Window's 255 character path limit is totally lame in this day and age. Sigh.

I've just been catching up on the last six months of business news with respect to the pending Google Anti-Trust lawsuit. I've lived through two rounds of the US Government taking on technology companies, IBM in the 80s and MS in the 90s.

IBM, as a result of the anti-trust threat being held over it's head became incredibly afraid of innovation, so much so that they are a consulting house these days. MS lost their dictator in chief, and have drifted listlessly ever since.

Unlike both IBM and MS, Google is not a technology company. Both IBM and MS made their money in their respective heydays by selling IT solutions. In IBM's case, it was turnkey hardware, in MS's, software suites. Google, for it's thirty thousand brilliant software engineers, doesn't make money selling IT solutions.

Google is a rent extraction company, living large on the firehose of money that goes by the rubric of "Advertising Spend." Advertising is huge, in the US it hovers around 2% of GDP, and has done for a century, give or take.

I suspect the current round of increased visibility of Google's internal processes is an indirect result of this Anti-Trust threat. We are seeing more google open source software, we are seeing more talks about how google builds it's data centers and more interaction with the linux kernel community. The flow of knowledge out of google's tech centers will have a massive impact on the future of technology use in industry.

So while an anti-trust shakedown of Google is imminent, and will do untold damage to Google the company, like it did to MS and IBM before them, I think the increase in knowledge in the widespread community will be a godsend.

I'm going to understand this code base if it's the last thing I do.

ps: I didn't make it out for halloween. So no pics of me tradgoth'd. Does that mean I'm banned off my own journal? =)

A very interesting reply in a comment thread on MetaFilter answering the question "Does math have big scary teeth or something?"

This reply draws out something very interesting. It seems the traditional working definition of "smart" is "being able to memorise lots of trivia." A more interesting definition of smart, to me at least, is "being able to work things out." Trouble shoot. Be creative. Find a way.

I suppose this is why i really dig creatives of every stripe, be they graphics geeks, font nerds, musos, photographers, etc. I respect people who can see something before it is built, and find a way to pull it into existance, kicking and screaming the whole fracking way.

Another thing starts to make sense as well. I've heard many stories where in, say, a group of doctors are having a conference to figure out what illness a patient has, and after hours of deliberation, come to a conclusion. (It's not lupus.) Then as they go about their duties, a nurse pipes up with "Was it X?" Dumbfounded, the doctors ask, how did you know? "I googled the symptoms" is the reply.

Google is destroying the value of being able to memorise facts.

The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell: A wired article that talks about content made to order based on search data and adsense predictions. In short, cut the price on content production until it matches what you can reap from adsense. Pulp.

So this is why the internet is dying. It's becoming a wasteland of cheaply produced crap.

Mmmm.

First, this breathless Google is evil post talking about Garmin, TomTom et al tanking now that Google have built their own maps from their streetview data: Google and the Deadly Power of Data.

Second the slide deck of Jeff Dean, presenting at the 3rd ACM SIGOPS International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware: Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems.

These two articles are actually talking about the same thing, using bulk data, lots of computation and a lot of smart engineers to calculate your way out of any problem. Admittedly, Google's bulk system are being paid for by Advertising dollars, and thus they can cross-subsidise their engineering efforts in other areas, and thus under price everyone in which ever tech field they choose to enter.

I think the secret here is to not try to compete with Google, but to leverage the tech Google provide to do things Google itself isn't good at.

Google Ad Planner.

Look at the Daily Uniques curve for any website you can think of. Facebook and Twitter are the only two that haven't halved in the last two years. I think this puts a very real picture on what i've been feeling for ages.

The Internet is boring. Like, get the fuck out, give me something new already, this shit is old. Ancient. Fucking bored already.

And that, my friends, is both scary, and a challenge. We need something new.

So, I'm going to a halloween partay... and I want to do tradgoth. So where the hell do i find black lipstick, black nail polish, and someone with a steady enough hand to draw eyeliner all over my mug? It's been years...

=)

GWT 2.0 is shaping up to be the release where GWT finally becomes fun to use. Being able to debug AJAX apps in running in chrome and firefox from my java debugger? Fracking finally. I can see this is going to lead to many long nights of me beating canvas into a myriad of odd looking shapes =)

Mmm, spring is in the air. The natives are coming out of hibernation, shaking off the shackles of winter, and figuring out where to from here. I like this time of year. You could say it has become a bit of a yearly ritual. Yep. You should be scared, it's going to be messy. It always is. =)