Sorry for the gap. Stuff to deal with.

anyway, bootlegging is dead. long live bootlegs!.

To the tune of "Oh no, not quail again", please add "Oh no, not a conference in Hong Kong again". But that's next year.

Regular readers will know that I believe that google is the answer to everything. Except that, recently, the question has been "Which high profile search engine that is shortly to have its IPO has been giving much lower quality answers lately?". There are very many clever but arbitrary theories out there as to why those page rankers have had so many rankings off lately (now try getting Jonathan Woss to say that...), but the most appealing (and the least likely) is given by arch hypocrites google watch. [Question: is it ironic that I had to use google to find their web page?].

The theory they have is roughly like this: google has run out of bits. They've been using 32 bits to represent unique page identifiers, and as they proudly announce on their front page, "billions and billions of burgers served". Sorry, I mean "3.4 billion pages indexed". When you add this to 500 million reserved identifiers (presumably actuall 2^29, which is... google calculator? 536 870 912, thank you. Anyway, this all adds up to something dangerously close the magic 4 billion limit of a 32bit identifier (the same reason you can't stuff more than 4Gb of memory in your 386DX, since you were wondering).

So, I have decided to start an appeal to help those poor googlers out. Send google your spare bits! Do you have any spare bits? Perhaps you are using some integers that are always positive, so you don't need a sign bit? Or maybe you are sending email in 7bit ASCII, so 1 bit in every byte is being wasted. Maybe you are running a 2 bit search engine that didn't anticipate how bit the internet would grow in the next five years? If so, you can help. Send your spare bits to bitappeal@google.com. Remember, every bit helps!

[My name is Andrew Orlowski, you've been a wonderful audience, thank you and good night!]