Posts by ratfox 3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
On the other hand, the Swiss have thousand francs notes, that are worth over £750. For some reason, it doesn't bother them.
Of course, that's a country where ATMs give you hundred franc bills (£75), which you have no problem using to buy a pack of chewing-gums at newsagents...
No, you don't. Where are private paid options?
The G Suite offers Gmail, Docs, etc. for businesses. It's paying, but ad-free:
"Google does not collect, scan, or use your data in G Suite services for advertising purposes and we do not display ads in G Suite. We use your data to provide G Suite services, and for system support, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spell-checking, capacity planning, traffic routing, and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account."
As it has done repeatedly in Europe, Google Ireland "licenses" the American web giant's Adwords technology, through which it makes most of is money, to other subsidiaries in Europe
Now I might be mistaken, but I believe this is completely wrong.
If I understand correctly, Google Ireland is not licensing Adwords to other European subsidiaries; it is simply the only Google subsidiary selling ads in Europe.
If you go to Google France and you ask them about ads, they will advise you, then put you in contact with their counterparts in Ireland who will sign the actual contract. Google Ireland pays Google France a small stipend for their services, and keeps most of the money.
The problem in Europe is not the licensing of technology; it is the European law which allows Google Ireland to sell in other countries while only paying taxes in Ireland... (And as a separate issue, to pay almost no taxes in Ireland through licensing arrangements involving Netherlands, but that's a separate issue, which Europe is trying to fix)
Would you replace a 8 to 10 year old Mac with a 3 year old Mac? No.
Why not?
If you're considering the mini line, you're looking for a cheap option that's good enough, and the 3 year old model fits that. It's not like you need to double the speed of your computer every year to run the latest programs; that era is over. What else do you want?
If you're looking for performance, or any kind of pride in having a recent, cool model, then you're not buying a mini anyway. That's what the iMac is for.
You know that Apple is still selling the iPhone 6s? That's because for people who are not chasing after the latest gadget, it's plenty good enough.
I tried "docker container orchestration", only two of the results contain Kubernetes in the title (2nd and 4th). The top link is a linux.com comparison between 8 orchestration tool. Maybe Google knows what you're looking for (I basically never search anything about containers).
How is SQL itself still a thing?
I mean, this is a language that is roughly the equivalent of COBOL. It's been invented almost forty years ago, on the mistaken assumption that programming languages should look like English. Its syntax completely obfuscates the execution logic.
So now we have computers concatenating strings to build SQL statements, which are sent to other computers, only to be parsed at the other end, which is pretty sad; and when you think of it, that's the only reason SQL injections are even possible in the first place.
I yearn for a modern language based on the abstract concepts underlying the execution tree. The only way I can explain we don't have such a language is that by the time engineers understand the execution tree, they already have Stockholm syndrome about the syntax.
The thing is, these amounts are a drop in the ocean compared to what Trump and Clinton paid in advertising. If I remember correctly, Hillary Clinton raised half a billion dollars, and she did not get elected.
It would be a bit weird if 100k spent on Google ads were enough to upend the election, considering they represent 0.01% of the money involved. If Putin is that good at advertising, he should just become a marketing consultant, and he'd make enough money to save the whole Russian economy.
It's interesting, because historically, Microsoft has been quite good at copying the competition, and making their product just a bit better to be preferred. Windows, Word, and Excel were all products that basically copied somebody else, cheaper and as good, or maybe just a bit better.
I'm not sure how come they did not manage to do it again here, maybe they left it too late, and the network effects of first movers were too powerful this time. And they couldn't undercut on the price of free Android (though they did manage to make it non-free by forcing makers to pay for their "patents on Android"). Or maybe everybody hated them too much by that point.
The truth is that as much as people instinctively don't like the authorities deciding what can and cannot be shared online, when it gets to a point where society is damaged by a lack of controls, it is time to introduce them.
And we are at that point.
Really? I for one prefer to have fake news showing up a few hours before they are taken down, rather than having some people opaquely deciding whether I'm allowed to give my opinion; whether done by algorithm, corporations or bureaucrats.
Despite the recent noise made about fake news, they're not a recent invention. 9/11 conspiracy theories did not need Facebook or social media. In fact, they never needed the internet to propagate. And before, it took weeks until they were recognized as fake, if ever.
People just have to learn that "I saw it on the internet" doesn't mean it's true. We've been through this before.
In practice, my browser autocompletes the whole address (e.g I type "the" and then I choose between www.theregister.co.uk and www.theonion.com), so I rarely have to type more than three letters. Rarely, I type the full name of the web site, and let google find what I mean.
TLDs are basically remains of a bygone era. They serve no purpose anymore. At best, they're a gimmick. In a better world, ICANN would have been forbidden to create any new ones.
To be honest, I find the idea of a non-convex screen rather silly. We'll see what kind of hash developers make out of it, but I suspect most will just ignore the left and right pads to simplify their lives. I mean, it is Apple, and the people buying those will be rich, but there is a limit to how much money you can get out of people by having your app display something in two awkward corners of the screen.
an industry that has been competitively fragmented and structurally stable
Rather than "competitively fragmented", I think "local monopolies" is the proper term. E.g The service offered by London black cabs is horrendous. If there had been any proper competition, they'd have gone out of business long ago.
No one can demonstrate a clear link between specific Uber product features and its meteoric growth
They have an app which allows you to order a ride in most of the Western world, and they accept credit card payments. I believe just those two advantages over most incumbents are enough to explain their popularity.
explain why no one else had ever recognized these opportunities
Because the incumbents were so entrenched that they could afford to sit on their asses, considering the multiple layers of regulation protecting them, and it was so hard for new entrants to get into the market that it took near-organized crime methods to do it.
or document how they are powerful enough to allow Uber to rapidly drive all incumbent taxi and limo companies out of business.
As soon as any alternative to the incumbents was created, customers couldn't switch fast enough.
Uber has broken the laws in many ways, but I for one am really happy that the incumbents got the kick they deserved. And I'm not really worried about Uber becoming a global monopoly, because it's actually easy to replicate the business model. You just need not to suck.
It seems that Google is paying Apple billions to be the default search engine on Safari. I wonder how much the change is due to Google's superior search results, and how much to them bidding higher? Apple also knows how to monetize their users...
Though Bing is still the default for images, for some reason (is Bing good for images? Anybody knows?), so maybe there are complicated trade-offs.
Solving it is either something you can do in minutes to impress
Please. The world record is 4.69 seconds. The guy sitting next two me can solve it in 30 seconds. Using only his left hand. And he's not left-handed.
I'm not sure the Googles and Facebooks are those that have most to fear from such new regulations. They have the size and the cash to adapt and create the systems that will keep them out of trouble.
On the other hand, small players that are trying to enter the market won't be able to do the same; and they could be sunk by a single legal complaint...
Like net neutrality, it's the small players that have the most to lose.
Incorrect - check out the trade deficit figures.
Size matters. If trade between EU and UK grinds to a halt, EU loses 4% of its exports. UK loses 13%.
After all, if those in power would have thought that way, there wouldn't have been special rule after special rule for the UK. It's hard to imagine that that mindset is suddenly gone.
Dating is a very different circumstance from breaking up.
In the end, it's the top of the google.com page which is valuable real estate. Google's price comparison engine does profit from being able to put ads there, but that's less space for Google to put text ads.
If the price comparison engine becomes a separate entity, or possibly a separate company, and Google runs an arm's-length auction to decide who gets to put their ads there, then it looks like a textbook solution to monopolies.
It's pretty much a given that FoundEm would complain, given that it's dead and buried, and the only money they can hope for is damage settlements; they have no interest in any solution. The big question is, will the EU accept it?
Apple will be fine as long as they have an important enough percentage that they can't be ignored by most app developers and accessories makers. The fact that their customers are generally rich helps make their percentage heavier.
But it's a tricky game, and if they ever lose that, it will be near impossible to turn it around. Unlike desktops, smartphones don't command significant staying power in the workplace, so that when consumers leave, it's over.
I for one welcome this. It's all nice to have competition to determine who has the best solution, but at some point it becomes really annoying when things don't follow a single standard.
I would argue that it's better to have a single standard even if it's not actually the best one. For example, Betamax might have been superior, but it was very convenient for ten years when VHS was dominant and people could expect their tapes to work with any device they were likely to encounter.
For small companies, the cost of having to declare income in multiple jurisdictions is a nightmare. For big ones, it's a rounding error. Why not declare that the single market rule of paying tax in a single country does not apply to global corporations controlling subsidiaries in most countries? Seems to me simpler than inventing a tax on turnover.
If it makes it more difficult for mega corporations to compete with local businesses: well, that's just icing on the cake.
How is it in the society's interest to pay for incarceration of a non-violent offender for a few years, and then make the person effectively unemployable for life due to the criminal record
Same as most punishments: deter others from following his footsteps. Unfortunately, what he did is both easy, and terribly costly to society. There is a high risk that many other "activists" would find it a very "funny" way to fight the system. A bit like swatting.
So it's very important to send a clear message that doing this will absolutely ruin your life.
But, uhm, first of all: how exactly is fining Google going to change anything?
Well, they're going to have to change the way they do their business at least. In fact, they already agreed to do that, appeal or no appeal. Which indicates that the goal of the appeal is more to reduce the fine or avoid further damage lawsuits than to reverse the decision.
Second: couldn't they have seen this coming for a long time already?
People have been complaining about this for about ten years already. What took so long is that the previous competition commissioner tried to solve this without a big fine, and that took about five years. Then they had to start over from the beginning.
I'm kind of wondering what are the "14 top commercial functions of the web"?
And which one is not owned by Google? Cloud computing, owned by Amazon? Online shopping, owned by Amazon? Online payments, owned by... credit card companies? Bitcoin?
Extortion, owned by Oracle?
ratfox ... Your "perfect" usage can easily be replaced with email.
No it can't. I don't know the complete list of all my old friends who live in LA, or who might happen to be in LA next week. And I'm not about to spam the mailbox of hundreds of people who might or might not live in LA.
Contrary to email, what you write in Facebook does not demand more than one second of attention of anybody who isn't interested. It does not guarantee either that people will happen to read it, and that's totally a feature.
There are people who genuinely use Facebook as an easy way to connect with people they don't see often. They say to all their contacts: "I'll be in LA next week, send me a message if you're there and want to meet". That feels to me the perfect usage, which is genuinely useful and cannot easily be replaced by another tool.
Apart from that, I mostly see: jokes, links to articles, family pics, pictures showing how cool the user is since he's on a beach/in a bar/on a mountain, pictures of vaguely interesting sceneries (like a cloud).
There are also people who treat is as a microblogging site, and post many times a day to give their opinion on some subject.
Artists tend to post pictures of whatever they're working on, at different stages. That can be interesting.
Isn't the very definition of a think tank that it is a lobbying organisation paid to promote the views of its backers? What's so surprising that you would be fired for saying the wrong thing?
I mean, there's a reason these people are not working for universities, or calling themselves journalists, right?
Writing a messaging app is easy, they're dime-a-dozen. Popularity is recursively the best predictor of success. App makers generally copy me-too features while trying to differentiate themselves any way they can. But what are really the features that would push you to use one rather than the other for your business? Apart from reliability?
I think they're trying to sell the robots. Couldn't figure out where to put the ads, maybe.
On topic, I'm thinking Google suspend enough accounts for wrong reasons, and there are enough people criticizing them, for it to be a coincidence. That it took almost three months to reinstate the account is just an example of Google's great customer service.
That puzzled me too. I can buy that it's more efficient or has more features, but I don't see how it can be easier to use...?
EDIT: I was making the assumption that normal people just set their favorite temperature and never ever change it. I now remember that American houses typically have crap insulation, which means that heat is perpetually bleeding out of your house, and people save money by not heating whenever they're not at home.
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