> For starters, we built the entire Bing stack from scratch. No OSS. No common platforms like the JVM. Nothing like that. We started from nothing, and invented the server infrastructure, the data pipeline, the runtime that would support the site, the ML tools, everything. The fact that the site runs at all is a small miracle, but the site does not "just" run: the most remarkable thing by far is that the quality of our tooling is quite incredible, generally an order of magnitude better than the OSS equivalents. For example, the largest deployment of an OSS NoSQL datastore seems to be a few thousand nodes. The small NoSQL cluster backing our MapReduce implementation is stably deployed on a cluster an order of magnitude larger than this. This is something you only really see at companies like Amazon, Google, or MS.
You lost me here. Not building on OSS seems like setting yourself up or failure from the start, particularly when you are fighting a manpower war, which is where OSS is beating every proprietary entity. OSS already powers Google and Amazon and OSS db's will scale to billions of nodes, not a few thousand.
I wasn't talking about anyone outside google, just critiquing the game being rigged internally, but it's maybe interesting you brought that in.
On the one hand that could be criticised as an illusion of choice in the market (behind the curtain there is often ownership across entire industry sectors, regardless of 'competitors' within a sector). On the other, governments quite correctly get a say in any case (what do we representatively govern otherwise - the alternative is to cede governance to global corporations). Google is particularly sensitive to the latter as it has a huge de facto monopoly and has become part of our infrastructure - it is absolutely a huge target for regulation wherever it has traction.
Talking of competition, is there anything viable in the shape of an open source effort where the algorithms and indexes could be crowd-managed - perhaps indexing via browser plugins?
Disagree. The sanctions that Google applies indicate that it is unable to effectively index a free web and is instead relying on editorial control and favouritism.
As a user I care whether Google finds me the most relevant results from the biggest haystack or whether it editorialises those results - it's a big distinction. By that measure I'd say they definitely _shouldn't_ be penalising sites for finding loopholes in their algorithms but should simply close those holes up.
About a year ago I tried it for receipts due to the OCR but at least half the scanned images got lost (some in transit, some after they had been viewed in evernote). Shame as I'd have have gone for at least one paid account if it had worked.
Seems the journalist and a lot of commenters here are saying that a service like this needs to be regulated so that there are consequences for negligence or carelessness. There's probably something in that, but in the absence of a regulatory framework for social media systems, snapchat surely has no liability or requirement around data security (beyond existing regulations).
> every despot on the planet sees that and can say "Well America does it," and have firm ground to stand on. That's why we need people like Snowden, to keep the American government in line...
Whether styled as a despot or not, when it comes to the exercise and maintenance of power, nobody is ever saying anything remotely like 'well America does it' - it's just irrelevant. It's never a moral question, but one of what power can be assumed (both at home and abroad). That's the interesting thing about Snowden - he just acted and took the upper hand. (And even more so that he further consolidated by maintaining it, despite huge efforts to bring him down a peg or two.)
Think about any big project you've been a part of. With the benefit of hindsight, is it not true to say that you might well not have taken them on in the first place if you'd known what would be involved?
I take management blaming here to mean that this is a systemic problem that can can only be solved at an organisational level (rather than blaming a caste within that org).
This whole light thing seems a bit out of proportion, like being paranoid of people wearing shades in case they are eyeing you up (which is more than half the reason anyone wears them in the first place).
How hard can it be to just stick them in some aviators? Plenty of people would be after a pair of those. You could be half geek and half Lou Reed circa Street Hassle.
I think there's maybe a distinction to be drawn between transactions between individuals, which could be made in virtual doughnuts if both parties agreed, and a currency used in trade.
As far as I can see, btc is now two things - a protocol which could be used as technical implementation for any number of things, and also implementation of a currency which isn't backed by any concrete asset or entity (other than end users). For the currency, the main value and insurance against risk seems to be in the brand (i.e. what makes a bitcoin worth more than a foocoin).
But it's trivial for a government to kill commercial use of btc as an alternate currency within their jurisdiction. It's not legal tender and therefore can be banned for use in transactions by registered companies - that can be easily enforced by tax authorities and police. It's also quite justifiable on the basis of collecting taxes, protecting the economy generally, and protecting citizens from being caught with paper that isn't backed by law or national banks. Black markets are by definition illegal - the only question is to what extent they are tolerated and that is largely a question of their size and impact on the formal economy.
It may not be for all but as far as I'm aware most productive creative people are rigorous in their schedules. For example, I've read a number of artists and writers talking about the importance of developing the habit of creating output every day regardless of quality.
There's no such thing as an unbiased report and you are being disingenuous here as the article is clearly a personal account. As such, it obviously wouldn't and shouldn't aim to be a broad survey on the pros and cons of the utility and ethics of various approaches. On the contrary, the aim is clearly to add new first-hand information to the public debate, which has hitherto been deliberately biased by extensive and coordinated efforts to repress that info.
I think you intended this as a reductio ad absurdum but a lot of people take this view, quite possibly the majority of Europeans and Buddhists for example.
You lost me here. Not building on OSS seems like setting yourself up or failure from the start, particularly when you are fighting a manpower war, which is where OSS is beating every proprietary entity. OSS already powers Google and Amazon and OSS db's will scale to billions of nodes, not a few thousand.