iigs

In a lot of NPAs (area codes) there just aren't any never-assigned numbers left. My brother waited, for months I believe, for a GV number in 512 (Austin).

1) I don't recall who it is, but someone who is not google holds a patent (sigh) on using the URL path after the host as the search string.

2) If it was my property to control, I would not want google.com/{*} to accumulate links on the internet. That is to say, before there was google.com/maps, one would expect some people to link to that URL directing their users to search for maps. Now that google is so big, that could be a dicey prospect, because substituting their own property for what would have previously been a search could reasonably be seen as anti-competitive.

Although I can see it the latter way, as well, and it's reasonable to ask for an ebay clone if you can poop one out for $200. There's a lot of stuff I'd buy for $200 if it could be had. But just because I'd buy it at $200 doesn't imply that I'm willing to pay several times that to have one hand crafted, which appears to have been the outcome with the billable time.

I don't think that's a fair assessment of the developers themselves. I would write it up to differences in product release mentality -- it takes a different mindset to put bits in a box vs a web server.

BGC3 appears to be Bill's business presence now that he's not at MS on a day-to-day basis.

A very common business design pattern for wealthy businesspeople is to have a "parent company" that is essentially the businessperson plus their entourage: the legal team, technical due diligence buddies, capital raising marketing staff (people who woo wall street). This company may or may not be owned by a parent company that does the investing in other companies that actually "do stuff".

Without seeing the evidence for the patent troll concerns, I have no reason to believe it's the case -- he just needs some place to park his Mercedes during the day. :)

If you can't get frank, direct honesty from that person I would consider not taking the position. If you can, and your perception is that the previous director was not creative commensurate with the requirements of this type of position, or worse, was an empire builder, then it's probably no problem.

See:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=155201

Google only cares about things with a data connection, and I firmly believe that WiFi only devices are a small enough market that they're just a distraction for the big names right now -- except Apple, since the iPod touch kind of bridged an established product with the at-the-time new phone platform.

I'm especially annoyed that this piece of hardware appears to have a AT&T compatible 3G chipset but is disallowed in the baseband. To me this is just another piece-of-crap restricted-use telco-friendly piece of hardware, this time with Google livery. To pay for an unsubsidized phone and not get all of the features that the hardware is clearly capable of (modulo patents: multitouch) is offensive, and makes the $550 to me even more irritating.

The whole thing is slightly less appalling when you think of the phone as another iteration of the G1 and MyTouch for T-Mo and not as an honest attempt by Google at offering an open device.

You can also run a pair of "front end" servers at all times, and use magic in the back-end to replicate the DB between sites. Depending on the type of site in question this can be really easy or really hard.

Another (generally commercial hardware) solution is to receive the query to one DNS server. This DNS server waits to respond for a few milliseconds while it sends a copy of the query to the other DNS server. They have different answers for the question (dns-east will return the IP for www-east, likewise for dns-west and www-west). They return the answers at the same time, and the closer server "wins" by getting to the recipient faster. This is called GSLB, Global Server Load Balancing.

It's exceptionally easy to engineer around these issues if you don't just outsource all of your thinking to a provider.

I was the ~100th employee, so to some extent I feel allegiance, but I'm also salaried well below market rate for my skillset (part of that going to work early for a company thing).

Also, regarding per-hour: The salaried people are often the ones "getting screwed"! I grabbed my work-life balance by the horns, but some of my coworkers were not as fortunate, and they rightly make the argument that if they were paid by the hour they'd be making 50-100% more per year than their salaried rate. One of the sweetest stories I know in this regard is a guy who went from helpdesk to system administration -- he refused to take the official title change so that he could stay salaried. He'd have to take a 30-40% pay cut to switch.

As it goes, I'd prefer to have even _more_ fine grained control over my destiny: If I could work 80% as much and make 70-80% of the salary, I'd think long and hard about it. A lot of other people might not want to make that choice. A coworker of mine would rather be on a half-time program with reduced or no benefits (and is brilliant enough to merit the inconvenience to the organization). We can't do that because of the inflexibility of the business world, but collectivism would play directly against that goal.

A link to the opposing viewpoint is cited at the end of the article.

Personally, I prefer to retain all of my bargaining control, rather than delegating it to another entity.

Furthermore, I do not understand the "us-vs-them" attitude that is pervasive in the pro-union mentality. I have stock in my company: I am them.

The mood ring was a fad. Nobody knew what it was, then it happened, then it went away again and everyone was fine.

With technology that's largely not the case. What appear to be fads end up being evolutionary dead ends. [Possible HN heresy ahead] I'd put LISP business applicaiton development into this category. Prior to the AI craze, systems were developed in low level programming languages or mainframe business languages. Then LISP happened, but when the AI winter happened, did people go back to C/ASM/{the IBM languages}? No! C++, and later Java happened. For business Java will eventually superseded, but it's foolhardy to think people will regress to the languages of yesteryear -- time is marching forward.

Being too stodgy or unwilling to invest in maintaining the business applications in current mainstream languages can put you in a precarious support situation in a relatively short (say a decade) time when people that are willing to do work in your system language are very expensive and no longer the best people in the industry.

Obviously it's important to see through technology fads but starting from a position of skepticism may not play as well as it seems at first blush.

My eyesight happens to be OK, but I overwork my eyes in a similiar manner - I crank the size down until I have a hard time reading it. I've found that having my monitors up higher encourages me to sit with the best possible posture. YMMV. Good luck.

Also, the fuel being burned appears to be a byproduct of petroleum distillation, and while ships are burning it "because they can", I wonder what the other options are for disposing of it. Legislating away all of the consumers of a byproduct does not get rid of the byproduct. I would assume that the petroleum could be further distilled out of the byproduct, to some extent, but that at the end there would be some waste sludge that might be unmarketable. If that's the case, then THAT becomes a disposal headache, and I'd be curious to see how that plays out.

Interestingly, there is a luxury version of the Civic in Canada, it's called the Acura 1.6EL. Other than the fact that it shares sheet metal with the Civic, I'm not sure why it's not sold here.

Man, how did they not work up a system like morse code? That's horrible. Mad props for the patience, though.

We've probably all seen it with computing; it looks mysterious from the outside but learn the logic and you can make it go.

Fixing cars is the same way (fuel, air, spark). Circuit design is the same way (a few types of component, logic gates). Power engineering is the same way (W = V*A, wire's got to be big enough). Music is generally the same way (very math-y in both the time and frequency domains). Dating is pretty similar (statistics play a different role here, but you can do well enough here "by the book").

We're currently learning that raising a child is the same way. Diaper, hungry, tired, hot/cold, {colic, teething, other age related issues}, doctor.

I would consider reversing the order of those from a desirability standpoint, particlularly if the throttle is forced wide open (as opposed to partially). Most of the time the rev limiter will prevent any damage (and who cares if it doesn't, even a $3000 engine is less than a night at the hospital). IMO the car isn't even a thing to consider saving.

If it fails to switch into neutral while the engine is loaded, turning the key one click in the off direction will unload the tension in the driveline and possibly give it what it needs to shift to neutral (electric shifting transmissions might only benefit from the first few milliseconds after reapplying power). Then you can turn the key back on.

The "dig at it with your toes" solution is worth a shot if you have the time, or if it's only revving slightly above the desired level. I would be afraid that it would take concentration away from the primary objective (keeping the car pointed away from cars and fixed objects).

On automatic transmission automobiles the ignition switch is also required (US federal law, I believe) to not lock if the transmission is in a gear other than park.

IPS panels ("FlexView" in IBM/Lenovo-speak) make a tremendous difference. Compare these two pictures:

http://ii.gs/gamma/t60p-t61p-onaxis.jpg

http://ii.gs/gamma/t60p-t61p-up.jpg

I set up a site for quickly ironing out calibration issues with monitors that people may be interested in:

http://ii.gs/gamma/

All of this said, there's no reason why, if they provide proper instrumentation/controls, that I couldn't use a resolution independent display to crank the UI down to tiny size (tell it that I have low DPI) and provide a lot of screen real estate.

It was mildly uncomfortable (and very amusing) to hear people ask where to find "Rubber". :)

Yes, with certain firmwares you can. This adjustment is like turning up your stereo: it might get a bit "louder" but beyond a certain point it begins to clip and distort. The big difference is that unlike a stereo, the default radio gain is usually set fairly high -- there's rarely much more headroom to get.

A radio tuned for 100mw might have 200mw in it, if you're lucky. While this sounds like a lot, it's only 3db, which is a small fraction of any signal meter "bar" reading.

If you really want to increase your effective transmission power, your best bet is a high-gain antenna:

http://tinyurl.com/client-antennas (no affiliation)

These will increase your effective signal strength by focusing the beam of the antenna in the direction you wish to transmit/receive it. The down side is that the antennas have to be pointed at each other, and the higher the gain the closer they have to be aligned.

However, please keep in mind that increasing your effective radiation in one direction above the initial design limit is likely to run afoul of your government's (the FCC in the USA) rules about RF emissions.

In summary, yes you can do it, but it will take expensive, fidgety antennas, is probably illegal, and at the end of it you still might not get the amount of gain you need. I recognize your desire to use wireless but generally IMO it's not worth the work.

So enjoy your peer-to-peer applications while you can; their expiration date will be coming up not long after 2010.

Oh, come now. Every major ISP has a VoIP project to support competition with local telcos. The telcos can see the benefits of VoIP and are or will be offering VoIP soon as well.

With http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication a major driver of hosting IP demand should decrease.

ISPs can provide the vast majority of todays users NAT with no ill effects -- in fact, ISPs could even sell it as a security feature, as you're keeping all of the bad guys away from the end user device.

We haven't even started using mitigation strategies in the USA. We have a long way to go before there's any concern -- we might "run out" of public IPs to pass out to every customer, but we're a long way from not being able to sell some services to people because of a resource shortage.