I'm not saying that Schmidt wasn't at fault, just that TFA didn't directly state that Schmidt was at fault (apart from the China searches) - it just sort of implied it.

or at least not clearly right. Context from TFA:

Schmidt, according to associates, lost some energy and focus after losing the China decision. At the same time, Google was becoming defensive. All of their social-network efforts had faltered. Facebook had replaced them as the hot tech company, the place vital engineers wanted to work. Complaints about Google bureaucracy intensified. Governments around the world were lobbing grenades at Google over privacy, copyright, and size issues. The “don’t be evil” brand was getting tarnished, and the founders were restive. Schmidt started to think of departing.

This doesn't mean that Schmidt wanted to move away from "don't be evil", he may have just been worn out from trying to uphold it for as large and diverse a company as Google is.

The above post was me, btw, I didn't realize it'd lost track of my login.

Obligatory xkcd link

If you understand Turing machines and big-O notation (and if you claim to be a programmer, you should) and polynomials (and if you claim to understand big-O notation, you should):

• P is the set of all problems that can be solved in O(some polynomial of n) using a Turing machine. This can still be obnoxiously difficult, e.g. O(n^1000000), but 1000000*n^1000000 is still better than O(e^n) if n gets high enough.
• NP is the set of all problems for which an alleged solution can be checked in O(some polynomial of n). The N stands for "non-deterministic" - imagine hooking up the Turing machine to another machine that spits out random maybe-solutions.
• NP-complete problems are the hardest ones in NP, in the sense that if any of them is in P, then everything in NP is in P - because translating a solution of a NP-complete problem to a solution of any other NP problem is itself O(some polynomial of n).

Fair enough, but let's put that in perspective, too. First, Larry left Wikipedia after about one year. Second, after about three years, Larry's new project Citizendium has about 15,000 articles; at the same point in Wikipedia's lifecycle, it had about 200,000, and today it's up to about 3,500,000. (And then there's non-English material, but you get the point.) Citizendium has its benefits, but breadth of coverage is not one of them, and breadth of coverage (with generally-good-enough accuracy) is evidently what most people care about.

From TFA (the original, not the haphazard rewrite):

A hallway usability test is where you grab the next person that passes by in the hallway and force them to try to use the code you just wrote. If you do this to five people, you will learn 95% of what there is to learn about usability problems in your code.

The guy's apparently from Belgium, so English is quite possibly his fourth language, so I won't bother ripping on his grammar. His content is another matter...

Original: Do you use source control?
New: Do you use a distributed source control system?
My current Big Work Project has a whopping four coders, so I can't speak to when distributed source control is a big deal and when it's overkill.

Original: Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds?
New: Do you have automated build or deployment procedures?
Clearly inferior. An error-prone 20-step process that you run once a month is still automated, just not automated enough and not used enough.

Original: Do you have a bug database?
New: Do you use a bug database where users can report bugs directly?
The BWP is still small enough to get by on Excel lists, with changes manually merged back into the master copy by the project manager, or just e-mail for quick-turnaround items. Excel is noticeably clunkier than an automated system, but you may want to start there to get a feel for what the automated system should do (e.g. separate status fields for "the coder did some testing and thinks it's fixed" vs. "the tester did some more thorough testing, confirmed that there were no misunderstandings, and couldn't find any more edge/corner cases").

Original: Do you have testers? Do you do hallway usability testing?
New: Do you have a testing protocol, and specific resources for testing?
I hate calling people "resources". Also, your protocol should stick to the right things (e.g. "when you find a problem, report X and Y and Z"); an example of a wrong thing is "test this specific way of using the system", because real users will go off the rails.

Original: Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
New: Do you fix bugs before implementing new features?
More or less equivalent.

Original: Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec?
New: Do you have a roadmap, and you don't make important changes to the short term priorities?
These have become fuzzy for no good reason that I can discern.

Original: Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Do you use the best tools money can buy?
New: Do your team work in good conditions (quiet environment, flexible schedule, freedom to choose development software, fair paycheck...)
More or less equivalent. "Fair paycheck" is so blindingly obvious that it shouldn't need to be pointed out. "Flexible schedule" is a genuinely good addition; I've personally gained some peace of mind by saving some tasks for evenings/weekends when I knew I wouldn't be interrupted by other work stuff (family stuff is another matter, but easier to control), and consequently taking it easier during normal business hours.

Original: Do new candidates write code during their interview?
This has been omitted completely for no good reason that I can discern. Maybe he's lucky and hasn't had to clean up after a bad coder yet.

It's semi-random computer-simulated artificial animals moving, eating, breeding, evolving and surviving (or not). The link to critterding doesn't directly state this, but gives enough information that you can reasonably figure it out:

How the program works

Critters are informed by sensors:

• if their head touches food unit
• if their head touches another critter
• if they are able to procreate
• about their energy state
• about their age
• about the state of their joints
• what the world looks like (RGBA vision)

Critters can make use of the following motor neurons (actions):

• bend joint
• bend joint in other direction
• eat
• procreate

At default, the program sets up a small world with a relatively large amount of food units and keeps throwing in critters with randomly generated brains and bodies.

(picture omitted)

After a while, one of these idiot critters will unavoidably be good enough to maintain a small population:

(picture omitted)

Slowly but surely, their behaviour will become a lot less random as they demonstrate increasingly better survival skills:

(picture and video omitted)

Are you sure you want to know?

At least there's an addon for it.

erroneus explicitly referred to Internet servers, not desktops. statowl doesn't specify, and the top-level graph shows Windows at 88% and Linux at 1% (so it may not be counting servers at all, or may be lumping desktops and servers together).

Also with the exception of their story on Eccleston, The Sun is by and large a load of bollocks.

Both halves of which are explicitly pointed out in TFA:

Normally I would take such a rumour with a grain of salt, especially as it comes from a British tabloid, The Sun. However, The Sun ran a similar story (a highly accurate one as it turned out) regarding former Doctor Who cast star Christopher Eccleston, who also left the series earlier than expected.

A bit of poking around indicates that the community edition is released under GPL v3 and the paid edition is released under this variation of the Mozilla PL. Someone want to dig through it and work it out?

You're ass-u-ming that "Director of IT" means he manages other coders. He may be a one-man department, or may manage people in any number of other IT roles.