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Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to…
Built By Google
Pete logs onto his desktop computer. It’s a “dumb” netbook built by Google and called Google Chrome Superbook 5, with a fast startup time of 0.3 seconds, the point at which the Google engineers figured further optimizations were not useful, in terms of limitations of human perception. The mouse next to the computer is…
My First BillG Review
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
Google: we're having scaling issues, please stop distributing your FF extension
Google's public relations efforts are exemplified by their friendly communication regarding a user's Firefox extension, showcasing a collaborative approach over legal threats.
How Many (Indie) Games I Sell - Part Two
The first part of this column, in which I gave the full sales figures for one of my games, Geneforge 4: Rebellion , attracted a fair amount...
Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street?
By James Kwak That’s the title of a post a couple weeks ago by Ezra Klein, in which he interviewed a friend of his who went to Wall Street after Harvard. Having seen this phenomenon from a co…
Did somebody just try to buy the British government?
Hansard is the official printed transcript of the proceedings of the houses of parliament — in other words, the working log of the British government.
Life at Google
As I noted in the previous outing , I have the peculiar fortune of working for a company that’s also a tourist attraction; so I’ll do some tour-guiding while my eyes remain fresh.
IE 8 is the new IE 6
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.
Overnight success takes a long time
For some reason, this weekend has seen a lot of talk about what FriendFeed is/isn't/should be doing (see Louis Gray and others ). One pers...
How to waste money in Google Adwords
I have looked at quite a few Google Adwords accounts as part of a 1-day consulting package I do for other microISVs and small software vendors. I have also talked to a lot of people at conferences…
Ejection Seats
I pulled a few pranks in the military, but the one that got pulled on me took years off of my life. Alone in the Cockpit There isn’t anything cooler for a 19-year old then getting into the cockpit …
DHH: Let It All Out
Casey's reporting for The Verge brought some of the dirty laundry that helped motivate our change of direction regarding societal politics at Basecamp onto the public record. It erased part of that fine line we try to toe between sharing as much of the inner workings at the company as possible while respecting the…
Tips for Startup Companies (2006)
Having rich parents is great. In fact, it is the best and surest way to get rich in these United States. Unfortunately, having a low cost of capital is no guarantee of success because, as formerly poor countries have become ridiculously rich, capital has become very cheap. Your competitors can probably get a home…
The Asian domain-name extortion scam
We are a leading internet solutions organization in Asia, and we have something urgent to confirm with you. Yesterday we received a formal application from a company called ” Varmer Investment Co., Ltd “. They were trying to apply for ” instapaper ” as Brand Name and following Domain Names through our organization:
Let's just say it: 3D TV is a joke.
(At Panasonic's IFA booth: People using 3D glasses and monitors to watch the live women in front of their faces.) If you determine the big story here at the IFA tech show here in Berlin based on raw square footage in the booths, there's no question what it is: 3D TV is everywhere. The massive boot
Google's mismanagement of the Android Market
Earlier this week, CNET ran an article critical of the permission model of the Android Market. Google’s response to the criticism was that “each Android app must get users’ permission to access sensitive information”. While this is technically true, one should not need a PhD in Computer Science to use a smartphone…
The App Store Spam Problem
The first two are real. Rocket Bird 3D and MY BEST FRIEND are other things (although probably keyword spammers). The other six of the top ten results for this game’s name are pure spam. Judging from the number of customer ratings, a lot of people are downloading them — and, reading the reviews, it looks like they’re…