The main problem with Google Docs is that it is just too complicated - or better to say, has some rules which are quite unique.
For example, normal people get very confused that you can have multiple files with same name. Also the concept of collections is something quite broken since they represented as "folders": yes great on a paper but people assume if a document A in collection X is different document than the same document in collection Y.
I wonder how the above things will map to local filesystem without confusion.
It is very dangerous to be ignorant about critical computer science fields like cryptography and just go with the cult.
I'm not saying you should build your own cryptography, but a good hacker (or a good engineer how we call them in early 90s) should understand difference between bcrypt, PBKDF2, and scrypt. At least to understand why bcrypt is better than salt+SHA-1. And some other aspects of security.
However, if somebody has no clue about cryptography and security then she/he should go with bcrypt - but I'm not sure if that person should be responsible or in business of storing somebody's critical data at all.
And they both live in San Francisco - which shows that it is all about $$ and not about their political views or principles.
So this is one of the problems I can see with politics today: politicians have no views or principles you can count on. Everything is depended on how much money they get (of course they all stick and talk about wedge issues such as guns, gays, and god which are really stupid).
That is one of main reason people like Ron Paul: you know what you get.
Unrelated question - but I would to hear what others think.
I noticed that two sites we have developed in the past (chat/dating site and food review site) had much better acceptance in Mexico, Brazil, Netherlands, etc. than in US.
First we thought this is just a western anglo-saxon thing, but we also have much higher acceptance in UK.
It seems like that users in US are not early adopters. Did anybody noticed the same trend?
Does anybody know why they were doing this experiment (measuring speed fo neutrinos) at all? Were they assuming that neutrinos travel faster than speed of light in the first place?
I'm not an expert how to write job posing (and Dave Thomas is an excellent writer), but this is more like "what a developer job posting should NOT look like" then "should look like"
Two important things and one less important:
* job description is more for system admin and not for a developer - your audience will be confused
* if you do not offer either health care or a pension plan, this is then essentially a contracting gig. You probably need to provide exact salary in this case. Probably you need go to hourly rate. In practice, there are only two type of jobs for developers in US: job fully loaded with all benefits and contracting gig. There is very little between.
* less important: too wordy and just too long without exact facts (you know engineers do not like
The questions like this are the reason why your first job should be working on large scale very-well maintained projects and not some small startup.
By working on these kind of project you will understand that there is a clear need to have good nomenclature and naming standard for a project and modules which, in many cases, reassemble Hungarian notation (describing method's or variable's purpose, portability, performance implication, etc.).
From engineering point of view, the sad thing (and danger) about Google, Twitter, or Facebook is they will get in trouble as soon as some other company figure outs more efficient advertising model (and starts eating their revenue).
In other words, regardless of all these great things Google is doing and great technology, if somebody invents better ad market than AdSense, all this great technology will not help them at all. That is the problem.
I think the problem for engineers working for certain companies such as Google, Twitter, or Facebook is not that your customer are advertising companies.
The real challenge (and problem) for some engineers is that your user is not your customer.
The joy of interacting with customers which are actually paying for things you made for them is sometimes priceless.
Also when working for Google, Twitter, or Facebook you might never learn how to envision and build the product (and company from it) which is sold directly to the customer.
So don't expect the next Oracle, Informatica, or Apple coming from ex-Googlers (even they have a lot of engineering knowledge in that space).
Comparing personal budget with US budget is a gross oversimplification.
First, US can (it is already doing via QE) monetarazie all the debt. And one comedian said: US can just start a little bigger war to get us out of the.
Also don't forget that 4/5 of all that "government" spending (that is medicare, SS and defense) is actually just tunneling money to other parts of economy (defense contractors) and poor people.
Also we have disturbing trend which will, I believe, start making differences: the rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer. If that trend continues, we will see some Trocky wannabes popping around.
What I see happening in the coming years:
1. One more banking crisis: this time it starts from China. They say all depressions have two legs: the second is leg is longer.
2. Thanks for this new banking crisis, we will finally reconstruct the banking sector and make it more efficient. There will be no more 4 banks on each intersection in downtown SF.
I have been living in Bay Area for 11 years and here is my take:
- as an engineer, you will never be able to buy a house in Bay Area (at least not so you can live conformable). you will struggle all your life. And don't dream: None of your stock options will be worth shit.
- the schools are horrendous, so expect extra costs for after-school programs or private school
- Bay Area is the best place in the world to be entrepreneur
- Bay Area has the best weather in the world
In short, if you have entrepreneurship aspirations and/or weather is important for you then Bay Area is the place. Otherwise, go somewhere else.
All the big corporations have development centers in other parts of the country. For example, Oracle has a big development center in Nashua, etc.
Even if you put write ahead logs on different I/O subsystems the lock needed to ensure consistency will probably be a bottleneck (and crappy Linux implementation asynch IO on multi processor system does not help). How do you guys organize data so it is consistent and lock is not a bootleneck?
How MemSQL compares with TimesTen? Or even with Oracle RDBMS with bunch of RAM? Or Oracle RDBMS with Oracle In-Memory Database Cache (TimesTen) on application app servers?
What is MemSQL "secret sause" comparing to competitor?
EDIT: Just so say that I'm so very happy to see a company which tries to solve real problems not Web 2.0 social networking crap is able to raise money.
EDIT2: The company like this needs $40M investment not $2M.