$700,000,000,000

President Bush asked for a little money today.  Here are some ways to put that into perspective.  I use the very handy data from the census bureau for these calculations.

  • He recommends spending ~$2300 for every person in the United States.
  • According to the census, there are about 33 million Americans earning less than $50K per year with mortgages.  Assuming a 10% default rate (this is huge) and an average $92,000 mortgage, we could cover all defaulted loans for $303Billion.
  • There are 6,450,000 Americans living below the poverty and holding mortgages.  Their median mortgage (sorry, I don’t have the average) is $21,390.  We could roughly pay off all of these people’s homes for only $137Billion.

The Killer Vista Feature

startmenu At home I use Vista.  At work I use mostly XP.  There is really only one feature I miss from Vista when I’m at work.

Search in the start menu.  I can’t stand XP’s menus on the start button.  I’ve got at least 4 machines, each with different ways of categorizing things in the start menu.  They all are way too cluttered to spot anything, and I loathe every time I have to go these menus.  With Vista, all you do is search.  Type “e”, and you are already at Excel.  Type “programs” and you’re in the control panel.  It’s just great.

I realize you can buy add-on products to XP to do this.  Maybe I will.  This is the most visible feature that I miss from Vista.

Google Chrome

chrome-256 If you haven’t read about Google Chrome already, I hope you’ll take a look! This is the project I currently work on at Google.

Features:

  • Open source browser based on the Apple Webkit Rendering Engine.
  • Multi-process browser.
  • A fast JavaScript engine.
  • Minimalist approach to user interface.
  • “Incognito Mode”, a private browsing interface.

Rather than blab about it – I’ll let you go try it out.  The Google Chrome Comic is a much better description of the product anyway.  Let us know what you think.  We wouldn’t release it if we didn’t think it was quite solid, but please remember it is in beta.  If you have any questions, please ask!

P.S.  Some may notice that this is not the first product I’ve worked on called Chrome!