google

Don’t be evil (terms and conditions apply)

Posted by

0

Is this true?

Just over 15 years ago, two Stanford University students set out to commercialize PageRank, a brilliant new search engine concept they'd developed to organize the Internet's vast array of information. However, the same intellectual property rights Google now opposes in regard to Android would have prevented Larry Page and Sergey Brin from ever having got their company off the ground back then.

Google's Current Stance on Patents with Android Would Have Prevented Google from Ever Having Existed – Daniel Eran Dilger, AppleInsider (25 May 2014)

It's a detailed and interesting article that takes not only that headline argument but goes into specifics of when Google allegedly played with less than saintly techniques.

Personally I'm still annoyed they killed off Google Reader, though after a year or more I'm finding things have sorted themselves without Google. And I can cut through all the Android vs iPhone arguments and who created what by just glancing at the difference in all smartphones before and after the introduction of the iPhone.

Oh, and I think Google Docs is clunky. And actually Gmail is a bit ugly. But powerful.

Still, I want Google to have and to stick to this “don't be evil” mantra.

Look forward to Google ads on your fridge

Posted by

0

“Look forward” is perhaps an optimistic – no, it's just bollocks, there's no looking forward to this, there's no optimism, it's just coming. We don't know when but The Wall Street Journal says Google intends to serve ads to everywhere:

In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was disclosed Tuesday, the search giant said that it could be serving ads and other content on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”

Google made the statement to help justify why it shouldn’t disclose revenue generated from mobile devices, a figure the SEC had requested and that companies like FacebookFB +1.37% and TwitterTWTR -3.24% both disclose. Google argued that it doesn’t make sense to break out mobile revenue since the definition of mobile will “continue to evolve” as more “smart” devices roll out.

Google Predicts Ads in Odd Spots Like Thermostats – Wall Street Journal, 21 May 2014

Do self-driving cars come as standard or is it a KITT?

Posted by

0

Re/code has an interesting view on Google’s self-driving cars, the invention we’ve wanted since Knight Rider began in 1982. And it’s the invention we are surely most wary of:

The Google self-driving car has come a long way. On a demo excursion through Google’s Mountain View campus and surrounding neighborhoods today, the white Lexus self-driving test vehicle I rode in was much less of a conservative driver than I anticipated.

Sure, it followed the rules of the road, but it also accelerated into the open lane in front of us and then nudged itself around a truck that was edging into our lane so we could drive ahead without pausing.

Maybe I was kidding myself, but from my vantage point in the back seat, I didn’t feel unsafe in the least. The car braked for jaywalkers, paused when it was coming around a curve and couldn’t see whether the light in front of us was green or red, and skittered when it worried that a bus might be turning into our lane.

Liz Gannes – Re/code (13 May 2014)

Gannes’s full feature is a balanced look at the pros and cons of driverless vehicles and of exactly where we are with them now.

Finally – work offline with Google Docs

Posted by

0

Previously on Google Docs and spreadsheets: you really had to be online to use them. There was a Google Drive app that let you work on this stuff in, say, your Dropbox account. But from today, you can get Google Docs and Google Sheets for iOS and work whenever you like.

I'm not a fan of Google Docs: I revise my opinion every time I see the price – it's free – yet I've found it clunky to use. And clunky to have online all the time.

This could change my mind – and I am shocked at you for making the connection that Microsoft Office for iPad just came out. Total coincidence.

Get Google Docs here and Google Sheets there. A presentation app is reportedly coming soon.

As ever, by the way, do go via these links to get the apps: going straight to the App Store and searching for them by name does not find them. Ridiculous and hopefully changing soon, but true.

Do this and you’ll get a job

Posted by

0

The New York Times has been running a short series called How to Get a Job at Google. It’s very much about getting a vocational education, it’s mostly rather down on the concept of getting a degree in what interests you even if that won’t directly set you up for a career in the burger and fries industry. But among the long part 2 feature last weekend, there was this about writing a CV.

Laszlo Bock “is in charge of all hiring at Google – about 100 new hires a week” and says about CVs:

“The key,” he said, “is to frame your strengths as: ‘I accomplished X, relative to Y, by doing Z.’ Most people would write a résumé like this: ‘Wrote editorials for The New York Times.’ Better would be to say: ‘Had 50 op-eds published compared to average of 6 by most op-ed [writers] as a result of providing deep insight into the following area for three years.’ Most people don’t put the right content on their résumés.”

How to Get a Job at Google, part 2 – The New York Times

I read that translating the word job into the words freelance contract – and, actually, also translating resumé into CV – but what he then says about interviews is surely useful advice for any session where you’re pitching yourself:

“What you want to do is say: ‘Here’s the attribute I’m going to demonstrate; here’s the story demonstrating it; here’s how that story demonstrated that attribute.’ ” And here is how it can create value. “Most people in an interview don’t make explicit their thought process behind how or why they did something and, even if they are able to come up with a compelling story, they are unable to explain their thought process.”

There’s a not a gigantic amount more in the full Times piece but see what you think of the guy’s opinion on whether liberal arts qualifications have merit.

By the way, this is the 300th news post on The Blank Screen. Let us raise a mug of tea. Clink.

Apple improves Gmail support in OS X 10.9.1

Posted by

0

Right now my Mac is nudging me. Oi, William, it’s saying, I’ve got something for you. That’s nice but what’s nicer is that I can say nudge me again in an hour or maybe try me tonight or perhaps tomorrow and the nudging will go away.

And it will come back so I don’t have to add to my To Do list that there is a new version of OS X Mavericks, I certainly don’t have to remember that lottery-number-length “10.9.1”. I can just agree to it being downloaded the next time I leave my desk.

The significant digit of the 10.9.1 is that last .1 because this is a small, minor, trivial update so I’m happy to just let it loose while I go off somewhere. But it’s also one of those teeny updates that bring important things – to some people. If you are a heavy Gmail user then you’ve apparently been narked by how OS X Mavericks broke Apple’s support for Gmail. It didn’t break it enough that you could see it had died, no, it just bent it a bit so that you’d be working away unaware that something wasn’t right.

I don’t believe anyone lost any data, this was a matter of convenience but an important matter of convenience. Apparently.

I’m not particularly a fan of Gmail – ask me why some day, it’s trivial but it sticks with me – so I don’t need the update for this. But there are also tweaks akimbo for software that I do use, such as the Safari web browser.

Plus, it’s such a quick download and such an automatic don’t-need-to-think-about-it kind of job that if you’d started it instead of reading this, you’d be updated now. Sorry about that.

Your Mac will be telling you the update is available but if it hasn’t yet, check up the Software Update option in the App Store.