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so the daily bulletin today says that waterloo has opened an office in new york, which i think is pretty cool. given the university's relationship with employers in the area (a bunch of people from my class alone are going to be working in new york in the winter term), it makes a lot of sense and just seems like a good idea in general. i wonder if other universities also have similar offices?
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so after long long weeks of über-busy-ness, things are finally easing off. a bit. there's still a ton of assignments/projects/things due on december 2nd, and i expect at least one more crunch before then, but it shouldn't be too bad.
main culprit: SE 463 and the brain-busting software requirements and specifications document. 120 pages of redundant and useless diagrams and massive amounts of busywork. some of the concepts in the course are useful (i.e. how to elicit requirements from customers) but just about everything else is... ugggh.
also somewhat time-consuming, but in a good way is ECE 354. aaah, the joys of writing an OS. from scratch. it's fun, although there's the occasional really-hard-to-find-bug.
and then of course, to round off the core courses i'm taking this term, is databases. good ol' databases. the first half was taught by a guy who nobody could understand, and the second half taugh by a guy that likes teaching us stuff that is mutually exclusive with stuff used in real life.
the constant stream of work has led to some interesting results.. this morning i got up and had no idea what day it was, because as of late all the days seem to be running together. i finally figured out it was sunday, and then i realized it didn't actually matter what day it was, since most lectures are useless anyway, so there's no need to go to class. :)
12 days to go..
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it's snowing! that is all.
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so we placed first at the regional contest, with waterloo gold coming in second place. we beat the pants off all the other teams :) final scoreboard is here.
looks like we're going to the world finals are in san antonio in april.
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as of one minute ago, i signed my offer letter for an internship at google. therefore, i think it's probably in my best interests to stop commenting on google's various activities and propagating conspiracy theories :)
hm.. i guess i could find another company to stalk. any suggestions?
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so the google rumor mill is cranking out new rumours (and screenshots) of google base. see this article for mostly links to other content, including the screenshot. also pay particular attention to where it says "... and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local."
just the fact that they haven't forgotten about froogle is encouraging enough. that they're integrating it with a classifieds system that will probably be integrated with their payment service is getting closer to the relationship-changing services i talked about last time.
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ah, my favorite topic again.. world domination by google.
so today in my econ 101 lecture, larry smith talked about google. surprisingly, he said much of the same stuff i've been saying for a while. if even he's saying it, then it can't be all that crazy.
anyway, so he also didn't have an answer to the question of how google plans to make money off this web-centric model, and mentioned the new google payments/wallet service in passing. i agree with his suggestion that getting micro-payments from people via an online money transfer service is probably how they're going to do it. however, they can't just start charging people for services out of the blue. even if they got a whole bunch of web services up and running and ran them for free for a year, they wouldn't be able to just suddenly start charging money for it. their user base would drop like a rock.
so what then? i thought about it on the way home, and i think there's a way out. the main problem is that in this model, you're changing the type of relationship you have with google. right now, it's a non-financial one. in the subscription model, it's a financial one. that's a big jump to make. even worse, you're just paying for computing services, which you don't usually do (not in this sense, anyway - probably why sun had such a big problem getting their computing-for-sale ideas off the ground).
the point is, if google suddenly just asked me for money, even if it was just one cent a year, i probably wouldn't do it, because that changes the nature of my relationship with google. however, if i were able to buy some product THROUGH google, i would.
remember froogle, the forgotten child? now imagine froogle on steroids. it not only allows you to search for items on the web, but allows you to buy them. you give your credit card number to froogle, tell it what item you want, and it goes out and scours the earth for the cheapest instance of that item, and buys it for you. it'll search amazon, wal-mart, best buy, ebay, and that mom-and-pop store on the other side of the planet. it'll factor in shipping, taxes, currency conversions, and all that overhead, and figure out the cheapest way to get you what you want within the timeframe you want it. now there's a service i would use. and that's the whole trick. if google can put out this service (and i think they can), they can change your relationship with them, but do it so subtly that you don't notice. it's like ebay - when you buy stuff on ebay, you usually don't notice that ebay is also making money; you're just buying products online (never mind ebay an auction-based site).
google could probably improve froogle to the point that everybody would buy everything through it and they'd make a ton of money just off commissions. however, that would just be the stepping stone to paying google directly. once they've proved they're worthy to handle your financial matters, it's a whole different ballgame. they'd already have your credit info on file, so they could just add a little subscription button for computing services somewhere. i get access to the entire GoOSe system for a flat rate of $1/year? with a company that i trust to not screw me over? that has proven it's capable of handling financial issues in the same non-evil way that it handles everything else? where do i sign up?
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so, today was quite a day. started off by going to the talk by bill gates @ UW. most of the stuff he said was pretty standard and generic.. the future of technology, having information and services wherever and whenever you need them, blah blah blah. it was good, but still generic visions of the future. then he got to the cool stuff:
1) a promotional/recruiting/something video of him and napoleon. it was pretty hilarious, and i would describe it further except that (a) i have a bunch of stuff that i need to do and (b) no textual description could accurately represent how funny it was to watch bill gates get slapped around by a half-stoned dude with a semi-afro.
2) the xbox 360 demo.. the have a snazzy new UI and now support usb plug'n'play for things like ipods and digital cameras. bill gates also demoed one of the games (project gotham?). good stuff, but nothing truly groundbreaking - just standard improvements to what was there before.
3) the really cool demo. there was a "smart desk" - a surface which was being monitored by a camera and infrared sensor, along with some sort of projection system on which a windows-like desktop could be projected. bill put a cellphone (probably a prototype of magneto or something else microsoft is working on) down on the surface. the system recognized the phone and displayed a login screen for the user. a quick fingerprint later, bill was logged in to the system. he put down a newly-acquired business card, face up. it was scanned and the information was displayed above the card in a cartoon-like balloon. he flipped over the card and the handwritten notes on the back were scanned and recognized, and added to the info-on-the-card balloon. he then moved the card so that it was on top of the desktop projection thingy, and the information was instantly downloaded the the cellphone's address book. that was pretty nifty. there's a lot of recognition software at work there, all of it working seamlessly together to provide an intuitive interface to do things, and i was muchly impressed.
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i found this little quote tucked away in a wired article on Microsoft's agreement with Realnetworks... "Apple does great products, but at the end of the day we think consumers want choice, consumers want openness," Glaser said.
Admittedly, it was the head of Real and not MS that said this, but it still made me laugh out loud.
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so the register recently published what is clearly a joke article (it even says so at the bottom) about google denying any plans to create an office suite. this non-article then got re-posted on OSNews and Slashdot, and large numbers of people started commenting on it. saying "RTFA" has never been more appropriate.
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