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Comment Re:Steampunk (Score 3, Informative) 365

Most electric plants are just fancy steam engines. Even the nuke plants. Boil water and drive the generators with the steam pressure.

Coal is just a more efficient version of wood. Wood is renewable and we already know we can run an industrial society on coal.

Also, look up the Stanley Steamer some time. We don't even need oil to have motor cars, just high enough quality metallurgy to build pressure containers. And if we save the books, we save metallurgy.

Comment Re:Drink the kool aide (Score 1) 185

You're not off base. I think you're right on target. I also think that process sows the seeds of Google's fall, like every other tech company before you.

Look up psychology studies on creativity some time. Creativity and intelligence both benefit from collaboration but unlike intelligence, creativity is not a rapid-fire process. If intelligence measures how quickly you find a solution, creativity measures how many solutions you find over time.

Your hiring process biases towards high intelligence but middling creativity. You then use collaboration as a substitute for creative thinking -- many people, many viewpoints.

Unfortunately, you don't get genuine creativity this way. As often as not you get groupthink instead. Unusually smart groupthink but even so. This shows in Google's products, especially the user interfaces. Many of those UIs have steadily deteriorated over the past half decade. And you've selected for staff who despite their genius are quite literally incapable of reversing the trend.

Submission + - LG Split Screen Software Compromises System Security (developerscouch.com)

jones_supa writes: The Korean electronics company LG ships a split screen tool with their ultra wide displays. It allows to slice the Windows desktop into multiple segments, which is actually a nice feature. However, installing the software seriously compromises security of the particular workstation. The developers required administrator access for the software, but apparently they hacked their way out. The installer silently disables User Account Control, and enables a policy to start all applications as Administrator. In the article there is also a video presentation of the setup procedure. It is safe to say that no one should be running this software in its current form.

Comment Re:Drink the kool aide (Score 2) 185

Which brings me to my other complaint: Google looks at how people think "on their feet" to the exclusion of how they think and perform over time.

I don't know about you, but unless the problem is crazy-simple or something I've seen a dozen times before, I simply don't think in 45-minute timescales. Give me a week and I'll have three solid solutions. Give me a month and I'll have a dozen more, at least one of which is ingenious.

Give me your 45 minute segment of an all-day interview and as often as not I'll have only trash. Working trash but haphazard inscalable trash nevertheless. When you judge me by that trash, you grossly misjudge me.

Comment Drink the kool aide (Score 5, Insightful) 185

The key to interviewing at Google is to drink the kool aide before you arrive. Download and use the core software they make available. If you're not enthusiastic enough about their tool chain to do that, mere competence won't carry you over the finish line.

Most companies couldn't get away with that but Google is Google. At least for now.

Comment Re:The tarnishing of spirits really helps (Score 1) 228

Yes, actually, there is something better about that land. First, it's 13,000 feet above sea level, outside most of the earth's atmosphere. Second, the winds above the side are unusually stable, making it easy to post-process the data with computers to get rid of atmospheric distortion.

It's one of the few places on earth you can collect astronomical data with quality comparable to a space-based telescope.

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Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian

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