Archives for October 2004

Robs Blog: Gmail Tools & Plugins
Plugins and tools to make Gmail easier to use are starting to pop up on the web

Damn, people can be weird. But, at least they’re not out preemptively f*cking other countries (just [fake] bush, it seems).

So, giving away free shirts is a great branding opportunity, but every now and then it can bite you in the bum. I wonder if Nokia had this in mind when they came up with their “connecting people” slogan? Oh, and check out the rest of the pics in the series by following the links in Adam’s post (he has way more patience than me).

Rather strange you might say…!

…excerpt from: www.helloworldblog.com…

GooOS, the Google Operating System (kottke.org…)
Great post about what Google is up to by Rich Skrenta. He argues that Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anything that’s been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly:

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world’s top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world’s biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

This is great, of course, but when is Mars Co. going to start putting some decent chocolate in their products? By decent, I mean something with good flavor and not just alkalinity (that the processing is supposed to reduce but doesn’t much since it wasn’t good quality chocolate to start with).

The New York Times Magazine: Eat Chocolate, Live Longer?

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.

— John Cleese
…excerpt from: www.williamgibsonbooks.com…