Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for January 30th through February 4th:

• Op-Ed Contributor – Microsoft’s Creative Destruction – NYTimes.com – Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.
• Leonardo da Vinci’s Resume Explains Why He’s The Renaissance Man For the Job – Davinci – Gizmodo – At one time in history, even da Vinci himself had to pen a resume to explain why he was a qualified applicant. Here's a translation of his letter to the Duke of Milan, delineating his many talents and abilities. "Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below..The document, written when da Vinci was 30, is actually more of a cover letter than a resume; he leaves out many of his artistic achievements and instead focuses on what he can provide for the Duke in technologies of war.
• jsMath: jsMath Home Page – The jsMath package provides a method of including mathematics in HTML pages that works across multiple browsers under Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux and other flavors of unix. It overcomes a number of the shortcomings of the traditional method of using images to represent mathematics: jsMath uses native fonts, so they resize when you change the size of the text in your browser, they print at the full resolution of your printer, and you don't have to wait for dozens of images to be downloaded in order to see the mathematics in a web page. There are also advantages for web-page authors, as there is no need to preprocess your web pages to generate any images, and the mathematics is entered in TeX form, so it is easy to create and maintain your web pages. Although it works best with the TeX fonts installed, jsMath will fall back on a collection of image-based fonts (which can still be scaled or printed at high resolution) or unicode fonts when the TeX fonts are not available.
• Josh on the Web » Blog Archive » Abusing the Cache: Tracking Users without Cookies – To track a user I make use of three URLs: the container, which can be any website; a shim file, which contains a unique code; and a tracking page, which stores (and in this case displays) requests. The trick lies in making the browser cache the shim file indefinitely. When the file is requested for the first – and only – time a unique identifier is embedded in the page. The shim embeds the tracking page, passing it the unique ID every time it is loaded. See the source code.

  One neat thing about this method is that JavaScript is not strictly required. It is only used to pass the message and referrer to the tracker. It would probably be possible to replace the iframes with CSS and images to gain JS-free HTTP referrer logging but would lose the ability to store messages so easily.

• Panopticlick – Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 342,943 tested so far.

  Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.39 bits of identifying information.

  The measurements we used to obtain this result are listed below. You can read more about the methodology here, and about some defenses against fingerprinting here

These are my links for January 23rd through January 30th:

• Leonardo da Vinci’s Resume Explains Why He’s The Renaissance Man For the Job – Davinci – Gizmodo – At one time in history, even da Vinci himself had to pen a resume to explain why he was a qualified applicant. Here's a translation of his letter to the Duke of Milan, delineating his many talents and abilities. "Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below..The document, written when da Vinci was 30, is actually more of a cover letter than a resume; he leaves out many of his artistic achievements and instead focuses on what he can provide for the Duke in technologies of war.
• jsMath: jsMath Home Page – The jsMath package provides a method of including mathematics in HTML pages that works across multiple browsers under Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux and other flavors of unix. It overcomes a number of the shortcomings of the traditional method of using images to represent mathematics: jsMath uses native fonts, so they resize when you change the size of the text in your browser, they print at the full resolution of your printer, and you don't have to wait for dozens of images to be downloaded in order to see the mathematics in a web page. There are also advantages for web-page authors, as there is no need to preprocess your web pages to generate any images, and the mathematics is entered in TeX form, so it is easy to create and maintain your web pages. Although it works best with the TeX fonts installed, jsMath will fall back on a collection of image-based fonts (which can still be scaled or printed at high resolution) or unicode fonts when the TeX fonts are not available.
• Josh on the Web » Blog Archive » Abusing the Cache: Tracking Users without Cookies – To track a user I make use of three URLs: the container, which can be any website; a shim file, which contains a unique code; and a tracking page, which stores (and in this case displays) requests. The trick lies in making the browser cache the shim file indefinitely. When the file is requested for the first – and only – time a unique identifier is embedded in the page. The shim embeds the tracking page, passing it the unique ID every time it is loaded. See the source code.

  One neat thing about this method is that JavaScript is not strictly required. It is only used to pass the message and referrer to the tracker. It would probably be possible to replace the iframes with CSS and images to gain JS-free HTTP referrer logging but would lose the ability to store messages so easily.

• Panopticlick – Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 342,943 tested so far.

  Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.39 bits of identifying information.

  The measurements we used to obtain this result are listed below. You can read more about the methodology here, and about some defenses against fingerprinting here

• Benlog » Don’t Hash Secrets – If I tell you that SHA1(foo) is X, then it turns out in a lot of cases to be quite easy for you to determine what SHA1(foo || bar) is. You don’t need to know what foo is. because SHA1 is iterative and works block by block, if you know the hash of foo, then you can extend the computation to determine the hash of foo || bar

  That means that if you know SHA1(secret || message), you can compute SHA1(secret || message || ANYTHING), which is a valid signature for message || ANYTHING. So to break this system, you just need to see one signature from SuperAnnoyingPoke, then you can impersonate SuperAnnoyingPoke for lots of other messages.

  What you should be using is HMAC: Hash-function Message Authentication Code. You don’t need to know exactly how it works, just need to know that HMAC is specifically built for message authentication codes and the use case of SuperAnnoyingPoke/MyFace. Under the hood, what’s approximately going on is two hashes, with the secret combined after the first hash

• Data.gov – Featured Datasets: Open Government Directive Agency – Datasets required under the Open Government Directive through the end of the day, January 22, 2010. Freedom of Information Act request logs, Treasury TARP and derivative activity logs, crime, income, agriculture datasets.

These are my links for May 29th from 05:17 to 12:45:

• Some stats from Twitter conference compared to… – Robert Scoble – FriendFeed – Anecdotal data from 140tc this week. 200 tweets/second at peak. Didn't see an estimate of current user account population though, I keep seeing site unique visitor estimates, which aren't useful.
• Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters | Zoho Blogs – "The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement. It is easy to dismiss all this with "Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft," but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google's innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight? It comes down to one word: karma."
• makerfaire.com: Maker Faire – This weekend at San Mateo Expo Center
• Google Wave Federation Protocol‎ –
• Google Wave API Overview – Google Wave API – Google Code – APIs for Google Wave email / bbs / wiki / chat / collaboration / communications mashup platform introduced yesterday.
• What Emacs Commands Do You Use Most and Find Most Useful? : programming – Reddit thread discussing favorite emacs commands

These are my links for May 21st from 06:07 to 22:34:

• Data.gov Launches to Mixed Reviews | Wired Science | Wired.com – Commentary and initial reactions to data.gov. Good news – government is taking steps to improve access to public data. Bad news – limited catalog of datasets to start (47). But it's going in the right direction.
• IEEE Spectrum: The Million Dollar Programming Prize – Robert M. Bell, Jim Bennett, Yehuda Koren, and Chris Volinsky. A look at collaborative filtering and other predictive clustering systems used by one team competing for the Netflix prize, in which the goal is a 10% improvement over the original Cinematch recommendation system.
• bb: 21may2009 – (opinion) Graphic of the gap between how people (and companies) succeed, and how people think they succeed.
• Seventeen things that people are actually saying when they retweet others – meish dot org: life, unfolding – A look at various reasons why messages are retweeted on Twitter.
• Expanding the Cloud: Moving large data sets into Amazon S3 with AWS Import/Export. – All Things Distributed – More on shipping data to S3 via hard drive from Werner Vogels
• Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS Import/Export: Ship Us That Disk! – Tanenbaum-style bulk transfer for AWS/S3! "Customers with AWS storage requirements at the terabyte and petabyte level often ask us if they can sidestep the internet and simply send us a disk drive, or even a 747 full of such drives. "

These are my links for May 3rd through May 4th:

• Dilbert comic strip for 05/04/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. – Secretary to Pointy Haired Boss: "I live in a rented trailer and all of my money is in my checking account. Your investments are worthless and your mortgage is underwater. My net worth is higher than yours now. I guess promiscuity and a G.E.D. was a pretty good strategy after all." Reminded me of a thought I had earlier this year, that much of Western Civilization is built on valuing delayed gratification, which hasn't worked out so well recently as opposed to immediate consumption in many cases.
• Without Warning, Twitter Kills StatTweets (Businesses Beware) – StatSheet.com ChangeLog – Owner of StatTweets post regarding his network of sports-related Twitter handles being banned. They had several hundred accounts, one for stats for each team. This makes sense for users, given the way Twitter works, but they don't like mass account creation. Interested to see how this sorts out, there seem to be at least a few similar Twitter networks with team/region/topic-specific handles.
• Dooley Online: What URL Shortener Should I Use? – Comparison of features and some usage data for URL shorteners such as tinyurl and bit.ly used on twitter and other services.
• Obesity and Overweight: Trends: U.S. Obesity Trends 1985-2007 | DNPAO | CDC – During the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States. This slide set illustrates this trend by mapping the increased prevalence of obesity across each of the states. In 2007, only one state (Colorado) had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%; three of these states (Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%. The animated map below shows the United States obesity prevalence from 1985 through 2007.
• Why text messages are limited to 160 characters | Technology | Los Angeles Times – A look back to the beginnings of SMS in 1985 – Would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two "convincing arguments," Hillebrand said. For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters. Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards.

These are my links for April 28th from 05:35 to 14:24:

• Official Google Blog: Adding search power to public data – Interesting. Wonder if the underlying public data sets will eventually become available on Google App Engine as well, sort of like the public data sets available for use with Amazon EC2 applications.
• MySQL And Search At Craigslist – Jeremy Zawodny's slides on MySQL, Sphinx, and free text search implementation at Craigslist, from last week's MySQL conference.
• Skew, The Frontend Engineer’s Misery @ Irrational Exuberance – For mashups and the like, the distinction between a FE engineer and web dev is rather small in terms of technical skills; they are both using the same skillset, they are both interacting with APIs, and so on. However, there are important distinctions between the two: 1. web developers tend to move in small groups or as individuals, whereas fe engineers work in larger groups, 2. web developers tend to design a product on top of an existing backend service (api, etc), while fe engineers are usually working in parallel with the backend being developed.
• Study: Twitter Audience Does Not Have A Return Policy – Over 60 percent of people who sign up to use the popular (and tremendously discussed) micro-blogging platform do not return to using it the following month, according to new data released by Nielsen Online. In other words, Twitter currently has just a 40 percent retention rate, up from just 30 percent in previous months–indicating an “I don’t get it factor” among new users that is reminiscent of the similarly-over hyped Second Life from a few years ago.
• Hey Americans, Appreciate Your Freedom Of Speech : NPR – Firoozeh Dumas on the underappreciated freedoms of speech and expression we have in the US vs journalists and bloggers in Iran.

These are my links for April 12th through April 13th:

• Google App Engine Blog: Many languages, and in the runtime bind them – Now that AppEngine has a Java environment, there are a lot of possibilities for running other languages on top of the JVM, this is an all-singing, all-dancing shell interpreter demo providing a switchable command line interface to Beanshell, Clojure, Groovy, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, and Scheme.
• High Performance Web Sites :: don’t use @import – Summary – use LINK instead of @import for stylesheet references. "Using @import within a stylesheet adds one more roundtrip to the overall download time of the page. Using @import in IE causes the download order to be altered. This may cause stylesheets to take longer to download, which hinders progress rendering making the page feel slower."
• Learn Korean Language :The Official Korea Tourism Guide Site – Flash-based Korean language lessons, from KBS World Radio.
• Korea rate of obesity ranks lowest among OECD nations – INSIDE JoongAng Daily – Korea has lowest obesity rate among 30 OECD countries, at 3.5%, vs the US (#30) at 34.3%.
• FT.com / Weekend / Reportage – Is a high IQ a burden as much as a blessing? – “High cognitive ability is very often a mixed blessing,” Patrick O’Shea, the president of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE), told me. Too wide a deviation from the mean IQ of 100 brings with it an inherent isolation. “If you have an IQ of 160 or higher,” O’Shea explained, “you’re probably able to connect well with less than 1 per cent of the population.”

These are my links for April 9th through April 10th:

• Coding Horror: Sex, Lies, and Software Development – Are there any programming jobs you wouldn't take? Not because the jobs didn't pay enough, had poor benefits, or limited upside — but because the work itself made you uncomfortable? – A long comment thread about the ethics and social issues around working for porn sites vs other employers.
• Daring Fireball: How to Block the DiggBar – On URL shorteners and blocking DiggBarr from framing target pages.
• How I lost 50 lbs with the new Twitter API – And now it’s all this – On implementation changes required to update a Twitter client app (Dr. Twoot) to the latest API
• 10 papers you need to read | Science for SEO – "This is a list of my top 10 freely available papers on the topic of information retrieval. You will notice that they are rather old, but the techniques used described and the findings are not always dated. Those that dated are important nonetheless because they provide a good foundation to understanding why things are as they are in information retrieval these days."
• jesus blinched (or: why i love maundy thursday) – pistachio’s posterous – "what stays with me to this day is the abject humanity of jesus in the stories of the last supper, the betrayal, the denial and above all, in gethsemane."

These are my links for February 15th through February 16th:

• Berkeley cloud report gets mixed reviews | The Wisdom of Clouds – CNET News – James Urqhardt commentary on UCB paper, "The paper begins by setting a definition of Cloud Computing that will be considered controversial by many, as it is firmly in the "there is no cloud computing inside enterprise data centers" camp."
• Above the Clouds: Above the Clouds Released – UC Berkeley RAD Lab starts a new blog and publishes their take on the state of cloud computing.
• Forget Dunbar’s Number, Our Future Is in Scoble’s Number « I’m Not Actually a Geek – A look at changing interaction styles enabled by growing use of online social networks and applications. "If Dunbar’s Number is defined at 150 connections, perhaps we can term the looser connection of thousands as Scoble’s Number. "
• What really happened at Ma.gnolia and lessons learned – Video podcast with Larry Halff describing how Ma.gnolia was implemented (Ruby on Rails), its ongoing operation leading up to the failure of the (1/2 TB) MySQL database a few weeks ago.
• Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites « random($foo) – An overview of packages, services, and approaches for building web systems, circa January 2009. With assorted comments.
• Online Mind Mapping – MindMeister – Web-based, embeddable mind mapping software, sort of like MindJet, wiki-style collaborative editing.
• Jean-Lou Dupont’s WEBlog: Cloud Computing Mind Map – A mind map of companies and projects in the cloud computing space.

A few days ago, the first time I saw the television ad for the new Volvo S80’s heartbeat sensor alarm, I thought it was a parody. It shows a woman walking up to her car in a dark parking lot, then turning away after the heartbeat detector shows that someone is hiding in her car. I’m sure they test marketed this before including the feature, but I totally don’t get it.

Here’s what the Volvo site says about the feature:

The Personal Car Communicator (PCC) is your car key’s smart connection with your Volvo S80 applying the latest in two-way radio technology. When in range, you’ll always know the status of your car. Locked or unlocked. Alarm activated or not. If the alarm has been activated, the heart beat sensor will also tell you if there is someone inside the car. The PCC also includes keyless entry and keyless drive.

So…the heartbeat detector will tell you if someone’s unexpectedly locked themselves in the car? It isn’t going to do anything if it’s turned off, and you’d think anyone trying to break into the car would set off the alarm on the way in, or have a way to turn it off. The least likely thing I can imagine is someone successfully breaking into the car, and waiting there with the alarm still turned on. Even if it works with the alarm turned off, I still don’t see how this is useful.

Volvo has a reputation for safety, but I really did think the ad was a parody or a joke of some kind. I’m obviously not in the core demographic for this feature…but who is?

This weekend appears to have been the start of allergy season for me. As a consequence, I get to try the new over-the-counter decongestants. The old ones (Psuedophed etc) were apparently being purchased in large quantities to be crushed and used for producing methamphetamine, so now when you go to buy them you need to register at the pharmacy desk, show your drivers license, where they check with a state-wide database to make sure you haven’t exceeded two packages for the month.

This process takes a long time and is actually more difficult than getting a prescription filled (since you can’t call ahead). So I’m trying the new decongestants. The main drawbacks so far are that they don’t have the 12- and 24-hour extended release versions, and they also don’t seem to work very well. On the other hand, I can run in and out of the store to get them, rather than waiting for 10-15 minutes at the pharmacy desk while they check my drivers license against their database.

Perhaps it would be easier if I asked my doctor for a prescription decongestant. The “new formula” decongestants are a poor substitute so far.

I hate being skeptical about charitable solicitors, but I am.

This evening there was a solicitor with a table display of children’s toys on the sidewalk in front of the Long’s Pharmacy on Middlefield Road, next to a barrel marked for donation to Toys for Tots. In general, I like to make planned donations, and usually only make unplanned donations to people and causes that I know or are reasonably likely to be who they say they are. (Girl Scout cookies come to mind…)

For some reason, this evening I actually took the time to stop at this woman’s display and hear her pitch. The basic idea was that you buy one of her “pre-approved” toys and put them in the donation barrel at the end of the booth. The suggested items were around $20, and at the moment I didn’t recall hearing of Toys for Tots before (it turns out they’re legitimate, and well rated at Charity Navigator), so I asked if she had any credentials or anything else to vouch for her. She had a letter in a plastic sheet protector describing Toys for Tots, but said she didn’t have any ID and no one there would know who she was.

I was starting to vaguely recall something about Toys for Tots (it’s the toy drive run by the Marine Corps), and it seemed they would be better organized than that. The woman offered to call her supervisor and proceeded to dial a number on her cell phone, but no one answered on the other end.

At this point in the conversation I’m thinking I’ve already spent too much time on this and want to leave, but I get out a pen to write down the contact info on the letter in the sheet protector anyway. The woman I’ve been talking with doesn’t offer her name, but volunteers that she’s working for a company called Fifth Dimension Promotions, so I write that down as well, and departed without making a toy or cash donation. I told her I wasn’t comfortable making a $20 donation to someone I didn’t know with no plausible credentials, and suggested that she have Toys for Tots or her company provide her with something for future outings.

Later, digging around on Google, no such company turns up as “Fifth Dimension Promotions”, but “5th Dimension Promotionz” is apparently a multi-level marketer based in San Jose. They don’t appear to have their own web site, but show many listings on various job sites. They describe themselves:

5th Dimension Promotionz is the nation’s leading provider of promotional marketing and event marketing solutions. We work in conjunction with industry leaders in the fields of hospitality, sports, and charities. 5th Dimension Promotionz provides unique cross promotional strategies and product launch promotions. We provide staff to represent our clients at trade shows and sporting events for sampling and product demonstrations, as well as providing sales and marketing efforts throughout our communities.

So, in the worst case, we have a freelance charity promoter, selling toys at what appears to be a relatively high markup in the name of charity, and perhaps even reclaiming the items from the donation barrel at the end of the day so little to nothing ends up going to charity.

In the best case, we have a freelance charity promoter, selling somewhat overpriced toys and using most of the profit margin to pay for the booth staffer and downline MLM, with some additional toys going to Toys for Tots. The donors would have achieved more by giving directly to Toys for Tots, although the promoter is arguably providing a marketing and convenience service. I probably would have donated if I were confident that some of the money would end up in right hands.

Having looked up Toys for Tots on Charity Navigator, it looks like it’s well run, with 98% of funds going to programs rather than overhead. I’m not sure that they even have an affiliation with 5th Dimension Productionz, other than having some extra toys turn up at the end of the season.

I have mixed feelings about all this. In principle, I think most people would like to help others who ask. In practice, I’m reflexively distrustful of anyone claiming to work for a charity or political cause. I was puzzled by the woman and her booth this evening, and was curious enough to spend a few minutes checking it out. I started out feeling kind of bad that I didn’t trust her, and ended up feeling kind of bad that I was probably right. I suspect that 5th Dimension Productionz isn’t doing anything wrong, exactly. The woman staffing the booth is just doing her job, trying to work up the MLM ladder. But at best they’re misrepresenting or conflating their objectives and the Toys for Tots. At worst they’re preying on the goodwill and lack of curiosity of passers-by to separate them from their money in the name of a good cause.

This is why I usually stick with planned charitable donations, other than to people and causes I know.

If you would like to make a donation and be sure that it’s going to Toys for Tots, you can use their online form here.

If anyone knows more about 5th Dimension Promotionz and Toys for Tots or their other charity clients, feel free to comment below.

The past few days there’s been an unending, unavoidable stream of 9/11 anniversary coverage. Thankfully, I wasn’t personally touched by the day’s events any more than most people out here in California. But in between all the usual running around and tasks of daily life, I’m finding a I’m carrying a residual layer of dissociated free-floating anxiety. Nothing specific, just a general, strong feeling of ill-being and unease when I stop and check in with myself.

This is surprising to me. Those of you who know me in person know I’m not superstitious, I’m not terribly excitable in a crisis and tend toward focusing on the facts and options at hand, looking for a path forward. So this is just weird.

I see that the HP board flap is on the cover of this week’s Newsweek. But personally I think last week’s deal in Pakistan is a much bigger issue.

I’ll be glad when the week is over. I suspect I’m not alone, either.

Passing this along for friends who may have an interest in human rights in North Korea, from The Korea Liberator:

Jae Ku, Director of Freedom House’s North Korea program, sends:

Dear Friends, I am in need of a Korean speaking intern (native, read and write) for this summer. This is a paid internship, to commence immediately. If you know of anyone, please have that person send me his/her resume. I am looking for someone who is mature and responsible. It is helpful but not necessary to have a background in human rights or North Korean issues.

Thank you,

Jae

Jae H. Ku, Ph.D.
Director, Human Rights in North Korea Project
1319 18th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
O) 202-747-7048
ku@freedomhouse.org

Links:

• Freedom House Human Rights in North Korea Project
• Interview with Prof. Jae Ku, Freedom House’s New North Korea Director

Is Google headed for a downturn? Not only is it featured in a generally negative cover article in this week’s Barron’s, but now it’s featured on the cover of Time as well. These magazines cater to very different audiences, so turning up on both at the same time could be considered a sign that Google is reaching a peak of sorts on both the financial and general cultural fronts.

There’s a long tradition of things going badly for companies and people after getting this sort of high profile magazine cover treatment. If Google turns up next on the cover of People or Entertainment Weekly they’re probably doomed…

Update 02-12-2006 18:31 PST: John Battelle suggests that having made the cover of Time, Google has “jumped the shark”, while Matt Cutts offers a recent historical perspective of Google’s non-shark-jumping behavior while simultaneously demonstrating effective link baiting technique.

I don’t consider myself an expert on shark-jumping, but I do think that hitting the covers of Barrons and Time is qualitatively different than the counter-examples that Matt offers. Google is transitioning out of being loved for being better, new, and whizzy, and into a stage where people expect it to “just work”. Google has gotten large enough that people are developing a love/hate relationship with it (and web services in general) like they have with e-mail, and where the discussion about privacy, media, and commerce is just starting to get some critical attention from people outside tech land.