robtoo

He's been doing the donation model for years, and it looks like he receives about $3000/month: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=87996.0

NEW YORK, NY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--November 6, 1998--The following is a statement by barnesandnoble.com

With regard to the acquisition of the Ingram Book Group, Barnes & Noble, Inc. is amused to read Jeff Bezos' quote, where he describes himself as an independent bookseller: "Goliath is always in range of a good slingshot."

Well, Mr. Bezos, what with a market capitalization of some $6 billion and more than four million customers, we suppose you know a Goliath when you see one. Your company is now worth more than Barnes & Noble, Borders, and all of the independent booksellers combined. Might we suggest that slingshots and pot shots should not be part of your arsenal.

eweek has a slightly better write-up:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Google-Chrome-O...

In his demonstration, a friend shared a folder containing a note with malicious code, which was then accessible on the CR-48 through the ScratchPad extension. Once the note was opened, the note was able to then steal all his contacts saved in Gmail because he was already logged into Google's services.

Sounds like poorly-filtered ScratchPad notes (which presumably aren't supposed to contain executable code) combined with xss or csrf.

EDIT: Does ChromeOS give apps access to all cookies for all sites?

Apple working on a touchscreen smartphone? [So Google] spend billions from another business and copy everything you can, down to swipes and apps.

Apple used profits generated in one business area to fund a different one, swiping wasn't a novel concept, and "apps" is just another name for "programs".

I also particularly enjoyed that paragraph where he rails against Google for scraping content, claims that it isn't possible to block Google from scraping content, and then complains that if you do block Google from scraping content then it's unfair that they don't show that scraped content to their search users.

Or something like that. It's really hard to tell.

It was interesting to see how strong my expectations are for what a search box looks like that I will simply not see something right in front of me if it breaks the established conventions.

Also: putting it on the front page only doesn't help.

Yes, I know you can URL-hack, but a search-engine with stemming would make the site a lot more usable/useful.

A few good patents trumps a big pile of trash any day. (e.g. the current Apple/Samsung spat is about just 7 patents.)

Also...

Google is clearly willing to pay to acquire patents, but they’ve reiterated time and time again that they won’t overpay for them. “This anti-competitive strategy is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they’re really worth. Microsoft and Apple’s winning $4.5 billion for Nortel’s patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion,” [SVP and Chief Legal Officer] Dummond wrote today.

How do you get to be SVP at a $200bn company without apparently understanding that things are worth what other people are prepared to pay for them?

(edit: looks like the submission url was edited. I guess it wasn't snopes earlier.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper...

But I do think it is exaggerating to say that "everyone downloading the free app is harboring illusions that they're supporting the developer."

I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of downloaders get no further than "ooh! free stuff!" click

These secret back-door deals that were so secret that they were written in bold in the email, so secret that they noticed this and wrote back to amazon, and so secret that amazon then confirmed them.

They were offered a crappy deal, realized this and double-checked it, but decided to go for it anyway. When it turned out that the deal really was pretty crappy, they then act surprised and self-righteous and blog about it.

The S3 images return "Request has expired", and Twitpic is blank (and doesn't seem to be referer-checking)

SQL injection and sending slow queries? Or hammering regular HTTP pages which run slow SQL queries (such as an unoptimised search)?

And to answer the grand-parent:

building infrastructure that will help other parts of the project -- part of why I call myself a ‘middle-end programmer’.

It seems that the author is using "middle-end" in a manner analagous to the more common "front-end" and "back-end".

Exactly what this involves is not entirely clear, but building frameworks, perhaps.

This is coming soon to a Chrome near you: http://blog.chromium.org/2011/04/providing-transparency-and-...

Presumably other browsers will follow.

Flash cookies. Presumably Silverlight has an equivalent.

(And I even heard once that Windows Media Player shares cookies with IE regardless of the browser that it is embedded in.)

FF4 thinks your page is iso-8859-1 rather than utf-8 (your personal homepage too, in fact.)

I would guess IE9 has a similar issue.

You could also fix it with —

2 millions nights (claimed) @ $50 per night (est.) with 10% cut (est.) = $10m revenue

Unfortunately, it can't be extended to make sure that the new password isn't similar to the password from two generations back.