a feature) Peer-driven review process, flat management hierarchy

seefeld cameo

Moon X Prize

A morning brainstorm featuring Google’s Larry Page and Virgin’s Richard Branson had already turned up scores of possible new X Prize targets, from early cancer detection to ultracheap solar energy. During a break for lunch, Page dropped one more on X Prize chief Peter Diamandis: He and Google cofounder Sergey Brin had been “kicking around” the idea of sending low-cost robotic landers to the moon. Diamandis, who has been launching extraterrestrial enterprises since he was an MIT undergrad in the 1980s, grabbed his laptop and disappeared, returning half an hour later with a freshly minted PowerPoint deck. Page looked it over, then said, “Talk to Sergey.” That evening, as the guests sipped cocktails in the shadow of the little white spaceplane, Diamandis cornered the Google technology chief and pitched. Brin loved it. “Some endeavors are too speculative, even for venture capital. If they’re really worth doing, you try to find some other way.”

this is why i love this place. not just puny crap like the guys in sunnyvale.

Ganeti

an open source virtual server management software built on top of Xen and other open source software. Ganeti started as a small project in Google’s Zurich office. We’ve been using it internally for a while, and now we’re excited to share it more broadly under GPLv2. Here at Google, we’ve used Ganeti in the internal corporate environment to facilitate cluster management of virtual servers in commodity hardware, increasing the efficiency of hardware usage and saving space, power and cooling. Ganeti also provides fast and simple recovery after physical failures.

ha. i had no idea we are releasing this. another thing after mapreduce for yahoo to bring their technology into this millennium.

eBay Scam

Why would eBay erase all traces of a scammed auction like this? Maybe to hide the fact that there’s so many scams going on? I think so.

it should be quite easy to do better than the puny anti-scam technology ebay has.

Changing Health Care

In politics, every serious candidate for the White House has a health care plan. So too in business, where the 2 leading candidates for Web supremacy, Google and Microsoft, are working up their plans to improve the nation’s health care. By combining better Internet search tools, the vast resources of the Web and online personal health records, both companies are betting they can enable people to make smarter choices about their health habits and medical care.

industries that stop fighting the internet and embrace it offer vastly superior services. so it will be with these hidebound guys.

Yahoo using Google?

ang said he would be busy making a long-term strategic plan, which would include major changes if need be. “There will be no sacred cows and we need to move quickly”. No sacred cows, indeed. According to rumors circulating around the company, Yang and other executives at Yahoo are even considering something as massive as offloading some of its search monetization business to rival Google. I have suggested this option here in this column many times. Such a move, even if done in part, could instantly add a whole lot of dollars to its bottom line, drastically cut tech costs and remove the focus on its constantly losing fight with Google as a tech leader.

the old use google to monetize better