"Brian Rakowski walks to the whiteboard in a small conference room in Building 41 on Google's Mountain View campus. A lanky, gregarious man in his twenties, Rakowski is the product manager of a top-secret project that's been under way for more than two years." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet
Congrats on the great article, Brian. - Bret Taylor
@john: alleyinsider is the last source i will trust as to whether it is going or not going to happen. But, really, as @slippy says, choice FTW! The rest will just pan out. - Ashwin Bharambe
That picture is great. It looks like a band photo. - Andrew Burd
Internets are the new rock'n'roll, Andrew, didn't you hear? - Slippy Lane
The photographer, Joe Pugliese, has a great website: http://www.joepug.com/ In fact it's so great I haven't got round to reading the Wired article yet - Adewale Oshineye
Enjoyable read except for this completely bizarre paragraph -- "Not long after that, Brin and Page came by to check in on the furtive beginnings of their browser. "I remember sitting at my desk, which at the time had a stuffed snake running along the back of it," says Pam Greene, an engineer on the team. "Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake." - Osi
"The snake, called Mr. Bigglesworth, seemed to purr softly in Sergey's lap, providing a calming influence during the demo. However, when one of the tabs crashed, taking the browser with it, Sergey's voice took a more strident turn. "I have gathered here before me the world's best developers," Sergey began, "and yet each of you has failed to kill Internet Explorer. That makes me angry. And when Sergey gets angry, Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset. And when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, people die!" - Karim
Sergey then pressed a nearby console button that retracted Darin's chair into the floor below. A flash of flame could be seen as the screaming developer vanished from the conference room. - Karim
Somebody help me!" Darin pleads. "I'm alive, only very badly burned!" This proves to be very distracting, and after being interrupted several times, Sergey picks up his phone, and reports the situation to a henchman. "I'll go deal with it," he assures Sergey. "If someone opens the retrieval hatch, I can get out," Darin explains. At this point, the hatch opens. Darin is at first grateful, but then a gunshot is heard. - Geoff Longman
After a pause, Sergey is satisfied Darin is dead and attempts to continue explaining his plan, only be interrupted by Darin again, who says indignantly "you shot me! You shot me right in the arm! Why did you-". Darin sentence is cut short by a second gunshot, which proves to be the end for him, as the hatch is heard to close. (http://www.moviedeaths.com/aus...) - Geoff Longman
Google’s Chrome is aimed at Windows, not IE
This is no longer about browser but about the an entire marketplace spread between desktop, mobile and web. With Chrome, Google’s taking a shot at Windows, not paltry Internet Explorer
I’ve covered this in more detail on my blog
http://sachendra.wordpress.com... - Sachendra
The point of Chrome is the same point one would make about the iPhone. Will iPhone outsell Nokia worlwide in total number of phones sold? Not a chance in hell! Has it changed the face of mobile phones forever...absolutely. This is where I think Chrome is a fantastic concept. By open sourcing D8 Google has literally empowered every other browser including Safari and Firefox to be Windows beaters. In actual fact IE may even implemented their own canibalised V8 to canibalise their Microsofts existing fat client business. If you ask me, Google is the master of judo in this case. google 2 MSFT 0 - John Kotsaftis via feedalizr
I haven't been able to find many details about the V8 design, but it's apparently a straight JIT (no interpreter) with inline caching of property accessors. I didn't see anything about HotSpot/TraceMonkey-style optimizing compilation, and it doesn't seem to use any intermediate language. (http://code.google.com/apis/v8...) Is this the future of dynamic language runtimes? Am I a nerd? - Jim Norris
Nice to see Wired putting out a great article in a timely manner for a change - rather than spend page upon page talking about minor internet celebs and how they gatecrashed gawker media parties to build their fame. - Jonathan Beckett
Jim, tracemonkey should still be faster. Paul friendfeeded an article comparing them. I should say that tracemonkey will still be faster eventually, unless V8 adds hotspot-like tracing as well, in which case, my money would ride on V8, since Google probably has half of the hotspot team :) - Sanjeev Singh
Most coveted job title on Earth right now, huh? So, now you're on the squad, what's the minimum bribe to get you gushing forth to the guys on the merits of being able to tag our own (or each others) posts? - Slippy Lane
Congratulations!! Smart move by FriendFeed. :) - felix
greeaat news for all involved. congrsts. - Alex Gawley
Congrats Ben! I could see that coming at some point - Dobromir Hadzhiev
Congratulations! I knew it was coming when I noticed you'd been making changes and even had a FF email address... and there was no denial: http://beta.friendfeed.com/e/5... - Tony Ruscoe
This is recognition for his great work! Congrats! - Winston Teo
Someone send this to Jeremy Clarkson. He'll have a field day with this. - Roberto Bonini
Where was this?! That is hilarious.... - Emily Miller
Jacksonville, Oregon. It is about 20 minutes north of Ashland... I made Amy turn around so I could get a picture. If you turn right at this sign you go into downtown... Coming into town you have to stop no matter what. Going out of town you don't have to stop at all. This direction, you have to stop unless you're going right and the opposite direction you have to stop or yield if going right. Seems like the recipe for a crash to me... - Ross Miller
"According to a New York Times article in October 1985, “Lord Flathead,” was the leader of an early black-hat hacker group when he was 14 years old. In July and August 1985, between his freshman and sophomore years, Anderson hacked into a Chase Manhattan Bank DEC VAX computer system (like the one in the image below) that handled “much of Chase’s data processing and record keeping, including records of home mortgages and…portfolios of major customers such as pension funds.” He subsequently showed up to 40 of his friends how to do it." - Bret Taylor
You can't buy street credibility like that. - Mike Boudreaux
I think much more highly of Tom after this - Rob Kniaz
Rob - TC agrees with you: "Frankly, my opinion of Tom Anderson just rose significantly." - hunter walk
It's impossible not to respect Tom much more after that - Cesar Cardoso
I remember Ng presenting his research on self-taught helicopters way back when he was interviewing for a position at Stanford. I don't think they were flying upside-down back then though. - Jim Norris
Someone get this wise man a bigger chair, he knows his stuff - Bwana McCall
I always get a little disappointed when something I want to see is in SD. All EPL matches, most UW Huskies games, etc. Makes me cry little pixelated tears. - Akiva Moskovitz
I recently recovered tons of ideas I wrote up 20 years ago while I was in junior high and high school. I'm afraid to read them because I fear they're like this, only about special relativity. - Kevin Fox
How stupid. You'd have to boil each bucket of water to really get rid of it. - Derek Ward
"Think of it this way: When you go to the movies, you don’t go around to each theater to see which movies are playing and when; it would take all of your time and effort running around from theater to theater. Instead, you check the kiosk out front.
Your blog publishing system provides a RSS kiosk, or ping feed, to let FriendFeed (and potential RSS readers) know when and what has been updated since its last visit. Friendfeed doesn’t have to go theater to theater to see which movie is playing. It also checks all RSSs in a domain at once, eliminating the need to download each one separately. Polling is less frequent, but more accurate. By cutting out a lot of wasted data transfer, it reduces the load and gets the relevant information directly." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
So we need an index for the RSS feeds. Who's gonna post the index of indexes? - Bill Sodeman
I clicked on Paul's link to the code, but it was hard to read because the whitespace was collapsed. Looking at the source it seems that they're nesting the code within tables within <pre> tags. Since <pre> can't contain tables, my browser is ignoring the <pre>s. Why would they do that instead of just putting style="collapse-whitespace:pre" on the table? - Gabe Schaffer
No, Paul, I have a modern browser: IE 6.0sp2. - Gabe Schaffer
I don't know if I'd call IE 6 a "modern browser", considering it was initially released over 7 years ago... in any case you can view the source in plain text here: http://simpleupdateprotocol.go... - Simon Willison
I wouldn't call IE6 a modern browser either, but 14% of the traffic to code.google.com still comes from it, so it does need to be supported -- I'll open a ticket to investigate the issue (I don't have access to Windows right now to confirm). Though @Gabe, since you're a technically inclined person, I'm curious why you are running IE6 rather than FF3 or IE7. - DeWitt Clinton
Most of my clients are still running IE6, so I know that when something works on my machine, it will work on theirs too. Besides, I haven't really found a feature in IE7 or FF that is worth upgrading for. And honestly, I would consider it a bug for a browser to render a block element like a table inside a pre (which only allows certain inline content), particularly on a page that specifies XHTML Strict. I expect the browser to either ignore the pre (like IE6) or ignore the table. - Gabe Schaffer
Cool, thanks for the feedback Gabe. I opened a ticket here: http://code.google.com/p/suppo.... Please feel free to add more detail to that ticket and star it so you can follow the progress. Cheers! - DeWitt Clinton
Thanks Paul. It's definitely an issue that needs to be dealt with. - Daniel Shaw
Since I can find colliding user IDs easily with MD5, is there any risk of a DoS attack? - Steve Weis
I'm not sure what you're asking Steve. Each site generates their own SUP-IDs, so they would be DOSing themselves. - Paul Buchheit
ok plea to all bloggers- please stop using "modest proposal"- you're referencing Swift who was writing satire, about killing Irish babies to prevent/deal with famine. Almost all blogs with this play on the phrase "modest proposal" are not being satirical... so it's a reference without meaning.. I get confused easily, granted. And, not just this post, but there have been others... OK english major out. Thnx. - anna
Paul, maybe I'm misunderstanding the protocol, but I can pick a name that intentionally collides with someone else's SUP-ID. Is there any expectation of collision resistance? - Steve Weis
Steve, The service assigns SUP-IDs. It is in the service's interest to minimize collisions between the SUP-IDs it assigns. - Gary Burd
Steve, each SUP feed has its own SUP-ID space, so you really can't cause problems with other people's feeds. If that's not what you mean, please provide an example of what you have in mind. - Pau
![[daily dose of imagery] scrambled pedestrians](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/c9db097c45ea01c011464d1f1f9c667b3daad9c9 "[daily dose of imagery] scrambled pedestrians")