Using Wave we would post a requirements document. Then, since it is possible to start a conversation on any snippet of text each and every requirement could become a discussion. When a consensus is reached with the stakeholders the document owner could make the changes. No more random emails or marked up Word documents floating around. The whole document history and discussion are in one place. Nice.

Now, if only I could get a Google Wave invitation...

Open the about:config dialog in Shiretoko. Then, edit the general.useragent.extra.firefox key to have the value of Firefox/3.5.x (Firefox/3.5.3 as of this writing). Now, Gears will install just fine.

For most tasks that I do Linux is by far my choice. I am not necessarily a Microsoft basher, as I believe that they definitely have their place in the world and in large have made the computing industry a better place. However, I was skeptical and did give an eye roll when I first heard about Bing, Microsoft's new "decision engine." To be fair I decided to change my default search engine for one week from Google to Bing. I changed my home page and the search provider in the Firefox search bar. Here are my impressions:

Home Page

There is a certain appeal to the sparse Google home page. I am an engineer and I love things that are straight to the point. So, Google appeals to me on that front. However, the Bing home page managed to be beautiful and sparse at the same time. To me it looks as if Bing stole the Google home page layout and then rearranged it slightly and added a background picture and some useful information. I must say that I am surprised by my decision on this one. I have been a huge fan of the to-the-point Google home page from day one. Sorry Google, but I really like the Bing home page.

Maps

Surprising to me this one goes to Bing. Not only is their presentation better, but the speed is much faster. For the last several months Google maps has been really slow in loading. I've talked to several people who have noticed the same thing. For what seems like forever Google Maps gets stuck on "loading..." for minutes. OK, I'm sure it's not minutes, but it feels like it.

When Google maps first came out they were so far ahead of Mapquest, the then standard for maps, that it was amazing. Unfortunatly, it seems that the maps have not continued to be the subject of much active development.

As far as presentation goes, I love the smooth zooming of the maps. It just seems so fluid in comparison to Google. Also, the "birds eye" view is a really nice touch and I just can't get by without it now. Good job Microsoft.

Shopping

I admit that I don't use the shopping feature very often, but from the few searches I've done I like the results in Bing better. The presentation of the results is far less confusing. What Bing does that I think makes it shine is they seem to group results by items and then to find the list of retailers you drill down into the item. Google presents all items from all retailers and I just get lost.

Search Results

Finally, we get to web search results. This is the feature I consider most important. After all, why do people visit these sites? To find information.

Although I like the way the information is shown in Bing their page ranking/searching algorithm falls short of Google. For many searches Bing shows useful results. However, too many times this last week I've had to revert back to using Google to find something. In the end these are portals to find information so although Google loses out in other categories this one carries far more weight.

Two of the searches in particular that dissapointed me are:

• findbugs
• perforce

I also tried variations and related searches with these and couldn't get the results I wanted. For example, when I searched for "findbugs" in Bing I got a bunch of pages that were about FindBugs, but not the home page. Just now I tried this search again and the home page is the top result, so their page ranking algorithm must have done some learning since I first tried. Another search term that gave me problems was "perforce." Now, I happen to know that the home page is perforce.com, but I wanted to see what Bing said. To my surprise it shows everything but the home page in the search results. There is the wikipedia article about them and a blog and even an Apache Ant task, but no link to perforce.com. So, I try the same thing in Google and get what I expect. Unfortunately, I didn't write down all of my failed Bing searches, but there were several where I ended up resorting to Google for help.

Conclusion

I don't use most of the other features of Google or Bing like news, videos, or images, so I didn't comment on them. Overall I like many things about Bing and will probably continue to use it for many tasks and searches. However, for the time being they still can't touch the search results from Google and until they improve their search ranking algorithm I'm going to have to stick with Google.

import time
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
 
def longsleep(minutes):
    """
    The normal time.sleep() method is not very accurate from inside
    VMware when sleeping for long periods of time.  This method is
    accurate to within +/- 5 seconds of the desired sleep time period.
    For long periods on the order of hours or days this small inaccuracy
    is acceptable.
    """
    sleepTimeSec = 60 * minutes
    now = datetime.utcnow()
    td = timedelta(seconds=sleepTimeSec)
    endTime = now + td
    while now <= endTime:
        time.sleep(5)
        now = datetime.utcnow()

The method is accurate to around +/- 5 seconds, but for really long sleep durations 5 seconds is no big deal.

Where:
x = Miles to break even
Uc = Upgrade cost in dollars
E1 = Fuel economy prior to upgrade (miles/gallon)
E2 = Fuel economy after upgrade (miles/gallon)
P = Price of fuel in dollars/gallon

So, for example, lets say that I put $75 into a modification to my car. Prior to the modification I got 18MPG and afterwards I get 20MPG. Let's also say that fuel costs an average of $2.99/gallon. The calculation would be:

Which works out to 4515 miles. So, if my car got 18MPG and I put $75 into a modification that brought the economy up to 20MPG it would take 4515 miles of driving to recover my costs. Anything after that would be saving me money.

There are a lot of scams out there for fuel saving devices. IF you can actually find something that works then you can use the above formula to calculate whether or not it would actually be worth the purchase.