I joined [company with huge datacenters] just last year and so I'm still learning all the cloud/clustery technologies here. Every time I change jobs (every few years) I try to do something a little different. So my last gig was the first time I spent serious time using javascript and PHP (no I didn't like it much). Before that was a few gigs with J2EE and Oracle/DB2; before that was C++; before that was C# and WMI; etc. So if you're fortunate enough to get your employee to pay you to learn new stuff, that's the best way to go. Because then you can spend your time at home on slashdot, etc. :-)

Do you not use light bulbs in the summer? Or do you just not have summer in Wisconsin?

Well, based on Mach 2.5, which contained BSD 4.4 and Mach kernel code.

Google development is done on Linux but Mac laptops at Google run MacOS. Laptops (or chromebooks, there's a mix of both) aren't used for development (except via ssh, etc); they are used for email, web, etc.

> IIRC Google has more of the latter and fewer of the former.

Yes, you are correct. More details here:

http://research.google.com/university/exacycle_program.html

"The best projects will have a very high number of independent work units, a high CPU to I/O ratio, and no inter-process communication (commonly described as Embarrassingly or Pleasantly Parallel). The higher the CPU to I/O rate, the better the match with the system. Programs must be developed in C/C++ and compiled via Native Client. Awardees will be able to consult an on-site engineering team."

Native Client: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client

One area where gmail is infinitely better than Outlook is search speed. Which is important in an enterprise setting, e.g. when trying to find details about design discussions from months ago.

Most companies... except for IBM which mandates Lotus Notes. Which is the worst email program I've ever used (outside of BSD Mail).

I work at Google and I've never seen anyone here use anything besides gmail for corporate mail.

> Any reason you didn't go for chrome-frame instead? Chrome frame is being retired Jan 2014. http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/retiring-chrome-frame.html

Just joined Google six months ago, 51 years old, lots of experience. I've met no idiots at all at Google. I'm amazed at the skill and good-naturedness and lack of arrogance of the folks here. I absolutely would say best software engineers I've ever worked with, compared with Sun and IBM and Microsoft and a few startups.

... as part of Rick Rashid's Festschrift. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/183790/Rick%20Rashid's%20Festschrift%207.5.12.pdf starting at page 131.

Ctrl-[ is ESC independent of editor. Ctrl-(whatever) is generally (whatever) - 0x40 (in ASCII coding). And [ is 0x5b and (0x5b - 0x40) is 0x1b which is ESC.

If you prefer running emacs in text mode (as I do), just run "emacs -nw".

"Along with 7000 containers, ship MOL Comfort broke in half..." How did all 7000 containers happen to break in half?

In the OLD days (e.g. up through the early 1990s), MOST successful tech companies had research labs doing far out things. AT&T, Xerox, DEC, IBM... I think the fact that today, few companies have such a research arm, is the real problem.