Yea, that's great. I just saw that in the info email they sent me. It was worth taking a chance at this price even before knowing.
Also nice is with the complete package you can download your data. Maybe not useful to a lot of people, but I build genetic analysis software for a living (mostly focused on academic research - goldenhelix.com), so it will be quite fun to pull in my data and play around with it.
Should probably take into considerations the upgrades to Google Docs that are currently being rolled out (http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-google-docs.html). Wave like real-time collaborative editing, entirely new backed that doesn't depend on browser editing quirks ec. I'm looking forward to them and think they will solve a lot of the annoyances I have had with document editing with Docs.
I say annoyances, because the value of collaborative editing and online sharing outweigh them.
Wow, with this and 3rd party integration into Google Apps, the case for Google Wave is diminished.
Especially in an business environment where email is not going to be supplanted, you can build your collaboration/information management needs on these platforms. To me one of the big potential sells for wave was the programmatic extensibility and ease of integration with other information sources.
With this and 3rd party good Apps, I think I have enough reason to move my business to Google Apps. Maybe we can even find an alternative to Microsoft CRM that meets our needs eventually. The fewer servers in our closet the better.
It may be putting two hot topics togeher (MapReduce and GPGPU), but they sure don't make it easy. One of the strong sells of the MapReduce feature was how it reduced the amount of code something as complex as PageRank was written in and made most programs fairly straitforward.
There is a lot of challenges of programming CUDA (disclosure: this is what my ongoing MS thesis work is on), but their code examples show they add no abstraction layer and because of the generality they force on their kernels (all must have the same signature) will be near impossible to reach full GPU performance.
tl;dr Unlike MapReduce, this does not make programming GPUs easier or accessing their hardware potential easier.
There seems to be a wave of media attention on this following the release and popularity of "Born to Run".
If you are a runner or would like to be one, it's a good read. And if you haven't found out about it yet, check out Vibram Five Finger "shoes" which allow you to start barefoot running without the callouses and hard skin: http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/
I have been using Five Fingers for about a year. I initially used them to help me rehab a muscle/nerve injury in my leg. I have found that after learning to run in them my legs and feet never hurt like they did when I ran in my "running" shoes. I used to get Iliotibial Band Syndrome when I ran over 5 miles a day. I have yet to have IBS come back after I switched to the five fingers. You learn to slow down, cut your stride down and pay attention to where you are placing your feet.
I doubt this is representative, but we are a C++/Qt4 ISV and I'm looking for a Python/Django intern for the summer to help with some internal web sites and possibly setting up a customer portal (read $12-$15 an hour, no benefits)
In other words, Python is an on-the-side language for us that I would look for say a CS undergrad student to fill the need, where as for our C++ devs I have a much higher bar of required experience/education.
> Also, in the Under the Hood tab for Chrome Options, there is a new Content section for fonts, language and Google Gears settings:
This is not new as these settings are available in the 4.x version, but I was really hoping they would add a setting to set a freaking default zoom level finally. I've been wanting to use Chrome on my high-DPI HTPC for about a year. Chrome will DPI scale flash, while Firefox does not but the no-default zoom means every tab you create you have to zoom in to get your 6' interface.
Also, I tried downloading from the beta channel on windows and got Chrome 4.x (beta). Is there a trick to getting on the 5.x stream?
switch to the dev channelr ather than the public beta, that's where most of the excitement is. It is a bit more alpha than beta, mind - it's not uncommon for major functionality to break for a day and then be repaired the day after.
