The awesome bar uses historical data from previous searches, so if your search for "news" always ends with you clicking on HN, it will put that at the top. Over time, the bar will learn your preferences and become much more useful.

I hated the bar at first, to the extent that I considered going back to FF2. For example, I used to always type "en." to find a wikipedia page, but that no longer worked well. Now I love being able to type in parts of pages, and I no longer use bookmarks since I can just search my entire history. The only thing missing is the ability to sync the history and awesome bar training to other machines, which we're working on ( http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/ ).

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla :)

Unfortunately, this effect wears off by the time you graduate, which is when you need it the most.

1) He is a primary author on all of Google's major infrastructure-related publications (BigTable, MapReduce, etc)

2) I've seen his internal resume. It is CRAZY.

3) Just for fun/learning I took some time and wrote an internal web app which produced pie graphs showing peoples line counts navigable by directory. I didn't run it on the entire code base because Perforce is a dog, but what I did run it on, he dominated.

4) There is an internal web app listing Chuck Norris -style Jeff Dean facts. I learned that when Jeff Dean launches his profiler, loops unroll themselves in fear.

That man is certainly Done, and Gets Things Smart. In fact, he has been 40 times more Done ever since he upgraded his keyboard to USB 2.0. Not to mention that during downtime, he alone handles all Google searches by hand.

CSS was initially designed to support every kind of typography or layout which was achievable using presentational HTML. It was rightly recognized that if some effects (no matter how ill-advised) were only possible using presentational markup, people would not migrate to CSS. This is the reason properties like "blink" were included in CSS.

Regarding table-like layouts, the corresponding CSS property is called "display:table", and was included in the CSS 2.0 standard 10 years ago.

IE however did not and does still not support "display:table". Therefore there is no direct CSS alternative to table-layouts which works cross-browser.

A table-like layout can still with some effort be emulated by pushing other CSS features like floats to the limits. But this is actually misusing these CSS construct for a purpose they were never intended for, which makes it generally convoluted and inflexible compared to "just using tables".

But it is important to realize that the problems with the CSS approach is not that CSS is badly designed - or requires a fundamentally different mindset - but simply that the implementation in IE is incomplete.

One should also realize that tables are superior only in some specific circumstances (as described in the article). Generally CSS is better and easier to use for layout, even considering the omissions in IE.

Exactly! As it should be. (As it better be.) The challenge for IT is to prove what they want is in the best interest of the business, not the IT department. We know that, we just have trouble communicating it.

Why should the business care about getting new servers or having developers waste their time rewriting already functioning code?

It's your job to answer that question. They just don't know. I had a client with slow response times the previous holiday season. Business had doubled since then. I had to paint a clear picture of what it would be like on the same infrastruture for the upcoming holiday season. x dollars spent vs. y business lost. That's a language they can understand.

Most people in corporate IT want to do a good job.

And that job is much more than development or administration. One of corporate IT's biggest job is education. We shouldn't blame others for not understanding what is clear to us. It's also our job to get them to "see the light".

(Maybe that's why I like hacking so much. I find it much easier communicating with my computer than with the bosses.)

People he will never meet will forever refer to that number as Quadrupillion. He's already changing the world in odd, creative ways.

See? http://quadrupillion.com

Keep up the good work!

  As for goods, forget showing off. “If you want to live like a billionaire, 
  buy a $12,000 bed,” says a financial-planner friend of mine.

In the spirit of the quoted financial planner, therefore, I propose to discuss and uncover the areas where a lot of money is still able to buy more comfort and capability than a mere paycheck. If we could shrink these gaps, standard-of-living per dollar would increase, which would be very nice.

+ The quality of living quarters is basically as good as it can be, even for smallish sums. Fifty million dollars won't improve the quality of our hot water, good beds, good insulation and home entertainment by much. Rich people can still buy huge properties, but the utility of a private forest is small. Perhaps the biggest change that could happen here would be if people decided to not to skimp too much on the parts that matter.

+ Free time and attention. It is a pain in the ass to have to work for a living, usually at a somewhat painful job. Not quite sure how to tackle this problem. Robotics and artificial intelligence, maybe. It won't be solved in the forseeable future.

+ Efficient personal transportation still requires a lot of money. Think private jets: being able to travel to any location on earth as quickly and painlessly as anyone. This will probably remain a hurdle in the forseeable future, although the cost has come down a lot quite recently. It remains a matter of cheap airframes and cheap energy. Believe what you may, but being able to move ten of fifteen times faster than a car is a great boon. Get a private pilot's license, and you'll get the idea.

+ Personal attention. Money can buy all sorts of servants, therapists, coaches and mentors. I question how much of a boon many of these services actually are, but some of them would be very comfy. For example massage therapists, housemaids or chaffeurs. Also, learning new skills comes easier if you have world-class teaching talent available: the kind of teaching talent which would be bored to death and vastly underpaid teaching in public schools. Ironically, the most useful of these services (housemaids or nannies, for example, or prostitutes if we want to step into darker territory) can already be rented on the open market quite cheaply. Not to the same level of availability or quality as a billionaire could, but still vastly better than nothing.

+ Personalized health care. Even in Scandinavia, getting an appointment with the doctor and then an appointment with the required specialist is annoying enough to make you wish for something better. Health care is expensive enough as it is, but having a specialist watching you closely for a long time is much more so.

Can anyone think of any areas I missed? Perhaps some of these points could be separated into more sub-points..a list like this compiled 100 years ago would probably lump a lot of the luxuries we have today (washing machines, hot water, automobiles) into the same categories...