Daily Archives: Tuesday, 17 December 2002

The Shelters of Stone

Posted on by
Reply

I missed men­tion­ing at the time but I fin­ished The Shel­ters of Stone last week. What an excel­lent book! Ms Auel has really tightened up her story telling. Whilst there were plenty of the long-winded tech­nic­ally accur­ate descript­ive pas­sages as in the earlier books; there was plenty more ‘meat’ in this one. There are a couple of good new char­ac­ters intro­duced in this one too. One in par­tic­u­lar has the poten­tial to develop into a major player in the story. For a while at least. Was it worth wait­ing 10 years? I don’t think so. But I do appre­ci­ate Ms Auel had other things to do besides write books. How­ever it is a very good book.

Recom­men­ded. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 10 years for the next one.

Google vs. Evil

Posted on by
Reply

There is a fant­astic art­icle over at wired called Google vs. Evil: A Los­ing Battle? by Josh McHugh.

The world’s biggest, best-loved search engine owes its suc­cess to supreme tech­no­logy and a simple rule: Don’t be evil. Now the geek icon is find­ing that moral com­prom­ise is just the cost of doing big business.

It’s a fas­cin­at­ing look at the polit­ics of being a pre­ferred ref­er­ence for the major­ity of inter­net users.

Today, Inter­net users spend about 15 mil­lion hours a month on the site. Google.com logs more than 28 mil­lion vis­it­ors each month, nearly as many as Yahoo! and MSN. Nearly four out of five Inter­net searches hap­pen on Google or on sites that license its technology.

It then goes on to muse about some of the pres­sures which could come to bear if Google were ever to go pub­lic.
It’s a long art­icle (five pages) but well worth the read.