Subject: Google

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 11:22:25 +0200

Time and again, Google amazes me with its "cool" ideas - not just technical
ideas like better search, but even stuff like their holiday logos, and now
the page
	http://labs.google.com/papers.html

This list a list of papers, books, and projects done by people who now work
in Google - but much of the work described has been done before these people
joined Google. It's fun looking at this long list, and guessing which
famous people work there - and perhaps think what it must be like working
side by side with such people :)

Some educated guesses I made:

* Google got some of Bell Lab's people, like Rob Pike (see "The UNIX
  Programming Environment", "The Practice of Programming", "Plan 9", "Inferno",
  "A Concurrent Window System" and "Squeak"), and Eric Shmidt (one of the two
  people who created Lex) is their CEO.

* Google also got some of DEC research department's greatest. See references
  to Alpha CPUs, ATOM (a great idea in executable instrumentation, I believe
  by the same guy who developed Altavista), and block-sorting (the idea
  behind bzip, one of the best ideas I have read in the last decade).

* Somebody working or stuff like "A Bug's Life" and "Toy Story 2" (movies)
  and even the Mars Exploration Rover, now work in Google.

* The author of Ical, what used to be my favorite calendar application for
  many years, now works in Google.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Tuesday, Dec 16 2003, 21 Kislev 5764
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-790466, ICQ 13349191 |"A mathematician is a device for turning
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |coffee into theorems" -- P. Erdos

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Dec 2003 11:43:32 +0200

> 	http://labs.google.com/papers.html

Wow, way cool!

>   Programming Environment", "The Practice of Programming", "Plan 9",

It took me a bit of time to realize that Kernighan was not a part of
Plan9, so it must be Pike ;-)

Another guess:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0137903952

is mentioned, so is it Russel or Norvig? Going down from publications
to "Public Projects" I see JScheme, 

http://jscheme.sourceforge.net/jscheme/mainwebpage.html

so is Norvig now at Google? It well may be, I think he used to be the
head of CS at NASA Ames but that was downsized... A quick check at

http://www.norvig.com/vita.html

- yes!

>   many years, now works in Google.

Others will pay attention to GIMP, gtk, FLASH, Interlisp, etc.

Thanks for the link!

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked]

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 17:38:22 +0200

>   people who created Lex) is their CEO.

It's interesting how sometimes two completely different posts can have
something in common. In this case, my mention of Rob Pike and my previous
note about minimizing use of X server memory.

I am reading now Pike's "A Concurrent Window System" paper - a paper
from 1989. Even in 1989, Pike argued that the X Window System's philosophy
of minimizing memory use of the X server is WRONG, because desktop memory
is cheap and plentyful (and this was 1989, mind you!), and X's way of having
clients refresh their windows causes preceived slowness in the user interface
(and indeed, this is a problem I heard several times from users who are not
familiar with X. It must have been much worse in 1989).

A short excerpt from his article, about this issue:
   "...Other systems [such as X - nyh] typically send their clients expose
   events when the visibility of their windows changes. Such events require
   all affected clients to run when the display is rearranged, which can
   cause considerable paging overhead and delay. ... single bitblt
   executed by the window system can restore a window much faster than can
   paging in and executing client code. When windows take longer to repair
   themselves, the entire user interface becomes less dynamic and less
   comfortable [Pike 88]. Layers permit very responsive interfaces."

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Tuesday, Dec 16 2003, 21 Kislev 5764
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Bigamy: Having one wife too many.
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |Monogamy: The same thing!