I'm glad Google's blog search has finally launched. I've been waiting for this one for a while because, although I'm not a particularly prolific blog writer (or even reader), I see the medium as incredibly important. Looks like even Scoble is impressed!
Actually, others are too! Check out a nice, reflective query... blogsearch blogsearch for blogsearch!
Note that the RSS feed isn't just usable in your RSS reader. The clever developer will realize an rss or atom feed are a form of API and maybe do something cool with it... maybe even not-very-clever developers can do something fun:
(cool thing that was once here but is now broken removed to somewhat reduce the embarrassment of having an iframe with an internal server error on the page)
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
I have no self control. Steve Jobs ownz me.
I admit it. I'm a gadgetaholic. I'm trying to get better, honest I am! But just when I think I've kicked the habit, something comes along and says 'buy me.'
The company that has consistently pushed my 'oooh shiney electronics' buttons for the past two years is Apple, and as anyone knows, Apple is not known for affordable pricing. Damn you, Steve Jobs, damn you! How much money must you so forcibly extract from me each month? First it was a Powerbook almost two years ago. Yes, I admit it, I wanted a laptop, and I was really tired of dealing with Linux annoyances on laptops (suspend? 802.11g? things "just working"? BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAA). Of course, I could never run Windows (except for casual gaming), so I decided to risk it and buy one of those sexy aluminum 15' Powerbooks.
I was almost immediately in love. The best part was everything just worked. A few people at work had various iBooks and Powerbooks, but they were pretty rare (I did work at Red Hat, after all, so pretty much every engineer and suit used Linux, except for the few Mac holdouts). I started enjoying bringing it to meetings where everyone would, at first, snicker slightly at someone not using a Linux laptop. I would smile, throw a verbal quip or two, and close the lit on their laptop -- which would crash about 50% of the time. Who's sneering now!
About a year later, though, you did it again, Mr. Jobs. You released that damnable Mac Mini. Affordable, aesthetically pleasing, and tiny. How could I resist? I figured it would be my little toy computer, but no, oh no, somehow it became my desktop (which was embarassing -- a 1.4GHz machine with 512mb of RAM being my main desktop when I had a perfectly good AMD64 with 1GB sitting next to it). I soon realized your ploy, though. You wanted me to do the upsell. The Mini was great, but it was slow. I hate slow computers, and I know you know that, Steve. You know that.
So finally about two months ago, I gave in and got a new Powermac. Man oh man this thing is sexy. Interior and exterior, hardware and software... everything is amazing (well, except the stupid mouse and slightly awkward keyboard, but those are clearly afterthoughts and I had my own anyway).
Time still passed. I managed to avoid the Shuffle and the Mighty Mouse, though both were pretty cool. I thought, maybe, just maybe, I had kicked the habit, or at least sated it for a while (though I knew deep down that right when the Intel-based powerbooks roll out, I'll be needing an upgrade). I thought I had that inner strenght to protect my poor bank account from your vicious pillagings.
I was wrong. I held out for a few days, but I broke down. I'm your bitch, Mr. Jobs. I'm your bitch. My 4gb black iPod Nano should be here this week, hopefully. Damn that thing is gorgeous.
The company that has consistently pushed my 'oooh shiney electronics' buttons for the past two years is Apple, and as anyone knows, Apple is not known for affordable pricing. Damn you, Steve Jobs, damn you! How much money must you so forcibly extract from me each month? First it was a Powerbook almost two years ago. Yes, I admit it, I wanted a laptop, and I was really tired of dealing with Linux annoyances on laptops (suspend? 802.11g? things "just working"? BWAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAA). Of course, I could never run Windows (except for casual gaming), so I decided to risk it and buy one of those sexy aluminum 15' Powerbooks.
I was almost immediately in love. The best part was everything just worked. A few people at work had various iBooks and Powerbooks, but they were pretty rare (I did work at Red Hat, after all, so pretty much every engineer and suit used Linux, except for the few Mac holdouts). I started enjoying bringing it to meetings where everyone would, at first, snicker slightly at someone not using a Linux laptop. I would smile, throw a verbal quip or two, and close the lit on their laptop -- which would crash about 50% of the time. Who's sneering now!
About a year later, though, you did it again, Mr. Jobs. You released that damnable Mac Mini. Affordable, aesthetically pleasing, and tiny. How could I resist? I figured it would be my little toy computer, but no, oh no, somehow it became my desktop (which was embarassing -- a 1.4GHz machine with 512mb of RAM being my main desktop when I had a perfectly good AMD64 with 1GB sitting next to it). I soon realized your ploy, though. You wanted me to do the upsell. The Mini was great, but it was slow. I hate slow computers, and I know you know that, Steve. You know that.
So finally about two months ago, I gave in and got a new Powermac. Man oh man this thing is sexy. Interior and exterior, hardware and software... everything is amazing (well, except the stupid mouse and slightly awkward keyboard, but those are clearly afterthoughts and I had my own anyway).
Time still passed. I managed to avoid the Shuffle and the Mighty Mouse, though both were pretty cool. I thought, maybe, just maybe, I had kicked the habit, or at least sated it for a while (though I knew deep down that right when the Intel-based powerbooks roll out, I'll be needing an upgrade). I thought I had that inner strenght to protect my poor bank account from your vicious pillagings.
I was wrong. I held out for a few days, but I broke down. I'm your bitch, Mr. Jobs. I'm your bitch. My 4gb black iPod Nano should be here this week, hopefully. Damn that thing is gorgeous.
Friday, September 09, 2005
"Thrill" the audience?
(disclaimer: I'm a Googler)
Okay, I just spotted Scoble's post on how Microsoft can "beat Google" and that how it can do so being the wrong question to begin with. I tend to agree with what he's saying, in some sense; a company shouldn't focus on what they can do to beat another competitor, they should focus on what they can do to satisfy their customers and acquire new customers. The rest (usually) follows from being successful at those goals.
Unfortunately, I disagree that Microsoft is in the "audience aggregation" business. MSN certainly is, but not really Microsoft as a whole. Audience aggregation, to a public company, is usually about audience acquisition and then monetizing the audience (nowadays mostly through advertisements of some kind). I think his post blurs the lines between MSN, the subset, and MSFT, the whole. Microsoft as a whole is in the enviable position of not having to thrill most of its audience, and in the enviable position of basically not having to do anything to aggregate an audience -- when you have the number one desktop operating system, you get your audience for free. No, I'm not complaining about monopolies, I'm just pointing out that the place Microsoft has in the computer industry is a special case and doesn't act like how most companies have to behave.
Moreover, he compares audiences for concerts like audiences for websites. Sadly, this is becoming less and less the case anymore. I can come and go to concerts as I will -- the only loss of attending is the ticket price, and the only cost of not attending is missing a few hours of entertainment. But as websites become more and more complicated, it no longer is an issue of just pointing your eyeballs at the site of your choosing. After all, all of your email is in Yahoo! mail, or your contacts are in Plaxo, or your files are over on X-Drive. One of the things I miss, say, about Yahoo! Maps is being able to save addresses... but I did manage to convert to Google Maps despite that weak tie in (browser auto complete helps!).
This is not entirely unlike the world of "office" applications. Vendors would basically try to lock you in by reading competitor file formats but not really writing them as nicely (at least, the market leader wouldn't need to write them as nicely; the market followers desperately needed to, but often failed). Data lockin is as powerful, or even more powerful, than operating system lockin, and I think it will be one of the big issues technology and society deal with over the coming years. WordPerfect (something most of you may not have even heard of!) is still a major use in the legal fields because the volume of documents already written in it and that templates are available and usable effectively only from WordPerfect. To the rest of the world, though, WordPerfect is pretty much dead.
For Microsoft, though, only a tiny, tiny portion of their income comes from MSN. The bulk comes from operating system sales (which are almost never chosen because of an end user picking among multiple choices, like you do with cars or concerts; usually you have one choice, or are forced into the choice by the apps you want to run) and from Office. So although MSN Virtual Earth may be the topic of the day in the blogs, it isn't what Microsoft the company is about and it largely is a marketting effort to keep users' eyeballs on MSN until they decide either how to monetize those eyeballs or write them off as a marketting expense to fight for mindshare. This is a big area where, internally, I think Microsoft really is fighting Google, in mindshare among users. Never before since Microsoft first came into true power with Windows has another company so challenged them for the attention of all users as Google has, IMO.
The thing that I really disagree with is him stating that "don't be evil" is just a synonym for not pissing off audiences. The "don't be evil" philosophy (best described in the Letter from the Founders, aka the Owner's Manual for Google shares, which is part of Google's SEC IPO documents) is much more than that, but I can forgive someone who works at Microsoft for not seeing it :) (Sorry Robert! I couldn't resist a little barb). More seriously, unless you've been inside the company and seen just how seriously "don't be evil" is taken, you might not get it. But I assure you, it permeates Google -- "is that evil?" is one of the first questions asked of any new project, idea, or offering. It isn't always easy to answer, but it is the foremost thought in our minds -- well above "is this cool?" or "will this make money?"
That is one of the main reasons I chose to work at Google. It's damn hard to find companies that have some kind of moral or ethical backbone, especially publicly traded companies that are relevant beyond a local scale. I'm proud of how seriously we take "don't be evil" and I strongly disagree that it is just about not pissing off the audience.
Okay, I just spotted Scoble's post on how Microsoft can "beat Google" and that how it can do so being the wrong question to begin with. I tend to agree with what he's saying, in some sense; a company shouldn't focus on what they can do to beat another competitor, they should focus on what they can do to satisfy their customers and acquire new customers. The rest (usually) follows from being successful at those goals.
Unfortunately, I disagree that Microsoft is in the "audience aggregation" business. MSN certainly is, but not really Microsoft as a whole. Audience aggregation, to a public company, is usually about audience acquisition and then monetizing the audience (nowadays mostly through advertisements of some kind). I think his post blurs the lines between MSN, the subset, and MSFT, the whole. Microsoft as a whole is in the enviable position of not having to thrill most of its audience, and in the enviable position of basically not having to do anything to aggregate an audience -- when you have the number one desktop operating system, you get your audience for free. No, I'm not complaining about monopolies, I'm just pointing out that the place Microsoft has in the computer industry is a special case and doesn't act like how most companies have to behave.
Moreover, he compares audiences for concerts like audiences for websites. Sadly, this is becoming less and less the case anymore. I can come and go to concerts as I will -- the only loss of attending is the ticket price, and the only cost of not attending is missing a few hours of entertainment. But as websites become more and more complicated, it no longer is an issue of just pointing your eyeballs at the site of your choosing. After all, all of your email is in Yahoo! mail, or your contacts are in Plaxo, or your files are over on X-Drive. One of the things I miss, say, about Yahoo! Maps is being able to save addresses... but I did manage to convert to Google Maps despite that weak tie in (browser auto complete helps!).
This is not entirely unlike the world of "office" applications. Vendors would basically try to lock you in by reading competitor file formats but not really writing them as nicely (at least, the market leader wouldn't need to write them as nicely; the market followers desperately needed to, but often failed). Data lockin is as powerful, or even more powerful, than operating system lockin, and I think it will be one of the big issues technology and society deal with over the coming years. WordPerfect (something most of you may not have even heard of!) is still a major use in the legal fields because the volume of documents already written in it and that templates are available and usable effectively only from WordPerfect. To the rest of the world, though, WordPerfect is pretty much dead.
For Microsoft, though, only a tiny, tiny portion of their income comes from MSN. The bulk comes from operating system sales (which are almost never chosen because of an end user picking among multiple choices, like you do with cars or concerts; usually you have one choice, or are forced into the choice by the apps you want to run) and from Office. So although MSN Virtual Earth may be the topic of the day in the blogs, it isn't what Microsoft the company is about and it largely is a marketting effort to keep users' eyeballs on MSN until they decide either how to monetize those eyeballs or write them off as a marketting expense to fight for mindshare. This is a big area where, internally, I think Microsoft really is fighting Google, in mindshare among users. Never before since Microsoft first came into true power with Windows has another company so challenged them for the attention of all users as Google has, IMO.
The thing that I really disagree with is him stating that "don't be evil" is just a synonym for not pissing off audiences. The "don't be evil" philosophy (best described in the Letter from the Founders, aka the Owner's Manual for Google shares, which is part of Google's SEC IPO documents) is much more than that, but I can forgive someone who works at Microsoft for not seeing it :) (Sorry Robert! I couldn't resist a little barb). More seriously, unless you've been inside the company and seen just how seriously "don't be evil" is taken, you might not get it. But I assure you, it permeates Google -- "is that evil?" is one of the first questions asked of any new project, idea, or offering. It isn't always easy to answer, but it is the foremost thought in our minds -- well above "is this cool?" or "will this make money?"
That is one of the main reasons I chose to work at Google. It's damn hard to find companies that have some kind of moral or ethical backbone, especially publicly traded companies that are relevant beyond a local scale. I'm proud of how seriously we take "don't be evil" and I strongly disagree that it is just about not pissing off the audience.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Oh. My. Godel.
According to a news.com story, 48% of Americans believe in evolution, and 42% believe that life has remained unchanged since the dawn of time (I suppose the other 10% believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster).
Worse, 64% think that creationism should be taught along side evolution in public schools.
I just can't fathom that. I mean, come on! There is lots of evidence life changes over time; look at the emergence of dog breeds, for instance. It isn't like there were pomeranians running around the grasslands of Africa. We've seen evolution take place in various ways over the past century and a half since Darwin first came along with his new idea.
I just can't believe that many Americans believe creationism is even a science, much less worth spending valuable class time on. I mean, come on. Get your religion on sundays. How about, instead, we bring back music or art classes?
*frumple*
Worse, 64% think that creationism should be taught along side evolution in public schools.
I just can't fathom that. I mean, come on! There is lots of evidence life changes over time; look at the emergence of dog breeds, for instance. It isn't like there were pomeranians running around the grasslands of Africa. We've seen evolution take place in various ways over the past century and a half since Darwin first came along with his new idea.
I just can't believe that many Americans believe creationism is even a science, much less worth spending valuable class time on. I mean, come on. Get your religion on sundays. How about, instead, we bring back music or art classes?
*frumple*
Friday, September 02, 2005
An electrician I am not.
An electrician I am not. In fact, compared to many computer enthusiasts, I'm about as dumb as a rock when it comes to electricity. All I know about electricity I learned in my high school physics class and, although my teacher was superb, that isn't very much. I've recently been in a bit of a 'debate' with my local power company about my electricity bill, though, so my curiosity is a bit piqued about power usage. In particular, I've been wondering just how much power my various computers and peripherals use. So, while wandering the aisles of Fry's earlier tonight, I spotted something I had heard of a while ago -- a Watts Up? Pro!
This little device is great. Basically it is like an extension cord that measures the power flowing through it at any given time. The Pro model even has a serial interface to collect the data. I've not played with that yet, but I did stick the thing between most of my computers and the wall to see just how much power various things use. I was actually a bit surprised how low it was in some cases. In order of most power to least:
A few things of note. The low power use on the Linux box is attributable to several factors. One, the video card in it is a low-end, fanless card, whereas the Powermac and Windows machines have an NVIDIA 6800 Ultra and 7800 GTX in them -- very powerful video cards that are also very power hungry (apparently even when idle). In addition, the Linux machine is a small form factor PC -- an IDEQ 210P. It's a cute little box that I am very happy with, especially knowing it uses so little power :) All machines were configured to use little power, though were not in sleep or hibernate modes (in sleep/hibernate, the systems use maybe 6-8 watts).
The Soekris is one of my latest toys. I've not set it up yet, but it is going to be my dns/dhcp server soon. It's tiny, has 256MB of ram, a 266MHz processor, three ethernet ports, no video whatsoever, no moving parts whatsoever, and is one of the coolest toys I've played with in a long time. It excites the uber-nerd in me.
One of the most fascinating things about the Watts Up is how real-time the results are. Quite literally, pressing a button that causes a 100% CPU use spikes the power draw by as much as 100 watts in the case of the Mac. Heck, even waving the mouse over the dock so that the icons grow and shrink used 40 watts more!
Next up is experimenting on how much power draw different components use. How much does a 6800 Ultra use compared to a Radeon 7200? What about a Seagate Raptor, how much does it use? I'll also see about writing a nice little python module to start collecting and keeping all of this interesting data. The only problem I see is just how damn interesting it is knowing how much power things use... now I'm going to be plugging it into everything in my house.
PS: Yes, I have too many computers.
This little device is great. Basically it is like an extension cord that measures the power flowing through it at any given time. The Pro model even has a serial interface to collect the data. I've not played with that yet, but I did stick the thing between most of my computers and the wall to see just how much power various things use. I was actually a bit surprised how low it was in some cases. In order of most power to least:
| Dual 2.7GHz Powermac | ~200 watts idle; ~380 watts with both processors occcupied |
| Dual Core AMD64 X2 4800, Windows | ~180 watts idle |
| AMD 64 3200+, Lunux | ~73 watts (with cpuspeed), ~84 watts (w/o cpuspeed), ~130 watts (cpu occupied) |
| Dell 2405 24" LCD Monitor | 60 watts |
| Linksys WRT54G Wireless router | ~8 watts |
| Soekris 4801 | ~4 watts |
A few things of note. The low power use on the Linux box is attributable to several factors. One, the video card in it is a low-end, fanless card, whereas the Powermac and Windows machines have an NVIDIA 6800 Ultra and 7800 GTX in them -- very powerful video cards that are also very power hungry (apparently even when idle). In addition, the Linux machine is a small form factor PC -- an IDEQ 210P. It's a cute little box that I am very happy with, especially knowing it uses so little power :) All machines were configured to use little power, though were not in sleep or hibernate modes (in sleep/hibernate, the systems use maybe 6-8 watts).
The Soekris is one of my latest toys. I've not set it up yet, but it is going to be my dns/dhcp server soon. It's tiny, has 256MB of ram, a 266MHz processor, three ethernet ports, no video whatsoever, no moving parts whatsoever, and is one of the coolest toys I've played with in a long time. It excites the uber-nerd in me.
One of the most fascinating things about the Watts Up is how real-time the results are. Quite literally, pressing a button that causes a 100% CPU use spikes the power draw by as much as 100 watts in the case of the Mac. Heck, even waving the mouse over the dock so that the icons grow and shrink used 40 watts more!
Next up is experimenting on how much power draw different components use. How much does a 6800 Ultra use compared to a Radeon 7200? What about a Seagate Raptor, how much does it use? I'll also see about writing a nice little python module to start collecting and keeping all of this interesting data. The only problem I see is just how damn interesting it is knowing how much power things use... now I'm going to be plugging it into everything in my house.
PS: Yes, I have too many computers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
