An alternative theory is that Google originally thought it's value was in its employees, so even if somebody stole their technology and methods it wouldn't matter much. But now they realize that another company using their code and methods could easily out compete them with some help from the government or better cultural understanding. And the only way to protect your stuff from China is to not locate it in China.

In other words, Google now believes its future rests on leveraging network effects from its properties and not from innovation. They will continue to innovate as there are some smart productive people working there, but strategically their future will rest on buying out new competitors and 'cutting off the air supply' of those it can't buy out. Of course, being a marketing company they will have some friendlier term for it, maybe something 'stealing their Buzz' or 'spamming their blog'.

The security hole is running an unknown/unverified program, and anybody without the sense to disable autorun is going to just click on the installer and get the trojan anyway. Autorun doesn't make the problem worse, it just makes the computer more convenient for most users.

Autorun is not the security hole. As usual, users are the security hole.

In which case once there is a second version you have the exact same packet format as the current ogg, except for an extra mask, test, and one fewer flag bit. So the only gain at all is if you assume there will never be another version, and if there is even one more version then you've caused a pipeline stall for no reason. Which is stupid.

This goes along with the criticism of the checksum field as 'wasted space', but it is probably put there so you can reliably find the page header if doing a random seek. Which if you can do, then you don't need a time index because you can do a binary search to find any time index with only a tiny bit of extra seeks.

I haven't looked at these formats in depth, but it sure sounds like this guy is clueless.

Tablets so far have been just that, big and clunky and heavy PCs with no keyboard. But what if a tablet was the size and thickness of an LCD panel, got 20 hours per charge, passively cooled (and cool), and weighed 1 pound or less? Now all the sudden instead of a laptop with no keyboard it's like a magic piece of paper that's interactive. Apple could do this.

There are plenty of times reading /. or some other bookmarks where I go hours without typing anything more than a few words into a search engine. For this kind of browsing I don't want a keyboard. Between completion and abbreviations people hardly even type these days anyway. Yes, if you want to type a document you either need handwriting recognition or a bluetooth/usb keyboard... so what, that doesn't mean you want it attached to the unit making it big and clumsy all the time.

If you have an 8.5 x 11 inch tablet you have plenty of space for a on-screen keyboard for IM to type in 'lulz'.

Plenty of kids play games and browse the web on iPods with their tiny screens. Once your eyes start going you need a larger screen. Think those giagantic tv remotes... even just an iPod with massive screen would be a gold mine.

And why can't you have both? The only thing stopping a tablet from having a fast processor is heat and power, so just move that part out of the unit and send the display wirelessly.

What I'm predicting/hoping for is a 'giant iphone' with fast ARM processor (for power and weight) and iphone/ipod like apps... web browser, book reader, music, some light games, etc but on a display you can read and use. This is lightweight, easy to carry, lasts for days, and works everywhere.

But then the killer feature is that it also VNCs your desktop over your home wifi or internet. You buy the Mac mini for the fast processor and graphics, put it in the closet someplace, and just remote the display over wifi to the tablet. Plug a USB keyboard/mouse into the tablet for those things that are much easier using a real keyboard. Of course if you have a mac main computer this works really easily and works anywhere you can get a wifi signal thanks to some service Apple would provide. But if you have Windows you can still make it work. It would chunk up some over the internet at a starbucks, but that's why it would have the integrated safari, book reader, music, etc.

Google makes unauthorized copies of people's work to store in their servers, in some way similar to how Psystar is found guilty of making unauthorized copies of Mac OS X when it loads it into memory.

Then Google makes money hand over fist from it by selling search results/ads and the people producing the content get nothing or -at best- a very tiny fraction of the income. 'Take from the rich and keep for our own rich selves' sounds a lot like 'do evil' to me.

If your content shows up in Google's results and they make any money off it, then you as the creator of that content should get a portion of that money. Otherwise why do we have copyright laws at all? In a fair world, google and bing should need to set up accounts for each website and pay back a portion of their revenue each time that site's contents appears in a search result with ads in it.

As a professional C programmer, I've watched as C-the-language has stagnated. C-the-platform has only thrived thanks to Open Source, and no thanks to the sclerotic X3J11 Technical Committee and an ineffectual steward by ANSI.

C programmers have watched in horror as C++ gained fully reified templates, methods and objects, arbitrary template expansions and auto pointers, whilst we've only grudgingly been allowed a void* generics model whilst ANSI spent years rejecting and rewriting closure proposals that are still 10-20 years away from adoption.

C++ is thriving because it has a benevolent dictator in the form of Bjarne Stroustrup. C the language is a stagnant mess.
</sarcasm>

Just because a language is 'stagnant' doesn't make it bad. I still much prefer the uncluttered languages like C or Java to their swiss-army-knife competitors.

Of course ads generate enough money to pay for reporting. How do you think google pays for all those data centers, "free" gmail, groups, dns, blog, 'drives' services they have?

There is plenty of online advertisement money, the problem is that google gets pretty much all of it instead of more going to the people creating the content. Google is the SONY + EMI + Universal of the online advertisement industry... they keep all the money and the actual creative talent gets shafted.

Google has well paid employees with awesome benefits such as free food and 1 paid vacation day a week ('20% time') and 300% profit they spend on all sorts of money-losing projects. Meanwhile newspapers that hire people to produce news and content are going out of business. Do no evil, or just see no evil?

Why don't they just call it "g". Then later, others can invent g++ and g# languages. This won't be gonfusing at all.

- A program could include a LICENSE file.
- A set of program icons.
- It could include shared libraries that get used only if the system ones aren't compatible.
- It could include resources like a skeleton ~/.progrc or localizations that somebody might want to edit but probably not. ... or whatever the imagination can come up with.

The unix model with everything spread out between /share, /bin, etc works well for the tons of tiny open-source programs but fails for programs that are not both open-source and community maintained. For something like Star Office there's no reason why there shouldn't be a single 'linux version' file the user can download and have it work without needing to sudo an installer/uninstaller to write files to tons of protected folders.

The solution is simple, just make 'programs' be filesystems contained in a file. This scheme has most of the benefits of 'magic folders' without any changes to POSIX semantics.

This can be done now, for instance use mksquashfs to turn the folder into a single, tightly packed file (it could even be compressed). It's still readable as a folder by mounting it with -o loop. All that's needed is a /lib/ld-squashfs.so to map the correct program from it into memory, and can just be a slightly modified ld-linux.so that examines the squashfs structures directly. Some kind of libsquashfs.so could be used to let the app retrieve data files from its filesystem.

The only read drawback is if apps want to write data back to the bundle, although this probably isn't a good idea anyway so being read-only is an unintentional bonus. There might be some selinux and page sharing problems, but this can be solved easily after the scheme is established and in widespread use.

One user is reporting file corruption and nobody else can replicate it. That's no reason to hold up a release or worry at all.

Otoh, for a while I repeatedly got file corruption copying large ~10gb files on 9.04 from my ext3 filesystem to an SMB share. The hash would be wrong maybe 3/4th of the time after copying and doing an 'md5sum smb/thefile'. So we should stop using ext3 also? disable cifs?

Chances are in both cases it had nothing to do with the filesystem at all and was something else like flaky hardware.

That's why you do these kinds of experiments away from your home world. Then the observers on the home world see the observers on Mars Research Colony exploded/imploded/whatever and they don't do it again. It's only the observers that may die that would experience it as the universe 'conspiring' against their research.

But it explains why no aliens... we would only meet the ones that didn't experiment on their home world and in universes where we didn't either. That would be pretty slim odds. If you subscribe to the universe forking at every decision nonsense.

For me the dimensions of the screen is not what makes is a netbook. What I consider a netbook is:

a) long battery life
b) low heat
c) low weight
d) low cost
e) 'small' meaning not heavy or thick or clunky.

The perfect 'netbook' for me would be 14" screen, 1-2 pounds, 10+ hour battery life, $300. The biggest problems I have with 'real' laptops is they weigh a lot, burn your legs, and you have to carefully monitor the battery basically using it plugged in most of the time. I like using my 1024x600 netbook more than any of the laptops I've used for these reasons, except that the screen is just too small.

There is no difference between those buttons and the location bar.

The location bar shows the URL field for the current tab. It also uses global state, for instance browsing on one tab adds completion entries to other tabs. Should it be outside the tab because completing is global and not specific to a particular tab? No, because what it displays and how it operates is irrelevant to where it should be located. What matters is what visual grouping the element belongs to, and this is not the tab because the presence of the element is not unique to a tab.

Take another example, an SVG editor. What buttons are active and what is displayed (font, color, etc) depends on which object is selected. Does each object get a separate Font text field floating within its bounding box just because the data varies per object? No, that would be madness. The location bar per tab is just a degenerate case of this, but the same principle applies that controls are shown at the outermost layer where the element is always present.

Lets also put it in another way. The purpose of a tab is to switch between different views. Suppose the bookmarks bar, buttons, and location take 20% of the window. With tabs at the top, switching tabs changes 80% of the tab's area, plus a little bit extra for the URL and possibly different button states. With tabs at the bottom, switching tabs changes 100% of the tab's area plus some extra areas.

In terms of visual appearance, tabs in Chrome "sort of" switch between different views, but not completely. How would you explain what changes when you select a different tab? "The web page part is completely different, the buttons change what they show, and the bookmarks bar and menu buttons are unchanged" vs "When you select a different tab its contents show a different web page". I think you can see which is conceptually simpler and makes the most sense of the two.