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EGM: Who's that chick Mario is rescuing up there?
Brian: It's Princess Peach.
Kirk: It's a hooker.
Niko: She looks cut in half.
Tim: Oh wow—she's one of those pole dancers.
This would have been a simple thing to learn way back when. I am frustrated with myself for not being able to grasp things as quickly as I used to. It's frustrating to see kids that I inspire, pick up a book and 6 months later have more knowledge than it took me to learn in 2-3 years.
Being realistic, I don't believe I will ever be a good enough programmer to be employable by a company, but I can possibly be good enough in time to be a self employed shareware/donationware programmer and earn enough to cover the necessities of life.
As part of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, we’re constantly working to expand the diversity of content we make available to our users. With Google Patent Search, you can now search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Where does this patent data come from?
A. All patents available through Google Patent Search come from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Patents issued in the United States are public domain government information, and images of the entire database of U.S. patents are readily available online via the USPTO website.
Q. What types of patents are available?
A. Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO—from patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006. We don’t currently include patent applications, international patents, or U.S. patents issued over the last few months, but we look forward to expanding our coverage in the future.
Q. How many U.S. patents are there?
A. To date, the USPTO has issued approximately 7 million patents.
Q. How does it work?
A. Using the same technology that powers Google Book Search, Google has converted the entire image database of U.S. patents into a format that’s easy to search. You can search the full text of U.S. patents from the Google Patent Search homepage, or visit the Advanced Patent Search page to search by criteria like patent number, inventor, and filing date.
Q. How do you rank patents in the search results?
A. As with Google Web Search, we rank patent results according to their relevance to a given search query. We use a number of signals to evaluate how relevant each patent is to a user's query, and we determine our results algorithmically.
Q. Is Google hosting the patent pages?
A. Yes. We’re providing an easy way to find and read these patents.
Q. When will the product be available in my country/language?
A. Google Patent Search is currently available in English, and it includes only U.S. patents. We’re always looking to extend our products and services to users worldwide, and we hope to continue to expand the patent offices we cover and the language interfaces available.
Donkey Kong is "lame." Tetris is "boring." Space Invaders "needs a superbomb or something." And why play Pong when it's more fun to "jump up and down on one foot"? Hey, save your irate letters--we didn't say this stuff. The nostalgia-nuking commentary is from our original Child's Play story in EGM's November 2003 issue, in which we had kids of the PlayStation generation playtest classic games from the '70s and '80s. Mortified gaming grown-ups wrote in to call it blasphemy--and call these outspoken scamps a name that rhymes with "brittle truckers."
It was our most popular article ever. So we're doing it again, with a new batch of brittle truckers and a new bucket of classic games.
Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, caused lots of head-scratching Thursday as he tried to explain to a bunch of Wall Street types why his company is not interested in “monetizing” his ridiculously popular Web operation. Appearing at the UBS global media conference in New York, Mr. Buckmaster took questions from the bemused audience, which apparently could not get its collective mind around the notion that Craigslist exists to help Web users find jobs, cars, apartments and dates — and not so much to make money.
Wendy Davis of MediaPost describes the presentation as a “a culture clash of near-epic proportions.” She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). “That definitely is not part of the equation,” he said, according to MediaPost. “It’s not part of the goal.”
“I think a lot of people are catching their breath right now,” Mr. Schachter said in response.
The Tech Trader Daily blog ponders this question: “If YouTube was worth $1.65 billion, who knows what Craigslist would be worth if Jim and [site founder] Craig Newmark ever considred becoming — what’s the word? — capitalists.”
Craigslist charges money for job listings, but only in seven of the cities it serves ($75 in San Francisco; $35 in the others). And it charges for apartment listings in New York ($10 a pop). But that is just to pay expenses.
Mr. Schachter still did not seem to understand. How about running AdSense ads from Google? Craigslist has considered that, Mr. Buckmaster said. They even crunched the numbers, which were “quite staggering.” But users haven’t expressed an interest in seeing ads, so it is not going to happen.
Following the meeting, Mr. Schachter wrote a research note, flagged by Tech Trader Daily, which suggests that he still doesn’t quite get the concept of serving customers first, and worrying about revenues later, if at all (and nevermind profits). Craigslist, the analyst wrote, “does not fully monetize its traffic or services.”
Mr. Buckmaster said the company is doubling in size every year, as measured by page views and listings.
Larry Dignan, writing on Between the Lines blog at ZDNet, called Mr. Buckmaster “delightfully communist,” and described the audience as “confused capitalists wondering how a company can exist without the urge to maximize profits."