March 15, 2011
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Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.
(Full Story: Google’s 8-Point Plan to Help Managers Improve – NYT)
February 7, 2011
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Contracts are a powerful language feature and can provide great benefit if used correctly. We recommend that newcomers find an expert to learn from or spend some time reading around the subject to pick up good habits and avoid bad ones.
One point that often surprises people is that contracts must not be used to validate data. Contracts exist to check for programmer error, not for user error or environment failures. Any difference between execution with and without runtime contract checking (apart from performance) is by definition a bug. Contracts must never have side effects.
(Full Story: Contracts for Java – Google Open Source)
January 26, 2011
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In 2000 (and over the past 22 years), if the IPO is successful, the average gave:- a CEO stock value will be $6-8M- a VP stock is around $1M - and employees have in average $100k
(Full Story: Equity in startups: A Case Study and some dat)
January 5, 2011
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Highlights of functionality¶
Parsing phone numbers for 228 countries/regions, and formatting/validating phone numbers for 180 countries/regions of the world.getNumberType – gets the type of the number based on the number itself; able to distinguish Fixed-line, Mobile, Toll-free, Premium Rate, Shared Cost, Voip and Personal Numbers (whenever feasible).isNumberMatch – gets a confidence level on whether two numbers could be the same.getExampleNumber/getExampleNumberByType – provides valid example numbers for 154 countries/regions, with the option of specifying which type of example phone number is needed.isPossibleNumber – quickly guessing whether a number is a possible phonenumber by using only the length information, much faster than a full validation.AsYouTypeFormatter – formats phone numbers on-the-fly when users enter each digit.
(Full Story: libphonenumber – Google’s library for dealing with phone numbers)
January 3, 2011
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Anecdotally, my personal search results have also been noticeably worse lately. As part of Christmas shopping for my wife, I searched for “iPhone 4 case” in Google. I had to give up completely on the first two pages of search results as utterly useless, and searched Amazon instead.
People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment — Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO’ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.
Like any sane person, I’m rooting for Google in this battle
(Full Story: Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google)
October 21, 2010
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In Bermuda there’s no corporate income tax at all. Google’s profits travel to the island’s white sands via a convoluted route known to tax lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich.” In Google’s case, it generally works like this: When a company in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa purchases a search ad through Google, it sends the money to Google Ireland. The Irish government taxes corporate profits at 12.5 percent, but Google mostly escapes that tax because its earnings don’t stay in the Dublin office, which reported a pretax profit of less than 1 percent of revenues in 2008.
(Link: The Tax Haven That’s Saving Google Billions – BusinessWeek)
October 12, 2010
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Here’s the story in a nutshell: Android apps are written in a restricted dialect of the Java language, which meant the platform had a vast and skilled developer community from the moment it was released. The components of Android that allow it to run Java code are based on the Harmony project, an open source implementation of Java created under the aegis of the Apache Software Foundation. The vast majority of the code in Harmony was actually written by IBM employees, because Big Blue decided Harmony would be where it would direct its Java development efforts.
But that’s no longer the case; the core of the IBM-Oracle deal is that those employees will now switch their attention to OpenJDK, Oracle’s in-house open source Java implementation. The move completely sucks the wind out of Harmony’s sails, with Tim Ellison, one of Harmony’s senior developers, essentially conceding the project will probably fold in short order.
(Link: Oracle-IBM pact cuts Android off at the knees)
October 12, 2010
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But I.B.M. announced on Monday that after Oracle extended an olive branch, Big Blue decided to set aside past hostilities from the Sun days. I.B.M. said it would shift its Java development efforts from the initiative it sponsored, called Apache Harmony, to the one begun in 2006 by Sun, called OpenJDK.
…
Still, Oracle’s dispute with Google casts shadows over Java’s future in general. For example, Google, Mr. Lea said, has more people working on OpenJDK projects than Oracle, and the lawsuit restricts communications between the litigating parties.
(Link: Oracle and I.B.M. Agree to Java Pact – NYT)
April 16, 2010
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Google owns and operates up to two percent of the world’s servers, an official Twitter app is coming to Android (in addition to the already-announced official iPhone app), and Evernote Premium users get a big update.
(Link: Remains of the Day: Google’s 1 Million+ Servers Edition – Remains – Lifehacker)
April 8, 2010
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gvoice-ruby is a library for interacting with Google’s Voice service (previously GrandCentral) using ruby. As Google does not yet publish an official API for Google Voice gvoice-ruby uses the ruby libcurl library (Curb) to interact with the web service itself by using the HTTP verbs POST and GET to send and retrieve information to the Google Voice service.
gvoice-ruby is currently a very preliminary project with limited functionality basically confined to returning arrays of voicemail or sms objects and sending sms messages, or connecting calls. It cannot cancel calls already in progress. It currently works under ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.2-preview1 on my computer running Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). It is not guaranteed to work anywhere else and has very few tests.
(Link: Ruby API to Google Voice)
