chris100

That's the key restriction from Linus right there. He was talking about system-level code.

For everything else (application-level, frameworks, etc.), you need the abstractions that C++ provides.

It's hard, and "fluffy" at the same time :-)

So I wouldn't say it's hopeless for Bing at all. There are so many ways that search could be different from Google's current results...

So, assuming the market is bad and jobs are hard to find, is it then ok to work nights and weekends like the article describes? Or should there be some kind of limit to "slavery"?

On one hand, as a hacker myself, I like the idea. It's as free-form as possible. Which is exactly the right spirit of hacking: no forms to fill out, no rules and procedures.

On the other hand, they are bound to end up with thousands of weird requests. Sorting through those will be a lot of work, in order to find a handful of gems, I'm afraid.

But I hope it works out for them and trickles down to the entire hacker community.

(I'll let you figure out on your own why that particular link works so well)

Actually, it had two huge benefits: a lock-in for early adopters, and it is memorable. Don't discount the second benefit. Once enough early adopters talk about it, the general public will come to remember the name. This is extremely important for a consumer product.

(remember the FatBrain naming story).

Why? Because the date serves a purpose: so that people can know when your copyright expires and your content falls into the public domain. If you move up the date incorrectly, you are cheating the rest of the world.

As you can imagine, we are not that eager to copy your home page for free 75 years from now, but the law doesn't care.

Right now, the privacy policy looks great on the surface. They are launching a new product.

But you can't deny that Google's entire DNA is to extract monetizable information from huge amount of seemlingly unrelated raw data.

That's why you have to take their privacy policy with a grain of salt.

I use NPR as a counter-argument to saying that good content will find a way to make lots of money. Show me how because I don't see it.

Personally, I still believe that investigative journalism has a lot of value, but no way to charge top dollars for that value.

I don't know about you, but when I browse the web, I actually don't type that much.

Mike Arrington was specifically referring to the need to browse the web from his couch. In browsing mode, you like to explore and click. Type? Not so much.

And intensive use of my iPhone has shown me that the screen is just a bit too small to seriously browse the web for more than 10 minutes at a time.

So yes, there might be a market there.

So much for virality :-)

Of course, the business plan is just a stack of paper. You may have brilliant execution on paper, but who knows if you will be able to pull it off.

Insert mandatory quote about military planning being necessary but not surviving the first contact with the enemy

Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen.

Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of breaking a platform into small pieces and argue that individually, each piece already existed. The scrollwheel? A program to synchronize your player? Etc...

That's missing the forest for the tree. Someone (Jobs) saw all these disparate pieces and had the vision to build a full, coherent, intuitive platform that solved a real problem and made the device a winner.

Until you understand the difference between a laundry list of features and a solution, you'll keep writing useless code :-)