Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 8th Sep 2010 18:53 UTC
Hold on to your security blanket, people, because Google is rolling out a pretty big change to its search engine. Not too long ago the internet was in a shock because Google rolled out a new feature that allowed you to pick a background image for the Google home page, just like Microsoft's Bing. Google went a lot further today, and has launched Google Instant, adding search-before-you-type results to the Google home page.
Permalink for comment 439991
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2010-03-08
Of course Google have to innovate, if they didn't they will be dead in a few short years, just like any other player in the tech game/info/media game.
In order to see how daft that is just insert another company's name (ooh - lets be provocative and say Apple and its market lead with iPod or even iPhone as an example) and then make that comment. Do you see how silly it is?
Up to this point, we agree. This sentence is just crap, it looks like it's from a google marketting guy (like the whole article, in fact, in my opinion. Heavily disliked it). But then you say this...
And then, I think you don't understand what the strength of a monopoly like Google's or Apple's really is. Be it only because you overestimate the market share of ad blockers and mobile devices.
Google are everywhere. And, what's important, almost everyone on the Internet relies on them for something. Because of that, if they went in financial trouble, it's the whole internet that risks going ten years backwards, and through donations alone they could get enough money to come back on the saddle. That is, if they managed to find a bank who's not ready to lend them some money. Though one.
Example of things which rely on Google :
-All websites which rely on advertising as their main funding, since Google bought most of the ad market (be it for desktop or mobile web, since they are now both the same).
-A lot of open-source projects which rely on Google Code and the GSoC. All businesses and individuals which rely on those open-source solutions to get some work done.
-All individuals who neglect their bookmark collection "thanks" to google search. Due to its popularity, it has yet-to-be-matched result relevance.
-All GMail users (critical role), all Youtube users (compulsive behavior). Youtube user base goes well beyond its main page and covers a lot of websites who can't afford video storage themselves.
-And think about all those handsets makers who don't have enough development resources to code everything on their platform and rely on Google for some development work (OS or apps).
Again, this looks like a simplistic interpretation. As far as I know, Google Maps is still in the main menu of any brand new iPhone, I wonder if users can even delete it. And with Google Voice, the company showed that they can even beat the App Store's infamous policy. Managing to create an actually useful application from crappy web standard that offer inexistent support for developers in an impressive demonstration of raw firepower.
Google are doing two things in parallel in the mobile space. First trying to be present on the highest possible amount of mobile platforms (as a default home page or search engine, as a GMail app, as a YouTube app...). Second by preventing Apple from getting a market share that's too high. Because as I already stated before, market share is firepower, and Google want to have the biggest guns in negotiations. With a large enough market share, Apple could impose a much higher control on their platform, and this is what google wants to avoid.
This is, in my opinion, the goal of Google Android : keeping the iPhone market share small enough, no matter the price.
http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/08/google-vs-android-part-iv/
and this comment
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/09/07/buchanan-bing
Again, are you sure of it ? In the end, it's market share that matters. Every single Android handset still included a GMail and a Maps app, last time I checked. And though carriers can get in Google's way a bit, if they're paid to do so, it's their market interest not to do so extensively, because...
- The more they reduce Android's abilities, the less Android handset sell, the less money they get. Except, of course, if they want to favor another manufacturer.
- Carriers know that it's not in their best interest to favor Apple too much. Here in France, in the early iPhone years, they just turned every single mobile phone ad into an iPhone ad, but now there isn't any iPhone ad anymore on the roads. If I wasn't a geek, I wouldn't even have known that the iPhone 4 is out. Carriers are now quiet because they know that Apple's philosophy of control means less income and less control for them, and they don't want that.
- So carriers try to favor the BlackBerry and Symbian platforms. But in the end, they know that the sheep wants a smartphone with a large touchscreen, facebook integration, and silly apps on it. They must advertise such phones if they want all those customers that have a lot of money and no brain. Hence Android becomes the logical choice...
Geopolitics of the mobile space are complex, so I may be misunderstood, but I think that Google aren't in such a bad shape as you think.
Edited 2010-09-09 07:47 UTC