Huge congratulations to Bret Taylor and Karen Padham Taylor on the birth of their baby girl, Jasmine, this morning, starting off the new year in a fantastic way. Wonderful news. (Photos on Facebook)
happy new year Bret! But please, can you kill that pretty f***in' duck? Thank you so much :) I love you
- v per vitzbank
A good idea,relaxing.Let's be fair, and thank Bret .Biraz olumlu olsak bir şey kaybetmeyiz...Bardak doluyken de,boşken de kırılabilir.Önemli olan kırmamaktır.Sevgi-Saygılarımla...
- Dedegi
i dont love your present actually i hate it and i wanna kill it but it doesnt work. İts immortal. So could you please remove your fucking duck? And also its not lovely. By the way, Happy new year Bret, may it be the best for you
- özge gürçay
"especially if Google makes some sorely needed improvements to the Market -- a 30-character limit on app titles? Really? And how about a non-Android Web view of the market -- Google of all companies should know the importance of linking."
- ⓞnor
from Android
How is there still no web interface to the market? Ridiculous!
- Larry Greenfield
What Larry said. I really enjoyed developing for iPhone this year, while the Android dev cycle was a bit frustrating for me and my clients. I'm still cheering Google on though! I expect the dev and pub experiences to improve, and I'm confident they'll do what needs doing. Remember, in the end, healthy competition is a good thing. (Accent on healthy.)
- Joe D'Andrea
Joe: I'm curious as to what aspects of Android development you found frustrating. Was it actual development or something in the deployment process? I'm no expert on Android but did find the Eclipse development process to be really easy, mostly just stumbling through the APIs using ctrl-space until I got something working.
- Joel Webber
from BuddyFeed
Joel: This go-round, it was the dev experience. Deployment was a cinch by comparison. Without airing API-bug/IDE-snag/Wrong-documentation nits (which I've raised with appropriate folks), and to put this in perspective, keep in mind I wrote "developing for iPhone _this_ year" vs. last year. Big difference! iPhone's not all wine and roses either, but this year there were some very pleasant dev strides vs. Android. I'm plenty happy when I read of Android success stories. It means there's hope for me yet! :)
- Joe D'Andrea
I kind of wondered about that at the time -- there were some pretty silly assumptions in the original paper that violated the "assume the designers of the system you're attacking wouldn't do incredibly stupid things" principle.
- Joel Webber
Well, the authors of the original paper were mostly looking at commercial database systems, so that principle might not apply.
- Jim Norris
Fair point, Jim :) Although one of the authors is apparently involved in a company *making* a commercial database, so I guess that implies that he assumes himself to be unreasonable?
- Joel Webber
what original paper are you guys talking about? the original map reduce paper?
- Neha Narula
oh, the blog post. stonebraker is very entertaining :) i think that whole back-and-forth was a confusion over what the goals of map reduce are, and how they differ from the goals and uses of RDBMSs.
- Neha Narula
I think there's just some confusion over how much RDBMSs suck when you want to do something innovative. They want to control everything, and so of course you can say that that black box "could" be better than MapReduce in some theoretical way, but MapReduce scales from both a data and an engineering standpoint in ways that cause the more intricate and complex foundations of RDBMSs to collapse and beg for mercy.
- Jim Norris
that's because traditional RDBMSs do waaay more. Like joins. and most of SQL. I think old-school db researchers get annoyed because they thought map-reduce like things way back in the 80s, but didn't build them out, and forged ahead to make what you describe as these black boxes instead.
- Neha Narula
Neha, that's fair. What's not is attacking new systems (with pseudo ad-hominems to boot) without putting enough of an effort to understand why they might be useful - perhaps in under different environments than what the old systems were suitable for.
- Ashwin Bharambe
What seems strange to me is that, given how hard you have to squint to make an analysis tool like MR look like a database, that they would bother to attack it at all. Unless they truly believe that data should only ever be analyzed in an RDBMS, which is a pretty absurd stance to take.
- Joel Webber
from BuddyFeed
That's why I say the conflict is really confusion over goals. I definitely have heard people talk about Hadoop replacing RDBMSs, and I'm not even sure what that means. They are two very different tools. I think the authors of the blog post were starting from the premise that people thought that map reduce could *replace* a traditional RDBMS, and they were pointing out why it couldn't....
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- Neha Narula
Absolutely. I would also assume that Google is big enough that depts can easily keep secrets from one another.
- Louis Gray
@Louis - big enough, perhaps. But easy? Not at all. Secret projects are rather antithetical to the dominant paradigm at Google. It's only happened on a few occasions that I can recall, and those were truly exceptional cases (that each had to be justified). Besides, the engineering culture favors a large shared codebase with a tremendous degree of code reuse and common tools -- more so than anywhere else I've worked -- it is hard to keep projects secret for long in such an environment.
- DeWitt Clinton
Understood. I just don't always assume that the team working on GMail, for example, knows the Android product roadmap, for example. I know that certain more involved and visible folks, such as yourself or Mr. Cutts, may be more cross-functional, I would not ask Matt for updates on Blogger or Reader.
- Louis Gray
Oh, certainly. And I wouldn't personally presume to speak for a team I wasn't working closely with. Though for most teams I bet all I would have to do is look at their team roadmap, which they'd likely share internally anyway. I think we've seen more value unlocked by having a culture of transparency and opportunistic collaboration (and to be honest, some drive-by critique) than we would by locking down too tightly. On the balance I know I much prefer it the way Google operates.
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt's description is in line with my experience as well. With rare exceptions, if I don't know about a project it's because I just haven't heard about it, or haven't had time to look. It's a very, very open culture, and it's very rare to keep code hidden.
- Joel Webber
My brother-in-law was an Apple employee. He usually didn't know what Apple was announcing until they announced it. He worked on the chip set of the iPhone and never saw a completed iPhone until Steve showed it off on stage. He told me before the iPhone came out that it would be "thin" and a "phone." Well, yes.
- Robert Scoble
Google's development tools and processes don't lend themselves to maintaining an Apple-esque degree of internal secrecy, even if the company wanted to. Its a unique environment, in my experience (and I'm old). The toolchain was built with searchability and discoverability of code as a goal.
- DGentry
Wow -- of 422 pictures it could have chosen, FriendFeed somehow knew to put the picture of me and Allan first. The future has arrived!
- Doug Beeferman
"The stretch of blizzard conditions alone ranges from Texas to the south and Ontario on the north, with every one of the lower 48 states influenced by the gyre!"
- Keith Pelczarski
from Bookmarklet
I've read this book, it's quite good. Mr. Gunn, Prof. Ekman has spent many years studying emotion across many cultures. He's making a statement of fact that's based on many more than himself. Mark, I don't see anything particularly motivational in the quoted statement, and there's nothing particularly motivational about the book--it teaches a skill.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Living in a left-brain world, people seem unable to talk sensibly about emotion. Hopefully things like this book can help, by leading to discussion...
- Daniel Dulitz
Hungarian Copyright Treaty Author Insists That Those Who Don't Like Anti-Circumvention Clauses Are 'Hatred-Driven' Maoists - http://techdirt.com/article...
"I have a PhD in physics, and although much of what I do at work is statistical data analysis and some engineering-type modeling I still have a physicists' outlook in general. I don't think a really simple physical model can tell us exactly what the doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will do...but I do think it can tell us a lot. So, let's take a look. "
- Chad Orzel
Also deriving a great deal of satisfaction from removing the air bubbles from under the protective film, probably because it's hard work.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Your hands-on review to counter Pogue's is pretty important to me, thanks.
- Daniel Dulitz
How does it feel to read PDFs of papers on it? Is the size and clarity good enough?
- Karthik Raman
Haven't done that yet, though I've downloaded epubs from the 19-th century from Google Books. (There are a few OCR errors, but this is otherwise very nice.)
- Ruchira S. Datta
Just tried reading a PDF of a paper. The text is much more pleasant to read than on the Macbook Air, but there are too many snafus associated with reformatting the PDF (in two column format) to fit the form factor of the nook, so I probably won't be doing this. I expect the Que would be better for that sort of thing.
- Ruchira S. Datta
That's a shame. Some ebook reader should try to get some special formatting hooks into LaTeX. :)
- Ryan Moulton
In case of a large amount of Ebook , I worry about eyestrain.It's good to read about time gap, I think.
- Ami Iida
Ami, I've read plenty of e-books on computer screens and the eyestrain with e-ink is much less, as the display is not backlit.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Second what Ruchira said about eye strain. You can read an e-ink based device for hours
- Deepak Singh
I mostly want one to carry/read articles (PDF) but I haven't decided on one. I could go for the DX if the price drops a bit.
- Pedro Beltrao
I agree with Pedro -- if the DX weren't so expensive I would have one already. I have a 2-hour commute and a huge stack of literature to read, and the DX would make it very easy to put the two together.
- Bill Hooker
Pedro the kindle2 does native PDF now (or so I think)
- Deepak Singh
from iPhone
Will the Kindle2 display pdf files that contains graphs and illustration in "proper" manner? I had one but returned it because it could not display pdf files properly. I am waiting for Ebook reader that would do that. kindle Dx does that but I am waiting for Que and other ebook readers so that I can compare and buy the one that suits my need. Also, I would love to have functionality of having to print straight to ebook reader using wifi or even USB will work.
- ashish
within limits. One of my friends has his entire library on his Kindle. The new firmware is the same as the DX to the best of my knowledge.
- Deepak Singh
from IM
To be fair, I had Kindle2 before the firmware update for pdf was pushed. I am compelled to try it again but probably wait for reasons mentioned before.
- ashish
Not a bad idea. The scientific capable reader is still a bit away
- Deepak Singh
There is a website that will convert any pdf on the web to be viewed an an ebook on the Stanza iPhone app http://epub2go.com/
- Christian Burns
I am waiting for the ebook reader that syncs with Papers in with the same ease an ipods syncs with iTunes. Oh Apple, where is your ebook reader?
- Matt Leifer
and you haven't put in line ordinary book...
- A.T.
Imagine If 'Genomics Denialists' Get Their Grubby Hands on the Top Sekrit Microbiome Emails : Mike the Mad Biologist - http://scienceblogs.com/mikethe...