First is first, quit coming to HN for a month. As you say you have high karma but with an un-satisfying job. That is not a good mix. When you read about all the start-ups hitting it big, some 25 year olds who solved a real world problem and are 'rock stars now' ..that might make you feel like you have not accomplished much. Every person makes their own destiny, different strokes for different folks. As fred said: find a middle ground. if you've written books you should not have a problem landing a job close to home that is somewhat satisfying.
I wonder how ApplyYourself found out which students took a peek? Were they dumb enough not to implement access at the Gatekeeper level but smart enough to some how keep a track, if someone did?
It seems probable that they just looked at the BusinessWeek forums on which the exploit was posted, and denied the applicants who they saw discussing it.
In an age when many employers seem happy to deny employment based on social networking profile posts and pictures, I suggest that it might teach them an important lesson about the presence of foolish people in positions of power.
That presupposes not just that ApplyYourself is in any way competent (evidence points to dubious), but that they are at all communicative with the admissions grunts.
The title was misleading, but what he talked about was interesting anyway. In this case, eyeballs don't equal money. This is a Harvard professor's blog with no ads.
Just for the record, Philip Greenspun is many things, but Harvard professor is not among them (he's simply using a blog service run by the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, which you can find out about by, as per the article, "hacking" his blog's URL: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ ).
Anyway, while not a Harvard professor, "philg" is a very interesting guy who has done a bunch of worthwhile things (e.g. "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", htttp://photo.net, Ars Digita, etc.) that should be of interest to Hacker News readers. He writes well--in books, essays and blog posts--and he writes provocatively, with a mix of snark and self-deprecating humor that many enjoy.
P.S. As many readers here already know, he's also the author of "Greenspun's tenth rule of programming" (which led to the term "Greenspunning"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspunning
I think they are holding back on plugins because this is what causes the various speed bottlenecks that FF is suffering from. Plugins are nice until they slow down the browser.
Whoa, you're right... they don't want adblock. I don't see any google ads these days. Not even on google search... (occasionally in gmail's webclips).
Could it be... that not having adblock is a major motivation for google chrome/OS? I suspect the market share of adblock is relatively small, but it's the kind of thing that can only grow... and unlike anything else that has been discussed, adblock directly threatens revenue.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page are neeeerdddssss, not business school kids that decided to make a web app.
There is a good chance that they're doing this just because it's really really cool, and because they can. I imagine that if I ever had the sort of cash that they have, I would be doing the same thing that I do on the weekends NOW, but on a larger scale: geekery.
Building a linux distro is geekery of the highest order. Good for them. Google makes billions and billions of dollars from their other projects. This is one that they can figure out later. :). (or I can figure it out for them now: adsense, lots of it.)
I understand that google is a publicly traded company; they have shareholders to answer to, but I imagine that all they have to do is point at their earnings and go "trust us, guys...trust us".
If anything, this will drive more traffic to their moneymakers.
There is probably some truth in what you say, albeit i wouldn't go so far to say that they're just nerds. They're business nerds, or they wouldn't be where they are today.
Also, i'd really appreciate if people would stop calling it a "linux distro". It makes as much sense than to call OS X a "BSD Distro"
I'm a CS grad student right now, and even I can see that'd be a pretty damn irresponsible way to run a business. Not that I think that's actually the motivation...
Really? So you'll be working away, on your document or your spreadsheet, or you'll be playing a game, and some ad will pop up, and off you go, zero attention span? Why would anyone want that?
$50 on your Netbook isn't much if it means you hand your thesis in on time...
No, not really. I doubt there will be ads in Docs & Spreadsheets. But there ARE and WILL BE ads in Gmail* and Google search results. The main idea is to keep you in Google's ecosystem and to make advertising on the web more valuable.
Selling advertisings isn't about creating new places to put ads--it's about making advertising space more valuable. And that isn't as straightforward as you seem to think. :)
Release an OS that will drive traffic to your [...] search engine where you can sell ads.
Not far removed at all. Google makes billions by selling ads. Even if they budget a couple of million $/year for this project (might be less, depending on how you structure the proejct), they'll be making crazy returns if this increases their ad revenue just by 0.001. Not to mention all the FUD it'll cause inside MS :)
lately youtube has been inserting overlays on top of playing videos, a highly annoying feature. If they ever do that to google docs there will be a mass exodus.
Eyeballs. Couple that with data mining and targeted ads and you end up with something that doesn't really fall outside Google's tried-and-true business model.
If they let Apple and Microsoft control how people connect to the internet one day they might see themselves superseded. This is a first move into making linux more acceptable to the consumer and maybe keeping the desktop the way they want it.
Google can get some eyeballs out of the effort by having more Google-apps users so this effort be somewhat self-supporting but more importantly, it serves Google's strategic goals.
Keep in mind that with the web constantly growing and constantly improving, Google doesn't need a new business model - being the entrance to the greatest show on earth will work for a long time now. Google today mostly needs to fend off outside monopolists who would aim to seize the whole thing by taking control of one or another choke-points. And having an OS to challenge MS is important here - even if the OS only takes minority share, keeping MS honest is important. Moreover, if all those other companies don't make monopoly profits, they won't have extra cash to throw at Google.
To get to a Google prompt, a user needs:
1) A PC
2) An operating system
3) A web browser
4) An Internet Connection from an ISP
The OS can potentially control search engine choice. Ditto with the browser and the ISP. Notice that Google has challenged monopolistic behavior in steps 2-4 by now (wireless venture, Chrome, Chrome OS). PC architecture is already mostly open so Google doesn't have to do anything there - but Google does build PCs!
