Amazon boss snubs 'expensive', 'sub-optimal' relational databases. Here's looking at you, Larry Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has used his annual shareholders letter to throw shade at legacy database rivals, saying that while no one asked for AWS, businesses were sick of lock-in and punitive licensing deals. spy As Alexa's secret human army is revealed, we ask: Who else has been listening in on you? READ MORE Tech execs rarely …
I'd settle for a nutrient dispensor, I wouldn't care that all food out of it looked like the square dolly mixtures.
But no, we instead get black surveilence tubes - useless.
Come back when you can sell me something other than useless junk designed to increase your profits at my expense.
But no, we instead get black surveilence tubes - useless.
I'd really like an Alexa if there could be engineered a way to guarantee my privacy. I'd have to have absolute confidence that the voice recording and transcripts never left the device save for the small fragment of conversation in which I'm specifically talking to the device. It'd just be verbal Google with tunes.
As to how I could be persuaded that the Alexa had ceased to be a "black surveillance tube" I don't know. At this point it's rather a big hurdle to jump.
a replicator would be lovely though
In the Star Trek, locally controlled version, sure. However I suspect what would happen in real life is that you'd have to pay for a license for access to the copyrighted replicator data files, which would be DRMed to the hilt and every single print would be commercially tracked, centrally controlled, and monitored by the authorities with an automatic kill switch if you want to replicate something nasty. For example a deep fried Mars bar (it's not healthy, doncha know?).
Yeah, I'll take the days* when I can go to the shops, buy anonymous, generic ingredients, then concoct something tasty and unhealthy if I desire in the privacy of my own kitchen. Sans Alexa of course!
* And my children will fondly reminisce about them the same way we reminisce about the days when mix tapes were a thing, having a firearm didn't get you executed on a terrorism charge, libraries allowed you to read all kinds of different viewpoints in private, etc.
For example a deep fried Mars bar (it's not healthy, doncha know?).
There was at least one occasion on STNG when Deana tried to order a desert that the computer warned her that what she was trying to order had no nutritional value....
'as to DRM, there seems little impetus among manufacturers to produce anything lately that doesn't also generate additional revenue via data collection, some form of wasteful and expensive cartridge based design and or subscription based usage. With current corporate trends towards unashamedly milking the customer, I would expect an attempt to milk the customer per usage, which would defeat the point of the device in the first place.
and while Amazon continue to dumb down Alexa, even google has seen the light and stopped repeating some commands back to you now.
How stupid is it when you ask a device to do something, and you see it do it, and it repeats your command back to you, or tells you where you are when you ask for something else, or displays the camera name on a video feed you have asked it to show, or tells you to have a good afternoon, after giving you the response you ask for?
Yeah thanks Alexa, but I already KNEW I'd asked you to turn on that light, or show me that camera, you don't need to tell me or show me AGAIN what I asked you to do in the first place!
As a Star Trek fan, I do have a black, always-on cylinder in my kitchen. Well, to be accurate, it’s positioned in low earth orbit above my kitchen. It’s neat, except that it keeps emitting whale-song noises at interstellar volume and disrupting my electricity supply (not to mention vaporizing my swimming pool).
Last time I was at the local barbers the hairdresser was chatting away and mentioned she had one of these in the bedroom. I just quipped about what it must have heard when her boyfriend was over and she went bright red and the other hairdresser laughed out loud. It had NEVER occurred to her this device could be listening to all sorts of intimate activities.
No, I have no idea if she did, but what if =>
Is this Alexa a real live human and not some blow-up doll that sits next to the black cylinder as sold to him by Amazon (along with the doll naturally)???
{the mind boggles for this time on a Monday... Need more coffee}
Just avoid anything with an Amazon logo (and Google for that matter) on it and eventually the world will be a better place. 1984 is not a sales manual you know.
Being serious for a moment, I feel really sorry for anyone who is really named Alexa (As in a living breathing human). Amazon has put the blight on that name for the forseeable future.
Sorry have to down vote you...
You bring up a couple of points that aren't actually true or relevant.
First, RDBMs are used in two different types of applications.
1) OLTP (Where you have transactions and multiple types of isolation in ACID)
2) DW (Where you're not locking the data but using a different subset of SQL
Now OLTP databases are not infinitely scalable, Distributed locks are a pain and get worse the larger and more distributed the data becomes.
DW... RDBMS top out around 100TB but that could have increased in the past couple of years.
In terms of vendor lock in... you have your engine and then you have your tool sets. That's where the vendor lock in occurs.
W.R.T Bezos...He has no clue about what he is blathering on.
I find it funny that the first comment is less about Bezos and RDBMs and more about Alexa.
Or the fact that AWS does in fact have a vendor lock in based on both their tools that they are encouraging, along with the high cost of exfiltrating data.
And yes, I happen to know a lot about both RDBMs and Big Data. Having spent time within Informix , IBM and have been doing Big Data stuff for the past 10 years.
To your point... Snowflake is making the same argument. Not that I agree with it.
There's a reason RDBMSs made sense in the past. Unfortunately you can easily lose temporal data unless you're careful.
There's a reason RDBMSs made sense in the past. Unfortunately you can easily lose temporal data unless you're careful.
RDBMSs still make sense, especially when it comes to transactional integrity, but I think we're in agreement on this. In some situations you may in addition want something different for highly volatile data, such as from logging.
But Bezos isn't really talking about technology, he's making a sales pitch to non-techies for AWS, because it will magically make all their database problems go away.
Anecdotally, last week I hit a problem with Amazon presumably due a lack of an integrity constraint in their customer database. I had two accounts with the same e-mail and name, could see both but only ever log into one, which was annoying because I was trying to review an order from another. Pretty much a textbook example of why RDBMSs are good.
"IBM and have been doing Big Data stuff for the past 10 years."
A few years ago my father told me about how the company he worked at the time bought an IBM computer, part of the sales pitch was how they would be able to analyze the data to predict future trends and what not.
Plot twist: he only worked there until the middle of the seventies.
You might want to check out Google's Spanner. Last time I used PostgreSQL, it supported compare-and-set transactions that benchmarked very well.
Both of these require some sacrifices to be performant, but they're still quite usable as a transactional relational database.
"everywhere i've been and there's one in the room , it gets unplugged before I utter a word to anyone."
I say that either 1) you're a liar or, 2) nobody wants to talk to you with an attitude like that.
What on earth conversations do you have that you give one single toss about this? Particularly in the rooms of other people!
"What on earth conversations do you have that you give one single toss about this?"
All of them, whether work or personal.
When I have conversations, I like to - no, I insist upon knowing who i'm talking with first.
My various employers would take a less than understanding view if I divulged any of their commercial confidences to an audience they hadn't previously authorised.
Without exception, on the very few occasions i've had to relieve one of those devices of its connection to a power source, once i've explained why, the subject (I was going to type 'user' but that'd be Amazon etc.) of the device has been fully understanding and supportive, occasionally they have commented that they'd wished they knew it was 'always on' before they had previous conversations with it around....
Just in the same way as I can still choose to not be monitored by one of these things in my own home or work environment, I can still choose to not be monitored by one of these things in any other private environment.
Timmy B.
I do try and minimise my exposure - it's not always possible to avoid the harvesting completely, I do what I can though.
Google, Facebook, & Twitter have never been used, Microsoft & Amazon are used in moderation, no 'smart' meter or listening / looking devices in the TV, fridge, toaster or kettle, seperate VLAN for visitors devices & CCTV is hardwired to a DVR with no network connection. All data transfer is by DVD-R (not RW)
No store or 'loyalty' cards, most purchases are in cash, my phones are running LineageOS with no googly services installed. Work stuff is primarily airgapped, some is Company VPN only - the devices cannot be interchanged.
And i've never picked up a USB stick from the street....
Not really, it's an evolved state, not one that was suddenly implemented.
Yes I do drive a car - well, many cars, owned my many different companies, sometimes more thsan two a day - very rarely do I get to drive my own, whilst ANPR is a non-negotiable fact of life, it recognises vehicles, not drivers, they are identified should the need arise, by contacting the registered keeper of the vehicle.
You seem to be missing the point that I choose to not be tracked, monitored or 'sold' where there is choice to be had, clearly, things like passports, air travel, council tax etc. are non-negotiable in the level of detail you have to give, if you want, need or have to avail yourself of the service.
AC - I enjoy parties very much, but they are on a much bigger scale than a few saddoes stood round an Alexa doing some 'Dad dancing' - which i'd hazard a guess is about your level of experience from your comment.
>it recognises vehicles, not drivers, they are identified should the need arise, by contacting the registered keeper of the vehicle.
Actually, those camera could be set up to not only give a clear picture of the person that's driving (IR works best for that) but also count the number of people and possibly identify any passengers in the car. The original ANPR was for early adopters, it needed license plates that were easily machine readable. Things have moved on a lot; they have no difficulty reading all the permutations of US license plates and getting a picture of the driver (because in the US we can't just issue a ticket to the registered keep of a vehicle, its a Constitution / Bill of Rights thing). The cameras that the Border Patrol uses at their inspection stations look into vehicles.
....and then there's the whole Chinese facial recognition thing......(but its in the UK if you see how quickly a person can be identified from CCTV data when its important to do so).
Enjoy your paranoia.....
"You seem to be missing the point that I choose to not be tracked, monitored or 'sold' where there is choice to be had, clearly, things like passports, air travel, council tax etc. are non-negotiable in the level of detail you have to give, if you want, need or have to avail yourself of the service."
No. I understand your point. But it's one of absurd paranoia that's worth of a kind of tongue in cheek mockery. The cognitive dissonance involved in: I chose not to be tracked except when it's unavoidable is just funny. If you're that worried give up and go and live off grid - have no home - use no money - drive no car - use no public transport. But that's a laughable to most people as the attempts you think are laudable.
Data in/out is common for cloud providers. Amazon talking about lock in however... the entirety of AWS (apart from EC2 and S3) is one giant lock in scheme. No you don't have to use their XYZ service for doing whatever feature, but eventually you do, and you end up with a "cloud" solution that only really works with AWS. Sure, you can get it running on GCP or OpenStack, but only once you replace that single click AWS feature with a different feature.
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I can understand where this rant from Bezos came from, I was watching some AWS related videos on YouTube at the weekend when suddenly it started showing video after video of Larry Ellison rubbishing AWS and Amazon generally.
I guess Bezos is just hitting back.
Must say Ellison doesn't come across well on video, looked pretty nasty and ruthless (yeah I know they all are but this was in your face nasty)
Ah yes, tying executive compensation to the racial, sexual and gender makeup of top management. Such an excellent way to prove that you should judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and what they stick in where. We are all just the same, and just as capable aren't we? No possible differences in job performance due to those traits right?
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