Microsoft's Loss, Google's Gain. Don Dodge Gets A New Job

It was just 11 days ago that Microsoft’s “ambassador to startups” Don Dodge waslaid off as part of a broader workforce reduction. Last week he showed up in Silicon Valley to “see friends” as he put it. But it was clear that he was also interviewing for jobs.

We sat down with him to do a proper exit interview while he was in town.

I got a few tips from Googlers that he was seen roaming their Mountain View headquarters, and I confirmed tonight that he has been offered a job at the company. He has accepted, and will shortly begin working for the company that he only recently considered the enemy.

It’s unheard of for Google to go from a first interview to an offer in such a short period of time. For Dodge, the process from first interview to first day on the job was less than a week.

He’ll be working for another ex-Microsofter, Vic Gundotra. Gundotra worked 15 years at Microsoft as General Manager of Microsoft’s developer outreach efforts. He joined Google in 2007 as VP Engineering, responsible for mobile applications and developer evangelism.

Dodge will have a similar job at Google as he did at Microsoft – developer evangelism. He’ll be focusing on Google Apps.

 

 

by Michael Arrington - techcrunch

Google to replace HTTP and make web twice as fast

Bangalore: Google's Chromium group has announced an effort to replace the traditional Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) web browser language with a new protocol that supposedly boosts Internet browsing by up to 55 percent. HTTP currently is the protocol used by all web servers and browsers, hence the "http" in front of web addresses. But, as noted by Ars Technica, HTTP becomes inefficient when transferring many small files on many modern websites.

 

By contrast, Google's cleverly named SPDY protocol can compress and handle the individual requests via one connection that's SSL-encrypted. That allows higher-priority files to slip through immediately without becoming backed up behind large files. 

SPDY has shown up to 55 percent web page loading when tested under lab conditions, and the Google team has released their source code for public feedback.

But Ars Technica raises some points of caution about the mandatory SSL encryption requiring more processing power from small devices and computers alike. Requiring SSL could also worsen the problem where server operators neglect SSL encryption and unintentionally encourage people to ignore warnings about unsecured websites.

Still Google's team recognizes these problems and has already proposed workaround solutions. An open approach has already proven a smashing success on Google's Android operating system, but redesigning the Internet's architecture will undoubtedly prove trickier in the days to come.

 

Courtesy - siliconindia

Go: Google's new open source programming language

Google never seems to just be satisfied with the status quo, and when they run out of fields to compete in they create their own! Google’s new “Go” programming language is one of their newest ventures, a language which is an amalgamation of Python and C++.

 

The Go language, in development since September 2007, has been unveiled by Google along with the release of a free and open source compiler. In fact, Google has released both a stand-along compiler implementation with cryptic names such as 6g (amd64 compiler), 8g (x86 compiler), and 5g (ARM compiler) and one which is a front-end for GCC (gccgo).

Born out of frustration with existing system languages, Go attempts to bring something new to the table, and mix the ease of dynamically typed and interpreted languages with the efficiency of compiled languages.

 

So why make a new programming language?

 

Google believes that the current languages have run their course. The prominent languages in use today (C/C++, Java, C#) are all based around a similar syntax, and updating and adding new features in these language consists of piling on libraries, with little or no upgrade to the core of the language itself. What Google intends to do requires more than just the addition of a new library.

Hello World in Go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {

  fmt.Printf("Hello, ??n")

}

 

The landscape of computing has changed a lot since C, and as Google notes “Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.” Languages have had to morph quite a bit to take on support concepts such as parallel processing, and garbage collection.

 

Go, on the other hand has been designed by Google from the ground up as “a concurrent, garbage-collected language with fast compilation”.

 

In order to not alienate the majority of developers though, its syntax is quite similar to C, and would not take much time for a developer to catch on to.

 

Go has accomplished some impressive feats. The language is designed to compile fast and Go can compile a “large" program in a few seconds on a single computer. It is designed to simplify the creation of application which can better utilize today’s multi-core processors. The language supports concurrent execution and communication between concurrent processes natively, and is fully-garbage collected.

 

Goroutines allowed are Google’s answer to threading in Go, and any function call which is preceded by the go statement runs in a different goroutine concurrently. A feature called channels allows for easy communication and synchronization between such routines.

 

Unlike other object oriented languages, Go has a much “simplified” type structure, which disallows sub-classing! Go offers a different flavour of object oriented programming using interfaces, which Google believes will simplify use.

 

By using interfaces, explicit type hierarchies need not be defined, instead, a type will satisfy all interfaces which are subsets of its methods. The relationships between types and interfaces need not be defined explicity! This can have some interesting implications as people can add interfaces to connect unrelated types even later in the development of an application.

 

Go seems inspired by Python as well. Python has been one of Google’s favoured languages and was the sole language supported on Google’s AppEngine when it launched. Like Python, Go supports “slices”, which allow you to refer to parts of arrays using a simple syntax. Thus for an array “a” with 100 elements, a[23,42] will result in an array with elements 23 through 42 of a. Go also tracks the length of arrays internally, further simplifying array usage. Additionally, Maps in Go allow you to create “arrays” with custom index types, and are a native feature of the language.

 

One consistent point in the features of Go is that it is better to have one excellent implementation of commonly used features such as garbage collection, strings, maps etc. rather than have them rethought and re-implemented in each program.

 

As nearly all Google products, Go is “beta” and not yet suitable for production use. By releasing it early Google hopes to garner a community around it and hopes that enough people will be interested in it to justify continued development.

 

Get out there and grab Go now! Like any Google product it has the capacity to become standard for the next generation.