>I work for ThoughtWorks (TW) and would be happy to tell you about it.  TW
 >was founded on the idea that if you put together the best and brightest
 >people and give them a challenging environment then only great things can
 >happen.  This has been and continues to be the main criteria by which we
 >hire people and is the one of the reasons we are so successful.  As such,
 >the recruitment process is a series of flaming hurdles, but well worth it.
 >I just can't bring myself to leave the company even after 5 years :-)

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The auto industrys number is almost up.

The 17-digit codes that identify the origin, make, model and attributes of cars, trucks, buses even trailers worldwide will be exhausted by the end of the decade.

And like an odometer that returns to zero and starts over again, a Vehicle Identification Number or VIN could be duplicated.

Experts say duplicated VINs would cause havoc for repair shops, state license offices, insurance agencies, law enforcement and other groups that use VINs to process warranty claims, investigate accident claims and recover stolen vehicles.

Weve been brainwashing law enforcement and the insurance community and virtually everybody that a VIN is like DNA theres one for any one vehicle, said Ed Sparkman, spokesman for the Chicago-based National Insurance Crime Bureau.

At the root of the impending shortage is the explosion of vehicle production in recent decades. Automakers build 60 million cars and trucks every year and each one needs a unique VIN in the same way a newborn is given a Social Security number. And that doesnt count heavy trucks, motorcycles and other vehicles that require VINs.

link

 I grabbed the latest 1.8.2 source.
 I ran the usual: autoconf, configure, make, make install.
 ri failed.
 I looked inside Makefile and see the target install-doc.
 I ran make install-doc.
 ri worked.

 Not the most obvious path for me, but there you go

 'We may have nuclear technology, but we still have stone-age brains"
 -- Anthropologist Paul Roscoe.

article

A simple CAPTCHA ("Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart") written in Ruby. This will dynamically create an image containing a key displayed on a noisy background, which the user must enter into a text box. link

Alternatively, as Ari has pointed out in ruby-talk:

 Alter the engine so that external URLs go to a non-indexed-by-
 search-engines "leaving the site" page. It effectively kills any
 pagerank that adding a link would add to the linkee. That's both good
 and bad, but it's a short-term solution.

 It may be that a simple HTTP redirect script would work, too, but I'm
 not sure.

This hurts the ruby experience a little bit, because among those characters are {}[]~\| …

and the solution

• software as Commodity
• network-enabled Collaboration
• customizability and software-as-Service

link

 This came up in conversation with a client today - the problem with
 projects is the equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
 The more control you want on their status (or position), the less you
 have over their velocity. Pick one of the two - and pick wisely.

Summary:

• Advertisement market has limits
• the cash from the IPO is the emergecy fund to reinvent themselves
• only buy small companies with interesting technology
• take on Yahoo and Microsoft, but not directly
• Amazon, ebay, etc. are there to lose .. The key to making money in search is to get between people and what they are searching for, and that’s where Google is on a collision course not only with Microsoft and Yahoo, but also with Amazon and eBay
• expect GoogleMedia taking on iTunes and entire new market places of intellectual property
• whatever Google will do will be incredibly technical

 After labouring over the weekend, I am happy to present the first
 version of Gnome's Guide to WEBrick:
 http://shogo.homelinux.org/~ysantoso/WebWiki/WEBrick.html

 The guide is more of a reference-type documentation rather than
 tutorial. I believe that WEBrick is straightforward enough for someone
 to grasp its idea. At that point, a tutorial would be of lesser use
 than a reference.

 Being the first release, I am aware that there are many mistakes:
 spelling, grammar (not native English-speaker), obtuse example, etc. I
 am also aware that there are missing sections. Some of the missing
 sections are listed in the 'NOT YETs' section. If you think there are
 other topics I missed, please inform me.

If you want to relax after too much work .. and are sick of the normal Hollywood movies, check out Beat Takeshi.

Excellent page about Beat Takeshi.

Takeshi Kitano on the question: What’s you’re coolest moment?

 "In Japan, there is a broadcasting station called NHK,
  like BBC, but much, much stricter. When I was a rising
  star in comedy I appeared on a live program, and the director specifically
  said you can't say such-and-such, if you use these words you'll
  be finished. So of course I couldn't resist. I said 'shit'
  12 times in a row. I said, 'I saw a shit-like substance on the street.
  So I went over and I picked it up and smelled it, and it smelled like
  shit. Then I felt it and it felt like shit, and I liked it, and
  it tasted like shit, so I put it away. Thank god I didn't step in it!'
  That was my coolest moment, because it was a tremendous risk. They could have
  cut me off but they didn't. The director was fired and the producer was moved
  to another program, far away from Tokyo."

I always think of such measures as inferiority complex. People will listen to what is best, no need to purify one’s language. Evolution will win in the end anyhow. .. but doesn’t marketing power brainwash us? Yes, but vote with your money and buy the cds of the language you want to support.

How come some sucessful bands like "Wir sind Helden" still sing German in Germany? If you sing English, the audience is much larger .. where is the problem? It’s a good thing .. people can actually understand it.

Countries like France that try to push French even in scientific publication only shoot themselves in the leg and live in the past. Sorry, vive la belle France!

There are cultural differences between countries. The French are still more likely to buy a French car than Germans buying German cars.

Why does Europe not wake up and only use one official language? Already now with 11 languages we wasted 550 million euros per year on translation. 1,300 translaters translate 1.5 million pages a year. Now the budget will increase to 800 million euros.

BBC-story-Ukraine

BBC-story-Translation