Monthly Archives: December 2005

Free cafeteria food, annual ski trips to the Sierra and free laundry are just some of the fringe benefits of working at Google. Getting hired is the trick.

Every month, aspiring workers deluge the popular Mountain View search engine with up to 150,000 resumes, equivalent to a stack of paper at least 50 feet high. And the firm claims to read each and every one.

As one of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies, Google has become a beacon for job seekers. In just a few short years, the interest has helped the company amass an arsenal of what is arguably among the world’s top technology minds.

“I would argue that definitely they have the best talent,” said Joe Kraus, a co-founder of the Web portal Excite Inc. and who currently leads a startup, JotSpot, in Palo Alto. “They invest so much because the more great talent you have, the easier it is to attract even more great talent.”

Google hires nine new workers a day. In less than two years, the number of employees has more than tripled to 4,989.

The growth spurt is being fueled by a gangbusters-like online advertising market and Google’s boundless ambition, including new initiatives in everything from wireless Internet access to video downloads. The goal is to keep the production line of new products humming so that users spend more time on the Web site.

Getting rich is what drives some of the applicants. Many Google workers became instant millionaires at the time of the company’s initial stock offering in 2004. To this day, prospective employees are drawn by the promise of wealth, although, their chances of striking gold are a lot less now that the firm’s shares are soaring above $400, making stock options less likely to appreciate by large amounts.

I was disappointed to read on and see that the free laundry is really just the free use of laundry machines. However, a child center, dog friendly offices, and a doctor on-site are perks that most employers just can’t match (not to mention the one night annual ski trip). Now this is living digitally!

Los Angeles County health officials have opened an internet website on which users can anonymously notify their sex partner of having been infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

The site, www.InSPOTLA.org, which opened on Wednesday, offers different types of electronic postcards to simultaneously e-mail up to six sexual partners of being infected with an STD.

“You’re too hot to be out of action,” reads one card, featuring the back of a handsome man covering his behind with a towel. “I got diagnosed with an STD since we played. You might want to get checked too.”

The site gives information about several of the most common STDs and how to prevent them.

Another card reads: “It’s not what you brought to the party, it’s what you left with. I left with an STD. You might have too. Get checked soon.”

The internet is all about bringing people together with common interests, but I’m not sure anyone saw this one coming. Who knows, perhaps this will catch on in other states as well. Leave it to California to lead the way!
From Doc To Doc.

Here at LIVEdigitally, we love most anything USB. Jump drives, thumb drives, flash drives, keychain drives, they all drive us crazy. I can’t say we’ve tested out a duck drive, a sake drive, or a Barbie doll drive. (I would like to test out a sake drive however, lately I’m a fan of the unfiltered kind.)

Fosfor Gadgets has a top ten list, which I’m also a big fan of, lists that is, titled “The Top 10 Weirdest USB Drives Ever”. They aren’t lying. I don’t know what Mikan Seijin is, but there’s a usb drive that looks like a yellow tomato with a painted face. Apparently it’s a mandarin alien, those kooky Japanese sure know just what I like!

There’s also an alarmingly high number of asian food usb drives. Dim sum, sushi, battered and fried shrimp, a human thumb, who does this? Weird.

As the joke goes, on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. But although anonymity has been part of Internet culture since the first browser, it’s also a major obstacle to making the Web a safe place to conduct business: Internet fraud and identity theft cost consumers and merchants several billion dollars last year. And many of the other more troubling aspects of the Internet, from spam emails to sexual predators, also have their roots in the ease of masking one’s identity in the online world.

Change, however, is on the way. Already over 20 million PCs worldwide are equipped with a tiny security chip called the Trusted Platform Module, although it is as yet rarely activated. But once merchants and other online services begin to use it, the TPM will do something never before seen on the Internet: provide virtually fool-proof verification that you are who you say you are.

There are some definite benefits to keeping track of users: online transactions and cracking down on cyber crime come to mind. However, one of the attractions of the ‘net has always been the anonymity associated with it. Even is discussion forums, chat rooms and instant messaging, we have anonymous identifiers like “cyber guy” or “user456.”

If these TMP chips are such a good idea, how come we’re only hearing about them now? Which of the computers out there have this chip? It sounds like they’re assuming that the chips can’t be modified; recent experience with the XBox would indicate otherwise. What about a crime committed by one user, on another’s computer? I think we’re opening Pandora’s box here and things may get kind of muddy for a while.

From MSNBC.

Kaya is ravishing. She has full lips, long lashes, and a slightly upturned nose. Her expression radiates confidence and power, and her smooth skin is well scrubbed and dotted with freckles. But she doesn’t have much of a body. At all. In fact, she exists only from the neck up. Kaya is a CG model, a 48,200-polygon beauty created by an artist in São Paulo, Brazil. And she’s sure to be a finalist in the Miss Digital World beauty pageant.

The man behind the event is Franz Cerami, an Italian promoter who’s trying to start the world’s first CG talent agency. His dream is to manage a bevy of virtual beauties, posing and costuming them for pinup calendars, videogames, ads, and movies. The benefits of digital models are obvious – they never age, never have bad hair days, and can be on location in Tokyo, Paris, and Hollywood simultaneously.

But there are downsides. For example, all of the talent that Cerami first auditioned looked creepy and waxen. CG artists call this the “uncanny valley,” the point at which a near-human model looks so real that every flaw and shortcoming is thrown into high relief.

So Miss Digital is a completely virtual model. Hair and makeup are always perfect. Easy to manage, and can’t be involved in any scandals that damage a career. In short, very easy to work with. Best of all, she can’t ask for a raise. I think she’ll have a prolific career ahead, and may get into movies down the road.

The model pictured is known as “Webbie.” See the other finalists and the Wired story here.

In a sprawling exhibit at the conference in a Washington hotel Monday, the group displayed 50 prototypes and early-stage products — from a robotic assistant called “Nursebot” to an interactive, Web-enabled medicine cabinet.

Some of the technology is expensive. It costs about $4,500 to outfit a home with wireless sensors in one Intel project: A personal computer and the Internet are used to allow doctors and relatives to check on a range of activities by a senior living alone. It tracks such things as whether medications have been taken to how many steps the person has walked since waking up, said Eric Dishman, chair of the Center for Aging Services Technology.

Prices should come down significantly in the future, he said, and those costs would be weighed against the sky-high price of medical care

Now, I’ve heard of a nursing shortage, but a nursebot? Our society definitely accepts robots on an assembly line, but to care for our loved ones? I’m not so sure about this.

Read some more here.

It isn’t easy to keep up with all my RSS feeds. If I go on vacation when I come back I have a virtual bible to read through. With all the content to keep up with it’s hard to go through my RSS feeds in a convenient manner. Luckily there is the rsstroom reader. It prints out, on toilet paper, my rss feeds for the day. Goodbye bathroom books and magazines, when I’m on the pot I’ll be surfing the Internet. Best of all, it’s environmentally friendly, all the paper gets, well…. used.

802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, Pre-N, 802.11n, MIMO, WiMAX, 802.16, 802.11i, IEEE, etc.

what do all of these numbers really mean? What do they stand for? If you’ve seen them before then you know that they all pertain to wireless networking, but that’s about it. Check out what InformationWeek.com says about the wireless jargon. In 10 minutes you’ll be jumbling wireless 802’s and acronyms like a real pro.

When Apple introduced the iPod Nano, the Mini was cut from the product line up. With the slim Nano came a flash based, color screened player with better battery life. Nanos flew off the shelf, and the Mini was a “has been.”

However, the Mini is having a second surge of popuarity. Devotees like the colored player, even if it has a black and white screen. Also the 6 GB Mini has 50% more capacity than the larger Nano.

What is Jobs to do? Look at the trend and build accordingly. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an 8 GB player available in colors to be introduced soon. Not everyone wants to step up to the 30 GB iPod.

See more here.

Update: I found this hack that uses a Seagate 8 GB MicroDrive to upgrade an iPod Mini.

There is now a solution for ipod mini-users. Seagate Technology has just released a large compact-flash type II+ hard drive called the CompactFlash Photo Hard Drive. Just as many once purchased a mini in order to remove the hard drive for digital photo applications, now you can buy a photo drive and use it to expand your mini’s storage. This works because the drive is formatted to the same ‘Fat 32’ standard that digital cameras and iPod minis use. Of course, you will have to tear open your ipod mini, much the way you would to replace the battery, but once you are in there, its simply a matter of unwrapping some tape and delicately removing a connector to the Hitachi 4GB drive, and replacing it with the Seagate 8GB Photo Hard Drive.