Famously, Google used to have a practice dubbed “20% time”: about one day a week, engineers were {expected ⊻ encouraged ⊻ permitted ⊻ tolerated ⊻ known} to work on something other than their nominal work; something they themselves chose. Circa 2011, not long after I joined Google, I pitched a 20% project idea to my… Read more
The position of many folks – most recently the U.S. Department of Justice – against Apple has drawn an unexpected parallel to that of music pirates in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. If you’re too young to have personally lived that time, just know this key point: back then, buying or streaming music online… Read more
Hardly news at this point, I guess, but just in case you’ve missed it: you cannot use the iPhone 14 Pro’s satellite communication functionality outside a very limited number of geographical regions (mainly the U.S. mainland). e.g. I thought I’d give it a whirl as I was flying out of Houston, out over the Gulf… Read more
An interesting essay on creativity, with the obligatory consideration of “copyright”.
This entry in Brett’s blog pointed out a rather antagonising (but subtly true) article from AskMen.com, which can be found here. The article’s pretty self-explanatory, so go read it. My favourite bits, though, are: When she says, “It’s your decision,” what she really means is, “You’d better know what I really want and give it… Read more
So the New York Times is running an article For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé (soul-sucking registration possibly required), talking about the apparently growing trend in employers consulting Google, MySpace, LiveJounral, Facebook and similar sites when reviewing graduating applicants. In summary: employers are turned off by poorly written rants on the writers’ most recent… Read more
So here’s some more crap on data retention by ISPs. In this particular case, the attorney general of the U.S.A. is telling ISPs they should voluntarily record the last two years of data from all their customers. Ahuh. Let’s just see how the maths work out on that… Let’s be super conservative first up. Let’s… Read more