Google's "Do Evil" NDA

I was telling my friends about the scary NDA I had to sign at Google when I interviewed with them. I am violating the NDA, making this post!

The NDA expressly forbids me ever "imply or mention the name of Google" in public, I am not supposed to mention the interview ever, and I am required to deny the existence of this NDA.

Out there at valleywag Someone managed to steal the NDA though and posted it online.

And they best part is, I needn't have signed it and they would still have talked to me. See update 2 here.

I'm told similar NDA craziness exists at Amazon too.

Just swim the atlantic.

I cant seem to decide if this is a joke (on the same lines as google moonbase and google gulp after all April 1'st isn't too far away) or it is a system error. Check out the driving directions from Boston MA to Le Havre in France :



In case you missed it, look at step 9 again. yes, Swim 3,462 miles across the Atlantic. nice.

via boingboing

Google outright denies Google Phone rumours

Mayavi posted earlier, a story linking to rumours about a possible GPhone. However Google Executive Alan Eustace outright denied that Google is working on "Yet another mobile device".

"We're not doing a mobile phone", Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, said in an interview yesterday at Google's office in Atlanta. During an event earlier in the day, Eustace said, "I'd like to find something that is broader, rather than do yet another mobile device."

Just wondering what "something broader" can mean..
Link

Google Themed

Google goes fancy finally. Google personalized home page will now support themes. Users can now choose themes for their personalized pages(I can count the number of friends using a personalized home page) . That apart, Now what is so cool about it?.

Well, these themes are loaded through XML files which carry different css files that constitute a theme. So they are so light-weight that degradation is absolutely smooth.

A plain look at the XML file will itself tell you it carries a lot of weather-related information. Though information about time i.e. morning, evening and nights have already been incorporated in the css, weather-related information i believe is still under construction. While this would be much easier to incorporate within the US coz they all have zip-codes, may not be all that easy to provide the same kind of service to a user elsewhere.

I dont think Google has rolled this out completely. It looks like they are still testing it out by letting a few users in a domain alone to test.(Coz i see the link to this in only one of my ids).So, when they actually roll it out, im sure they'll let user-customised themes as well to be a part of the system.