Facebook's hiring like crazy again

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to increase the company's head count by as much as 50 percent this year. The young founder said in an interview with Bloomberg that since there are a significant number of engineers and developers looking for work, Facebook--still flush with venture funding, and with revenues on the rise--can scoop them up.

As you may recall, Facebook had aimed to hit 1,000 employees by the end of 2008, but the market crash stalled that aim. The company currently has 1,000 employees, the Bloomberg article said.

But Zuckerberg also said he's trying to keep down costs so that the company can finally achieve profitability. Facebook has been keeping a lid on employee perks for some time now, even though it does feed its minions for free, Google-style.

"The thing I want to remind people of is we're way closer to the beginning than the end," Zuckerberg said in the Bloomberg interview, published Monday, explaining why Facebook moved to a stripped-down, concrete-walled office building when it needed a bigger headquarters. "A lot of times buildings can be a signal that you've made it. I would rather that our building feel much more like a very large garage."

Not everything he said was tinged with humility: he did confirm that he eventually hopes Facebook will have a billion users. Right now, it's over a quarter of the way there.

Apple to Release Snow Leopard on August 28

Dan Moren, Macworld.com

The wait for Snow Leopard is over: on Monday, Apple announced that the latest version of its Mac OS X operating system would be available starting Friday, August 28. The company had previously said that the update would ship in September, but speculation intensified that it would ship earlier than anticipated after a glitch on Apple's Web site late last week.

First announced at Apple's 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple later confirmed that the update would bring performance enhancements, under-the-hood improvements, and feature refinements instead of focusing on brand new capabilities.

Among Snow Leopard's most prominent new technologies are a transition to 64-bit applications; Grand Central Dispatch, which lets multicore machines take better advantage of those capabilities; and OpenCL, a system that allows Macs to use graphic processors for improved performance.

In addition, Snow Leopard builds in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in Mail, Address Book, and iCal, allowing users to seamlessly take advantage of those services in their e-mail, calendaring, and contact management.

The update's focus on under-the-hood improvements should yield dividends in terms of performance, too. Apple boasts of faster times for everything from installation to waking from sleep to system shutdown. And Snow Leopard packs all of that performance into a smaller footprint, reducing the size of its installation by around 6GB.

And with all of that, Apple has still had time to make a few tweaks and enhancements to the Snow Leopard's user features. Exposé now features a more organized overview of windows, as well as the ability to view all of an application's windows via the Dock; Stacks are now scrollable and allow you to navigate through sub-folders; and the Services menu has been revamped to be friendlier and more usable.

Apple's added a few new features as well. The Date & Time preference pane now allows you to set your time zone automatically, based on your Mac's location, and Preview now allows users to easily select text from a single column in a PDF. QuickTime Player has received perhaps the most attention, getting an interface facelift that features a black control overlay that fades out when not in use, and new video editing and sharing features.

As Apple announced at June's Worldwide Developers Conference, Snow Leopard will be available at the price of $29 for those customers upgrading from Leopard; a family pack of five licenses is available for $49. Users upgrading from earlier versions can buy the $169 Mac Box Set which also includes iLife '09 and iWork '09 or the five-user family pack for $229. Those who purchased a qualifying Mac on or after June 8, 2009 can take advantage of Apple's $10 Snow Leopard Up-to-Date Program. All versions of Mac OS X Snow Leopard require an Intel processor, 1GB of memory, and 5GB of free disk space.