Sounds quite worrying that they didn't think the failed member was highly stressed. This has to put the medium-term future of the bridge in doubt.
Aye, I've seen that. I've also got a reproduction of Stevenson's book of the building of the Bell Rock light (*). And a view of Edinburgh showing his house on the kitchen wall.
In addition, I've just received a book on Victorian warships that a gent on here recommended.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
I wonder how much of this - apart from the good publicity - is a cover for huge sales of a stock that could be worthless in a few years' time as technology marches on?
He would rather bank a billion in real money than rely on a theoretical multiple of that in his own company's shares.
Well the good PR is going down the tubes pretty quickly, because the whole announcement has been found out to be spin. 99% of his fortune, mutter quietly over the course of his whole life, mutter quietly into an LLC that he controls, so not exactly "giving it away" and said LLC can invest for profit, for giving, for LOBBYING...
I don't think as some as suggested the only for the reason of one massive tax dodge. I think it is more that he has been advised that this is the most flexible way in which he can secure and control his fortune during his lifetime and continuing on for his offspring, while being able to give money away as and when he wants. Its win win, other than for the US government.
'Wet Heidi' would perhaps be more at home with the Lib Dems, but they're annihilated as a force so for the expediency of her career had to go with the Tories.
A similar thing happened near Manchester a decade or so ago, as anyone who used the M6 will attest. The difference there being that they managed to get the new bridge open before the old one started crumbling.
The replacement bridge was blocked by the Labour Party for years, the SNP began the plans as soon as they formed the government.
Any issues with the timing overlap are entirely the fault of SLAB.
I'm not sure that's the case. The full extent of the problems in the bridge were discovered in 2005. The SNP minority government was formed in May 2007. In June 2007 the Forth Replacement Crossing Study (2007) was released, recommending a bridge. Earlier parts of the report were released in February 2007, before the SNP came to power.
It seems sensible to do a study into the alternatives (I favoured a tunnel, but I would) before detailed planning. And the Labour government commissioned that report.
Fantastic story! - amazing the things we can collectively dig up here. Love the tale about measuring with piano wire and plotting against OS maps - to meet in the middle only 5cm away from perfect. No lasers, GPS or gyroscopes 50 years ago!
One of the cases is closed but Scotland Yard's Special Inquiry team, which handles high-profile inquiries, is still investigating two others.
Both the Metropolitan Police and Ipsa refused to disclose the identity of the MPs while the investigation is ongoing.
It examined allegations involving a third MP but decided that there was no case to answer.
However, Scotland Yard told the Evening Standard that in this case a 33-year-old female aide accepted a caution in April this year for fraud by false representation.
I'm all for independent mindedness, this seems a bit rich.
I don't follow her reasoning. Sure, we all want people who do not slavishly follow a party line, that's why most people don't mind MPs of their own party rebelling on occasion, it only becomes an issue when they do it so often that you question why they are on the team at all. But outright saying she would prefer to be an independent? Why not stand as an 'Independent Conservative' or something if she leans that way politically but wants no pressure to follow specific proposals?
It's actually slightly different from serial rebels like Corbyn (or now the anti-Corbyn brigade) who might rebel like they were independent but are clear they want to change the mind of the party and get it going in a new direction, they are still part of the movement, they believe in whipping and so on, they just disagree with the leadership. This seems like saying she doesn't care about the party at all, it was just a vehicle to get elected. Which is probably true of quite a few MPs in all liklihood, so at least she's honest about it.
Yentob won't face BBC Trust inquiry over Kids Company as he has quit
The BBC’s governing body will not investigate accusations that Alan Yentob tried to influence the BBC’s coverage of Kids Company, because now he has stepped down as creative director it is “not proportionate, appropriate or cost effective”.
Arhhhh now it is becoming clear...What a f##king stitch up. He still remains working there for £180k a year, still has his £6.5 million pension, and no investigation into his behaviour.
It is like all those higher up involved in Jimmy Saville scandal...just conveniently shifted around the deckchairs.
I know it doesn't seem immediately apparent but Labour and UKIP motivated the same proportion (73%) of their May 2015 vote to turnout. Labour did no better than UKIP, and UKIP no worse than Labour.
The headline percentage change is almost entirely down to Tories not bothering to vote or take sides because:
a) The seat is unwinnable; b) There is a Tory government in place until 2020;
The big issue for UKIP is that Tories may see no reason to support them tactically whilst the parliamentary arithmetic is what it is. So, how can they break through?
The only thing I can see to help them is Corbyn dragging Labour further left.
It's clear that UKIP have failed to take advantage of that opportunity. Retaining 73% of their GE vote is not great when you're the obvious challenger.
I agree that they should have been looking for an improvement.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
I'm all for independent mindedness, this seems a bit rich.
I don't follow her reasoning. Sure, we all want people who do not slavishly follow a party line, that's why most people don't mind MPs of their own party rebelling on occasion, it only becomes an issue when they do it so often that you question why they are on the team at all. But outright saying she would prefer to be an independent? Why not stand as an 'Independent Conservative' or something if she leans that way politically but wants no pressure to follow specific proposals?
It's actually slightly different from serial rebels like Corbyn (or now the anti-Corbyn brigade) who might rebel like they were independent but are clear they want to change the mind of the party and get it going in a new direction, they are still part of the movement, they believe in whipping and so on, they just disagree with the leadership. This seems like saying she doesn't care about the party at all, it was just a vehicle to get elected. Which is probably true of quite a few MPs in all liklihood, so at least she's honest about it.
I know it doesn't seem immediately apparent but Labour and UKIP motivated the same proportion (73%) of their May 2015 vote to turnout. Labour did no better than UKIP, and UKIP no worse than Labour.
The headline percentage change is almost entirely down to Tories not bothering to vote or take sides because:
a) The seat is unwinnable; b) There is a Tory government in place until 2020;
The big issue for UKIP is that Tories may see no reason to support them tactically whilst the parliamentary arithmetic is what it is. So, how can they break through?
The only thing I can see to help them is Corbyn dragging Labour further left.
It's clear that UKIP have failed to take advantage of that opportunity. Retaining 73% of their GE vote is not great when you're the obvious challenger.
Here's what the UKIP candidate was saying a few days ago: "If Ukip doesn’t win — something Bickley is admits is very possible — he thinks Thursday’s vote will be a big moment for the party. ‘Either way, we are back in the game because we’ll either win it and it’s a game changer or we’ll get a brilliant second place’. He won’t be drawn on what would count as a success but the local Ukip operation is optimistic about their chances."
The lack of expectation management is staggering. I know some of the polling before the general election showed UKIP winning seats, however, once the people who had not voted previously were removed they did not win the seat. I wonder if UKIP's problem is that they are popular just with a large number of people who do not vote.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
A beautiful day here in London. Perfect weather this weekend for me to finish planting my spring bulbs: allium and tulips and iris.
A touch of hyperbole I think over Oldham: Labour holds onto safe seat with reduced majority 7 months after a general election doesn't strike me as sensational.
Anyway, the reason for my good humour this morning is that I have finally got the all clear re the cancer scare - after a lot of tests etc and monitoring for quite some time, no immediate need to go off to radiotherapy and the rest of it. Various other things wrong that I need to deal with but these are not, fortunately, terminal.
So I am like Tigger on speed today, bouncing around with happiness!!
A big thank you to all PBers for your kind wishes.
Super news. Go and celebrate being freed of the yoke of worry!
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Fantastic news Cyclefree. Thankfully I've never had to personally wait on such results, but I know what a total f*cking nightmare it is waiting for news regarding close relatives. When you get some good news the feeling of relief is overwhelming, and it sure as hell puts life's smaller problems in some perspective.
I hope the weather remains especially warm and sunny for you.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
I wonder how much of this - apart from the good publicity - is a cover for huge sales of a stock that could be worthless in a few years' time as technology marches on?
He would rather bank a billion in real money than rely on a theoretical multiple of that in his own company's shares.
Well the good PR is going down the tubes pretty quickly, because the whole announcement has been found out to be spin. 99% of his fortune, mutter quietly over the course of his whole life, mutter quietly into an LLC that he controls, so not exactly "giving it away" and said LLC can invest for profit, for giving, for LOBBYING...
I don't think as some as suggested the only for the reason of one massive tax dodge. I think it is more that he has been advised that this is the most flexible way in which he can secure and control his fortune during his lifetime and continuing on for his offspring, while being able to give money away as and when he wants. Its win win, other than for the US government.
Agree with the financial structure, but calling it a charity is, as you say, taking it way too far. He was probably trying to engineer comparisons with Bill Gates, who did give billions of dollars to charity.
But this is the company that convinced their human product that they were in fact the customers, of course they are scumbags. But they got the nice baby photos on the front pages, so mission accomplished in terms of the masses.
So long as he can keep the fake charity story in the financial pages, and not have Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert calling him a scumbag, then he will have got away with it.
A beautiful day here in London. Perfect weather this weekend for me to finish planting my spring bulbs: allium and tulips and iris.
A touch of hyperbole I think over Oldham: Labour holds onto safe seat with reduced majority 7 months after a general election doesn't strike me as sensational.
Anyway, the reason for my good humour this morning is that I have finally got the all clear re the cancer scare - after a lot of tests etc and monitoring for quite some time, no immediate need to go off to radiotherapy and the rest of it. Various other things wrong that I need to deal with but these are not, fortunately, terminal.
So I am like Tigger on speed today, bouncing around with happiness!!
A big thank you to all PBers for your kind wishes.
Super news. Go and celebrate being freed of the yoke of worry!
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
Facebook have made some good buys (although don't know about the money paid for) e.g. The kids have to some extent moved on from Twitter etc, they WhatApp, and Facebook bought them. So they have Facebook that is making money and used by the oldies and WhatApp that makes money and is used by the youngsters.
Where as Twitter is used by the likes of journos and is continues to burn money like there is no tomorrow, with no real plan of how to start to make serious income.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
In the Podcast, one of the people mention that 30,000 labour party members have left since JC became Leader. to me that's a very high number to go so quickly. I thought at most members who oppose him would just stop renewing their membership, or may even stay in and stay for there chance to vote in the next leadership election.
Has anybody else herd this number, or could they point me to any link/reference?
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
Initially it was a superior algorithm, based on uni research. The trick was to rank results based on how many other sites linked to the site in question (this provides a kind of popularity factor which seemed to chime with what people were looking for). The ranking ability was so much better than anyone else Google quickly became popular.
Their next trick was to charge for adverts and to introduce a sort of bidding process to buy adverts in with the search rank lists for a particular keyword. So getting your business included when people type 'buy a new car' into the search engine was quickly bid up to a high price. Google was a pure money making machine from that point.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
A beautiful day here in London. Perfect weather this weekend for me to finish planting my spring bulbs: allium and tulips and iris.
A touch of hyperbole I think over Oldham: Labour holds onto safe seat with reduced majority 7 months after a general election doesn't strike me as sensational.
Anyway, the reason for my good humour this morning is that I have finally got the all clear re the cancer scare - after a lot of tests etc and monitoring for quite some time, no immediate need to go off to radiotherapy and the rest of it. Various other things wrong that I need to deal with but these are not, fortunately, terminal.
So I am like Tigger on speed today, bouncing around with happiness!!
A big thank you to all PBers for your kind wishes.
A beautiful day here in London. Perfect weather this weekend for me to finish planting my spring bulbs: allium and tulips and iris.
A touch of hyperbole I think over Oldham: Labour holds onto safe seat with reduced majority 7 months after a general election doesn't strike me as sensational.
Anyway, the reason for my good humour this morning is that I have finally got the all clear re the cancer scare - after a lot of tests etc and monitoring for quite some time, no immediate need to go off to radiotherapy and the rest of it. Various other things wrong that I need to deal with but these are not, fortunately, terminal.
So I am like Tigger on speed today, bouncing around with happiness!!
A big thank you to all PBers for your kind wishes.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
Initially it was a superior algorithm, based on uni research. The trick was to rank results based on how many other sites linked to the site in question (this provides a kind of popularity factor which seemed to chime with what people were looking for). The ranking ability was so much better than anyone else Google quickly became popular.
Their next trick was to charge for adverts and to introduce a sort of bidding process to buy adverts in with the search rank lists for a particular keyword. So getting your business included when people type 'buy a new car' into the search engine was quickly bid up to a high price. Google was a pure money making machine from that point.
It is still superior search algorithms. Nobody else has come close in terms of speed, efficiency and accuracy. Does help if you have basically unlimited funds and the brightest minds working on the problem.
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
There were two factors. When they started, a search engine called Alta Vista was the most used, but it had two big problems.
The first was that it came up with hundreds of garbage results. For example, if you did a search on a company's name you'd get zillions of hits of CVs of people who'd once worked with the company or used its products. Google's algorithms stripped out the junk and gave you the most relevant results.
The other really, really smart thing Google did was not have any adverts on the search page. All of their competitors at the time had really cluttered pages full of blinking ads and other garbage, because that was how they got their revenues. To this day, Google's search page remains really clean. Of course Google needed a lot of financial backing to be able to afford to build their systems with very little revenue to start with.
He will be back, just like his 27 other different incarnations. I wonder what made the BBC think he was for real? I mean he claimed to be a BBC employee of all things, you would have thought a quick call to HR would have revealed if that was true or not. And a quick google would have told them he has a very "unreliable" past online. Tommy Robinson clocked him when he was getting trolled by him, so should they.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
One thing I recall when someone showed me google for the first time was how fast it seemed. Internet searches in the late 90s were rather ponderous, at least on the systems I was using... Ask Jeeves was particularly slow, but Yahoo search wasn't especially fast either. When I started using the web, I think I would often wait 30 seconds or more to get my results (or perhaps it just felt that way).
For regular web searches I switched to google pretty quickly, particularly since the quality of its results was so much better, though I sometimes found that Ask Jeeves gave a relevant and interesting result that google didn't pick up on (though like many other search engines, its results also contained some utter junk). In fact what was so much better about google's results was that there was so little crud in the results. Even on quite important topics, other search engines would often throw you the odd thing that was utterly irrelevant, and quite a lot of pages that were low-quality personal sites that had been chucked onto a web-ring somewhere. (Heh, are there still "web rings"?)
For a couple of years, google didn't have much in the way of media searches, and I used Alta Vista for images and (particularly) videos.
I'm off to a wedding near Brighton of someone who has played a huge part in the development of PB. I think he'd like to remain anonymous soI won't reveal his posting identity.
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
There were two factors. When they started, a search engine called Alta Vista was the most used, but it had two big problems.
The first was that it came up with hundreds of garbage results. For example, if you did a search on a company's name you'd get zillions of hits of CVs of people who'd once worked with the company or used its products. Google's algorithms stripped out the junk and gave you the most relevant results.
The other really, really smart thing Google did was not have any adverts on the search page. All of their competitors at the time had really cluttered pages full of blinking ads and other garbage, because that was how they got their revenues. To this day, Google's search page remains really clean. Of course Google needed a lot of financial backing to be able to afford to build their systems with very little revenue to start with.
If I remember correctly another ingenious thing they did was developed their algorithms to run on low cost self-built custom hardware with plenty of redundancy, that could easily be swapped in and out. All the other companies at the time were spending a fortune on hardware and they had big issues with outages and upgrading.
A beautiful day here in London. Perfect weather this weekend for me to finish planting my spring bulbs: allium and tulips and iris.
A touch of hyperbole I think over Oldham: Labour holds onto safe seat with reduced majority 7 months after a general election doesn't strike me as sensational.
Anyway, the reason for my good humour this morning is that I have finally got the all clear re the cancer scare - after a lot of tests etc and monitoring for quite some time, no immediate need to go off to radiotherapy and the rest of it. Various other things wrong that I need to deal with but these are not, fortunately, terminal.
So I am like Tigger on speed today, bouncing around with happiness!!
A big thank you to all PBers for your kind wishes.
I'm very pleased to hear it.
Seconded by all else here, I should think. Long may you continuare a rimbalzare.
I'm off to a wedding near Brighton of someone who has played a huge part in the development of PB. I think he'd like to remain anonymous soI won't reveal his posting identity.
Never mind Oldham West - here's the result we have all been waiting for. Bognor Regis Town Council ( Marine Ward): LD 265, Lab 216, Con 107, Green 25 - Lib Dem HOLD
It's not just PageRank. It's one thing to build a better search engine than the competition, you also need to do so economically, to achieve high performance and reliability, at lower cost.
Google's real expertise is on the systems side. They have the best infrastructure going. When they occasionally talk about what they have done we often find that Google was doing the "new hot thing" years ago at a scale that exceeds anything anyone else has done. They have done that with custom servers, custom network switches, software defined networks, containerisation, distributed file systems, distributed processing, and on and on. Usually there's a caveat that the stuff they are now talking or writing about is the old system, not the one now in production.
I'm off to a wedding near Brighton of someone who has played a huge part in the development of PB. I think he'd like to remain anonymous soI won't reveal his posting identity.
Lovely December day here in Sussex
All the very best for your nuptials - you know who you are (even if we don't!)
It's not just PageRank. It's one thing to build a better search engine than the competition, you also need to do so economically, to achieve high performance and reliability, at lower cost.
Google's real expertise is on the systems side. They have the best infrastructure going. When they occasionally talk about what they have done we often find that Google was doing the "new hot thing" years ago at a scale that exceeds anything anyone else has done. They have done that with custom servers, custom network switches, software defined networks, containerisation, distributed file systems, distributed processing, and on and on. Usually there's a caveat that the stuff they are now talking or writing about is the old system, not the one now in production.
Their custom MapReduce technology was genius, and they are already onto something even bigger and better called Cloud DataFlow.
Google being a search engine company is a bit like describing Amazon as a book seller...
I'm off to a wedding near Brighton of someone who has played a huge part in the development of PB. I think he'd like to remain anonymous soI won't reveal his posting identity.
I'm off to a wedding near Brighton of someone who has played a huge part in the development of PB. I think he'd like to remain anonymous soI won't reveal his posting identity.
Lovely December day here in Sussex
Enjoy and congratulations to the poster whoever they are. I am going to a wedding myself next week in Mauritius flying out tomorrow
I'm off to a wedding near Brighton of someone who has played a huge part in the development of PB. I think he'd like to remain anonymous soI won't reveal his posting identity.
Lovely December day here in Sussex
All the very best for your nuptials - you know who you are (even if we don't!)
A beautiful day here in London. Perfect weather this weekend for me to finish planting my spring bulbs: allium and tulips and iris.
A touch of hyperbole I think over Oldham: Labour holds onto safe seat with reduced majority 7 months after a general election doesn't strike me as sensational.
Anyway, the reason for my good humour this morning is that I have finally got the all clear re the cancer scare - after a lot of tests etc and monitoring for quite some time, no immediate need to go off to radiotherapy and the rest of it. Various other things wrong that I need to deal with but these are not, fortunately, terminal.
So I am like Tigger on speed today, bouncing around with happiness!!
A big thank you to all PBers for your kind wishes.
Well, it's at least a personality of some kind, which a few past winners were missing.
The SPOTY shortlist has a ghastly amount of political correctness already. Who has had more "impact", Jamie Vardy or Jessica Bronze ?
Lucy Bronze isn't even a good choice if you must have a womens footballer.
Kim Little should have been nominated two years ago, possibly last year. Definitely overdue. Jenny Beattie is the best defender the UK has ever produced and competitive for best in the world, Bronze isn't fit to lace her boots.
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
There were two factors. When they started, a search engine called Alta Vista was the most used, but it had two big problems.
The first was that it came up with hundreds of garbage results. For example, if you did a search on a company's name you'd get zillions of hits of CVs of people who'd once worked with the company or used its products. Google's algorithms stripped out the junk and gave you the most relevant results.
The other really, really smart thing Google did was not have any adverts on the search page. All of their competitors at the time had really cluttered pages full of blinking ads and other garbage, because that was how they got their revenues. To this day, Google's search page remains really clean. Of course Google needed a lot of financial backing to be able to afford to build their systems with very little revenue to start with.
If I remember correctly another ingenious thing they did was developed their algorithms to run on low cost self-built custom hardware with plenty of redundancy, that could easily be swapped in and out. All the other companies at the time were spending a fortune on hardware and they had big issues with outages and upgrading.
They did but that was not the clever part, which was they worked out how to split up their data analysis onto thousands of those commodity machines running in parallel (google mapreduce).
A lot of people got excited because someone, who usually knows the time of day politically, said it was much closer than we all expected it to be
As it turns out, he got this one wrong. All that has happened is the opposition have comfortably held one of their safer seats, as most people expected they would. I wouldn't think this is a portent for future by elections, unless they are in extremely similar seats
The stupidity of extrapolating too much from one piece of form is on show I fear
Good interview by the Guardian with Jim McMahon from 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jun/26/jim-mcmahon-leader-oldham-council Easy to see that he had a huge personal vote in the area as someone who was young but cared about the place where his kids were growing up. He also got cross-party support for his reforms of the council.
Yep - a really strong addition to the Labour parliamentary party. The Corbynistas will clearly grow to hate him, but he has a very strong mandate.
Corbyn went up to Oldham to congratulate him and it was undoubtedly a boost for the leader after a torrid few weeks so I suspect Corbynistas will forgive him, McMahon even said he opposed airstrikes in Syria
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
There were two factors. When they started, a search engine called Alta Vista was the most used, but it had two big problems.
The first was that it came up with hundreds of garbage results. For example, if you did a search on a company's name you'd get zillions of hits of CVs of people who'd once worked with the company or used its products. Google's algorithms stripped out the junk and gave you the most relevant results.
The other really, really smart thing Google did was not have any adverts on the search page. All of their competitors at the time had really cluttered pages full of blinking ads and other garbage, because that was how they got their revenues. To this day, Google's search page remains really clean. Of course Google needed a lot of financial backing to be able to afford to build their systems with very little revenue to start with.
If I remember correctly another ingenious thing they did was developed their algorithms to run on low cost self-built custom hardware with plenty of redundancy, that could easily be swapped in and out. All the other companies at the time were spending a fortune on hardware and they had big issues with outages and upgrading.
They did but that was not the clever part, which was they worked out how to split up their data analysis onto thousands of those commodity machines running in parallel (google mapreduce).
If I remember correctly another ingenious thing they did was developed their algorithms to run on low cost self-built custom hardware with plenty of redundancy, that could easily be swapped in and out. All the other companies at the time were spending a fortune on hardware and they had big issues with outages and upgrading.
Yes, a web server once meant cutting a very big cheque to a company like Sun for an Enterprise class server, and all sorts of expensive services contracts to keep it running. Now a web server is typically a stripped down x86 box that is barely touched from the day it arrives to the day it is carted away when the replacement turns up.
It's not just PageRank. It's one thing to build a better search engine than the competition, you also need to do so economically, to achieve high performance and reliability, at lower cost.
Google's real expertise is on the systems side. They have the best infrastructure going. When they occasionally talk about what they have done we often find that Google was doing the "new hot thing" years ago at a scale that exceeds anything anyone else has done. They have done that with custom servers, custom network switches, software defined networks, containerisation, distributed file systems, distributed processing, and on and on. Usually there's a caveat that the stuff they are now talking or writing about is the old system, not the one now in production.
Their custom MapReduce technology was genius, and they are already onto something even bigger and better called Cloud DataFlow.
Google being a search engine company is a bit like describing Amazon as a book seller...
A beautiful day here in London. Perfect weather this weekend for me to finish planting my spring bulbs: allium and tulips and iris.
A touch of hyperbole I think over Oldham: Labour holds onto safe seat with reduced majority 7 months after a general election doesn't strike me as sensational.
Anyway, the reason for my good humour this morning is that I have finally got the all clear re the cancer scare - after a lot of tests etc and monitoring for quite some time, no immediate need to go off to radiotherapy and the rest of it. Various other things wrong that I need to deal with but these are not, fortunately, terminal.
So I am like Tigger on speed today, bouncing around with happiness!!
A big thank you to all PBers for your kind wishes.
Super news. Go and celebrate being freed of the yoke of worry!
Excellent news Cyclefree, enjoy the Tigger experience and celebrate!.
Just keep those incisive and thought provoking posts coming in!
If I remember correctly another ingenious thing they did was developed their algorithms to run on low cost self-built custom hardware with plenty of redundancy, that could easily be swapped in and out. All the other companies at the time were spending a fortune on hardware and they had big issues with outages and upgrading.
Yes, a web server once meant cutting a very big cheque to a company like Sun for an Enterprise class server, and all sorts of expensive services contracts to keep it running. Now a web server is typically a stripped down x86 box that is barely touched from the day it arrives to the day it is carted away when the replacement turns up.
Summary: twitter doesn't understand its own product at all.
That was a good read, thanks. These 'social media' companies are all individual passing fads, very few have made any money because as soon as they try and make money by annoying the users, they all move on to the next and newest app. Even Facebook are not adding users in major markets any more, most of the kids have moved to Snapchat and iMessage. Twitter has 300 million users yet lost $500 million last year!
On Google, as others have said they were simply better at understanding search than anyone else at the time, had some serious brains working on the algorithms and data centre side, while deliberately decluttering the search page. Their search results page still says how long the search took, right at the top.
I'm off to a wedding near Brighton of someone who has played a huge part in the development of PB. I think he'd like to remain anonymous soI won't reveal his posting identity.
Lovely December day here in Sussex
Is Mark Senior marrying Plato?
I guess that's a No? PS shethatshallbeobeyed pointed out that on ITV3 "Loose Women" just now was some "famous" dog called Tuna or similar. real pug ugly dog.
It's not just PageRank. It's one thing to build a better search engine than the competition, you also need to do so economically, to achieve high performance and reliability, at lower cost.
Google's real expertise is on the systems side. They have the best infrastructure going. When they occasionally talk about what they have done we often find that Google was doing the "new hot thing" years ago at a scale that exceeds anything anyone else has done. They have done that with custom servers, custom network switches, software defined networks, containerisation, distributed file systems, distributed processing, and on and on. Usually there's a caveat that the stuff they are now talking or writing about is the old system, not the one now in production.
Their custom MapReduce technology was genius, and they are already onto something even bigger and better called Cloud DataFlow.
Google being a search engine company is a bit like describing Amazon as a book seller...
Amazon is as much a technology company as Google. Despite all the screams of tax avoidance, selling s##t online doesn't make them any real money and interestingly they are now really pushing the "fulfilled by Amazon" and placing a lot of investment into the technology of logistics side of things i.e deliver in 30 mins.
I can foresee Amazon just becoming the "enabler" / technology partner, and let others deal with the buying / selling / manufacture from China.
And I wanted to say how impressive the care from the doctors has been - both at the GP and at hospital - as well as the administrative staff. Really no complaints at all. I know it's only anecdotal and others have different experiences but credit where it's due.
Mind you, whenever I'm asked my profession I tell them "Litigation Lawyer" so that might have something to do with it!
I had to see the neurologist at one point; he said that I had to reduce stress and overwork. Then he asked me what I did. I told him. And we both had a good long laugh!!
And now back to work - while listening to the music from Suite Francaise - am trying to learn the piano part.
Summary: twitter doesn't understand its own product at all.
That was a good read, thanks. These 'social media' companies are all individual passing fads, very few have made any money because as soon as they try and make money by annoying the users, they all move on to the next and newest app. Even Facebook are not adding users in major markets any more, most of the kids have moved to Snapchat and iMessage. Twitter has 300 million users yet lost $500 million last year!
On Google, as others have said they were simply better at understanding search than anyone else at the time, had some serious brains working on the algorithms and data centre side, while deliberately decluttering the search page. Their search results page still says how long the search took, right at the top.
This is where WhatApp was so genius. Only 20 or so employees to start with, no marketing, very simple website, basically very low cost startup. Their business model was always 99c app, and they were profitable basically from very early on.
If it didn't work, they were never going to burn mega bucks nor work on the hope they one day it might become big and/or somehow work out how to make it pay 5 years down the line i.e twitter.
It's not just PageRank. It's one thing to build a better search engine than the competition, you also need to do so economically, to achieve high performance and reliability, at lower cost.
Google's real expertise is on the systems side. They have the best infrastructure going. When they occasionally talk about what they have done we often find that Google was doing the "new hot thing" years ago at a scale that exceeds anything anyone else has done. They have done that with custom servers, custom network switches, software defined networks, containerisation, distributed file systems, distributed processing, and on and on. Usually there's a caveat that the stuff they are now talking or writing about is the old system, not the one now in production.
Their custom MapReduce technology was genius, and they are already onto something even bigger and better called Cloud DataFlow.
Google being a search engine company is a bit like describing Amazon as a book seller...
Yes, AWS is quite amazing compared to where the world of web hosting was only a few years ago - especially in scalability. Remember when news websites used to crash or slow to a crawl when a major event happened? That that doesn't happen any more is down to AWS and MS Azure offering web servers by the hour in almost every major city in the world.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
There have already been some excellent answers, but here are mine about why it became dominant. Note: these apply to the very early days.
1) Speed (1). They produced results fast. 2) Accuracy. The results were at least as good as other web engines. 3) Speed (2). Most search engines came with pages full of adverts, images and the horrid 'portal' concept. These took an age to download on modems, and were often buggy, crashing browsers.
I think the third was most important. When designing any computer interface, it is a question of working out what the user wants to do, and letting them do it without you interfering too much. If a user wants to search for something, they don't generally don't want to be blitzed by a page containing loads of pictures that delay the process as they take minutes to download. They want a search box.
And that is all they want.
Google's real initial skill was in promising investors they could monetise a nearly-blank webpage. No-one else thought that was possible.
It's not just PageRank. It's one thing to build a better search engine than the competition, you also need to do so economically, to achieve high performance and reliability, at lower cost.
Google's real expertise is on the systems side. They have the best infrastructure going. When they occasionally talk about what they have done we often find that Google was doing the "new hot thing" years ago at a scale that exceeds anything anyone else has done. They have done that with custom servers, custom network switches, software defined networks, containerisation, distributed file systems, distributed processing, and on and on. Usually there's a caveat that the stuff they are now talking or writing about is the old system, not the one now in production.
Their custom MapReduce technology was genius, and they are already onto something even bigger and better called Cloud DataFlow.
Google being a search engine company is a bit like describing Amazon as a book seller...
Yes, AWS is quite amazing compared to where the world of web hosting was only a few years ago - especially in scalability. Remember when news websites used to crash or slow to a crawl when a major event happened? That that doesn't happen any more is down to AWS and MS Azure offering web servers by the hour in almost every major city in the world.
Netflix wouldn't be the service it is today without AWS. Can you imagine trying to handle that much data....I believe recently Netflix shut down their last datacenter that they ran themselves, instead letting AWS do all the work for them.
On Google, as others have said they were simply better at understanding search than anyone else at the time, had some serious brains working on the algorithms and data centre side, while deliberately decluttering the search page. Their search results page still says how long the search took, right at the top.
From a user experience point of view, along with the better quality of the links found (generally; this actually improved quite noticeably over the first few years I used it, from "somewhat better" to its competitors to "massively better") and the clean interface, it was the speed that startled me when I first used google.
My memory from the 90s is that Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Lycos all took ages, and felt it. Does anyone remember how long it actually was? Somewhere between 20 seconds and a minute for a typical search is my gut feeling, but my memory might be exaggerating.
These days the time taken to search is virtually irrelevant.
Summary: twitter doesn't understand its own product at all.
That was a good read, thanks. These 'social media' companies are all individual passing fads, very few have made any money because as soon as they try and make money by annoying the users, they all move on to the next and newest app. Even Facebook are not adding users in major markets any more, most of the kids have moved to Snapchat and iMessage. Twitter has 300 million users yet lost $500 million last year!
On Google, as others have said they were simply better at understanding search than anyone else at the time, had some serious brains working on the algorithms and data centre side, while deliberately decluttering the search page. Their search results page still says how long the search took, right at the top.
This is where WhatApp was so genius. Only 20 or so employees to start with, no marketing, very simple website, basically very low cost startup. Their business model was always 99c app, and they were profitable basically from very early on.
If it didn't work, they were never going to burn mega bucks nor work on the hope they one day it might become big and/or somehow work out how to make it pay 5 years down the line i.e twitter.
Yes, and they succeeded in that they got bought out by Facebook for a pile of money.
Whatsapp is just a wrapper around the open XMPP protocol, so their problem is that you or I (or Jihadi Ahmed, to make the point - this is a politics blog!) could do the same thing tomorrow with half a dozen coders. The value is in the user numbers and once they try to exploit with tracking or advertising (or government backdoors) then the users will happily move to the next chat app.
These days is there anybody in the West really doing search other than Google and Microsoft? AFAIK all the others out there are just metasearch / have deals to use either Google or Bing.
On Google, as others have said they were simply better at understanding search than anyone else at the time, had some serious brains working on the algorithms and data centre side, while deliberately decluttering the search page. Their search results page still says how long the search took, right at the top.
From a user experience point of view, along with the better quality of the links found (generally; this actually improved quite noticeably over the first few years I used it, from "somewhat better" to its competitors to "massively better") and the clean interface, it was the speed that startled me when I first used google.
My memory from the 90s is that Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Lycos all took ages, and felt it. Does anyone remember how long it actually was? Somewhere between 20 seconds and a minute for a typical search is my gut feeling, but my memory might be exaggerating.
These days the time taken to search is virtually irrelevant.
You're not misremembering. The company I was working for at the time was helping develop a web browser. We did loads of research into timings and other metrics. Some pages were awful, but I can't remember which was the worst sinner.
Another example were pages requiring megabytes of memory to store them, when the average computer might have had 32 or 64 MB of RAM. CSS helped there a little.
BTW, Google are still really keen on efficiency and speed. It matters to them.
Summary: twitter doesn't understand its own product at all.
That was a good read, thanks. These 'social media' companies are all individual passing fads, very few have made any money because as soon as they try and make money by annoying the users, they all move on to the next and newest app. Even Facebook are not adding users in major markets any more, most of the kids have moved to Snapchat and iMessage. Twitter has 300 million users yet lost $500 million last year!
On Google, as others have said they were simply better at understanding search than anyone else at the time, had some serious brains working on the algorithms and data centre side, while deliberately decluttering the search page. Their search results page still says how long the search took, right at the top.
This is where WhatApp was so genius. Only 20 or so employees to start with, no marketing, very simple website, basically very low cost startup. Their business model was always 99c app, and they were profitable basically from very early on.
If it didn't work, they were never going to burn mega bucks nor work on the hope they one day it might become big and/or somehow work out how to make it pay 5 years down the line i.e twitter.
Yes, and they succeeded in that they got bought out by Facebook for a pile of money.
Whatsapp is just a wrapper around the open XMPP protocol, so their problem is that you or I (or Jihadi Ahmed, to make the point - this is a politics blog!) could do the same thing tomorrow with half a dozen coders. The value is in the user numbers and once they try to exploit with tracking or advertising (or government backdoors) then the users will happily move to the next chat app.
Well we now know Jihadi Ahmed is now using Telegram. If I remember correctly the innovation that WhatApp had, which wasn't offered at the time and got a lot of people on board, was the simple integration. It went through your phone book and connected everybody and then if you added anybody either via phone number or WhatApp contact it linked everything up auto-magically.
Until then you had this tedious multiple contact lists for skype, then another for MSN Messenger, than another for AIM, etc etc etc.
I am surprised Facebook hasn't integrated WhatApp into Facebook, you still have their crap chat / messenger technology, which on IoS requires you to switch to another bloody app.
1) if you are reading this, absolutely delighted at your news. 2) if you are reading this, what on earth are you reading this for? Get back out in the garden!
Netflix wouldn't be the service it is today without AWS. Can you imagine trying to handle that much data....I believe recently Netflix shut down their last datacenter that they ran themselves, instead letting AWS do all the work for them.
And Netflix is huge, IIRC at peak times they account for 40% of all US internet traffic, whereas web surfing in total is something like 10%. It is mind boggling that Netflix can buy all technological capability "as a service".
I'm off to a wedding near Brighton of someone who has played a huge part in the development of PB. I think he'd like to remain anonymous soI won't reveal his posting identity.
I'm off to a wedding near Brighton of someone who has played a huge part in the development of PB. I think he'd like to remain anonymous soI won't reveal his posting identity.
Lovely December day here in Sussex
All the very best for your nuptials - you know who you are (even if we don't!)
Netflix wouldn't be the service it is today without AWS. Can you imagine trying to handle that much data....I believe recently Netflix shut down their last datacenter that they ran themselves, instead letting AWS do all the work for them.
And Netflix is huge, IIRC at peak times they account for 40% of all US internet traffic, whereas web surfing in total is something like 10%. It is mind boggling that Netflix can buy all technological capability "as a service".
Wonder how much that is worth to Amazon's bottom line? A lot more than reselling s##t from China at razor thin margins I would think.
Good interview by the Guardian with Jim McMahon from 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jun/26/jim-mcmahon-leader-oldham-council Easy to see that he had a huge personal vote in the area as someone who was young but cared about the place where his kids were growing up. He also got cross-party support for his reforms of the council.
Yep - a really strong addition to the Labour parliamentary party. The Corbynistas will clearly grow to hate him, but he has a very strong mandate.
Corbyn went up to Oldham to congratulate him and it was undoubtedly a boost for the leader after a torrid few weeks so I suspect Corbynistas will forgive him, McMahon even said he opposed airstrikes in Syria
As I said last night, having seen a rather silly photo, I am quite pleased to see UKIPs expectations stuffed. Once again we see people actively voting against or restraining themselves to vote for UKIP. Given the low turn out there were clearly Labour abstentions but they chose to ignore UKIP as an alternative. UKIP has lost its way, cosily talking to itself; it has turned from an anti EU campaigning organisation (as set up by Wheeler) into a blatantly anti immigrant anti colour party and intolerant of all sorts of other things as well. Funny really to think that it has been taken over by entryists. Comfortingly this was nothing like a tory target seat (as witness the GE result) and Farage making it a referendum on Corbyn has done the tories a favour. One day Farage will take a note of all the referendums on him.
NYT on the case of Zuckerberg tax planning, I mean giving his fortune away to himself. They dissect his latest spin about how it isn't tax efficient to do so and the claim that they will pay capital gains.
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
Facebook should be fine as long as they keep innovating. As you say, Twitter's probably a different matter.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
Genuine question, why did Google beat out all the other search engines (in the West anyway)? What about it, or the circumstances, led them to becoming the dominant force?
Are there better search engines now? Have others caught up?
Comments
In addition, I've just received a book on Victorian warships that a gent on here recommended.
Do you get the impression I like engineering ?
(*) And you too, dear reader, can read it here:
https://archive.org/details/stevensonbell1824stev
I don't think as some as suggested the only for the reason of one massive tax dodge. I think it is more that he has been advised that this is the most flexible way in which he can secure and control his fortune during his lifetime and continuing on for his offspring, while being able to give money away as and when he wants. Its win win, other than for the US government.
It's actually slightly different from serial rebels like Corbyn (or now the anti-Corbyn brigade) who might rebel like they were independent but are clear they want to change the mind of the party and get it going in a new direction, they are still part of the movement, they believe in whipping and so on, they just disagree with the leadership. This seems like saying she doesn't care about the party at all, it was just a vehicle to get elected. Which is probably true of quite a few MPs in all liklihood, so at least she's honest about it.
The BBC’s governing body will not investigate accusations that Alan Yentob tried to influence the BBC’s coverage of Kids Company, because now he has stepped down as creative director it is “not proportionate, appropriate or cost effective”.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/dec/03/yentob-wont-face-bbc-trust-probe-over-kids-company-as-he-has-quit
Arhhhh now it is becoming clear...What a f##king stitch up. He still remains working there for £180k a year, still has his £6.5 million pension, and no investigation into his behaviour.
It is like all those higher up involved in Jimmy Saville scandal...just conveniently shifted around the deckchairs.
What do you actually spend it on?
Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.
edit: I still remember when I first head of Google. Another engineer told me of a brilliant search engine that might just render fast in our browser ...
Just £39,999,999,970 to go.
I hope the weather remains especially warm and sunny for you.
But this is the company that convinced their human product that they were in fact the customers, of course they are scumbags. But they got the nice baby photos on the front pages, so mission accomplished in terms of the masses.
So long as he can keep the fake charity story in the financial pages, and not have Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert calling him a scumbag, then he will have got away with it.
Where as Twitter is used by the likes of journos and is continues to burn money like there is no tomorrow, with no real plan of how to start to make serious income.
Has anybody else herd this number, or could they point me to any link/reference?
You'll just make your original problem worse......
Their next trick was to charge for adverts and to introduce a sort of bidding process to buy adverts in with the search rank lists for a particular keyword. So getting your business included when people type 'buy a new car' into the search engine was quickly bid up to a high price. Google was a pure money making machine from that point.
He will have enjoyed taking the BBC for a ride.
http://www.davidhumeinstitute.com/snp-will-nationalise-forth-bridge-privatise-maintenance/
And they were able to do it without throwing stupid ads for foot cream at you, which is what everyone else was doing at the time.
https://www.baekdal.com/opinion/not-even-twitter-understands-twitter/
Summary: twitter doesn't understand its own product at all.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/sports-personality-of-the-year/12032967/BBC-urged-to-drop-Tyson-Fury-from-SPOTY-shortlist-over-homophobic-and-misogynist-comments.html
BBC urged to drop Tyson Fury from SPOTY shortlist over homophobic and misogynist comments
Boxer said fellow Sports Personality contender Jessica Ennis-Hill "looks quite fit when she's got a dress on" and believes homosexuality should be criminalised
The first was that it came up with hundreds of garbage results. For example, if you did a search on a company's name you'd get zillions of hits of CVs of people who'd once worked with the company or used its products. Google's algorithms stripped out the junk and gave you the most relevant results.
The other really, really smart thing Google did was not have any adverts on the search page. All of their competitors at the time had really cluttered pages full of blinking ads and other garbage, because that was how they got their revenues. To this day, Google's search page remains really clean. Of course Google needed a lot of financial backing to be able to afford to build their systems with very little revenue to start with.
For regular web searches I switched to google pretty quickly, particularly since the quality of its results was so much better, though I sometimes found that Ask Jeeves gave a relevant and interesting result that google didn't pick up on (though like many other search engines, its results also contained some utter junk). In fact what was so much better about google's results was that there was so little crud in the results. Even on quite important topics, other search engines would often throw you the odd thing that was utterly irrelevant, and quite a lot of pages that were low-quality personal sites that had been chucked onto a web-ring somewhere. (Heh, are there still "web rings"?)
For a couple of years, google didn't have much in the way of media searches, and I used Alta Vista for images and (particularly) videos.
Lovely December day here in Sussex
Bugger Bognor.....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-35000700
Google's real expertise is on the systems side. They have the best infrastructure going. When they occasionally talk about what they have done we often find that Google was doing the "new hot thing" years ago at a scale that exceeds anything anyone else has done. They have done that with custom servers, custom network switches, software defined networks, containerisation, distributed file systems, distributed processing, and on and on. Usually there's a caveat that the stuff they are now talking or writing about is the old system, not the one now in production.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/met-sacks-103-rogue-police-officers-in-two-years-a3129811.html
Google being a search engine company is a bit like describing Amazon as a book seller...
Kim Little should have been nominated two years ago, possibly last year. Definitely overdue. Jenny Beattie is the best defender the UK has ever produced and competitive for best in the world, Bronze isn't fit to lace her boots.
A lot of people got excited because someone, who usually knows the time of day politically, said it was much closer than we all expected it to be
As it turns out, he got this one wrong. All that has happened is the opposition have comfortably held one of their safer seats, as most people expected they would. I wouldn't think this is a portent for future by elections, unless they are in extremely similar seats
The stupidity of extrapolating too much from one piece of form is on show I fear
http://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-q3-revenue-up-78-percent-to-2-08-billion/
Just keep those incisive and thought provoking posts coming in!
I thought your contributions on Wednesday were spot on and am glad to hear your news.
Stay well.
Can you imagine that now?!
On Google, as others have said they were simply better at understanding search than anyone else at the time, had some serious brains working on the algorithms and data centre side, while deliberately decluttering the search page. Their search results page still says how long the search took, right at the top.
PS shethatshallbeobeyed pointed out that on ITV3 "Loose Women" just now was some "famous" dog called Tuna or similar. real pug ugly dog.
I can foresee Amazon just becoming the "enabler" / technology partner, and let others deal with the buying / selling / manufacture from China.
Mind you, whenever I'm asked my profession I tell them "Litigation Lawyer" so that might have something to do with it!
I had to see the neurologist at one point; he said that I had to reduce stress and overwork. Then he asked me what I did. I told him. And we both had a good long laugh!!
And now back to work - while listening to the music from Suite Francaise - am trying to learn the piano part.
If it didn't work, they were never going to burn mega bucks nor work on the hope they one day it might become big and/or somehow work out how to make it pay 5 years down the line i.e twitter.
1) Speed (1). They produced results fast.
2) Accuracy. The results were at least as good as other web engines.
3) Speed (2). Most search engines came with pages full of adverts, images and the horrid 'portal' concept. These took an age to download on modems, and were often buggy, crashing browsers.
I think the third was most important. When designing any computer interface, it is a question of working out what the user wants to do, and letting them do it without you interfering too much. If a user wants to search for something, they don't generally don't want to be blitzed by a page containing loads of pictures that delay the process as they take minutes to download. They want a search box.
And that is all they want.
Google's real initial skill was in promising investors they could monetise a nearly-blank webpage. No-one else thought that was possible.
Think different.
My memory from the 90s is that Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Lycos all took ages, and felt it. Does anyone remember how long it actually was? Somewhere between 20 seconds and a minute for a typical search is my gut feeling, but my memory might be exaggerating.
These days the time taken to search is virtually irrelevant.
Whatsapp is just a wrapper around the open XMPP protocol, so their problem is that you or I (or Jihadi Ahmed, to make the point - this is a politics blog!) could do the same thing tomorrow with half a dozen coders. The value is in the user numbers and once they try to exploit with tracking or advertising (or government backdoors) then the users will happily move to the next chat app.
blackburn63 said:
"...Humility costs nothing."
Plato replied:
"Yet out of your price range, apparently."
Another example were pages requiring megabytes of memory to store them, when the average computer might have had 32 or 64 MB of RAM. CSS helped there a little.
BTW, Google are still really keen on efficiency and speed. It matters to them.
Until then you had this tedious multiple contact lists for skype, then another for MSN Messenger, than another for AIM, etc etc etc.
I am surprised Facebook hasn't integrated WhatApp into Facebook, you still have their crap chat / messenger technology, which on IoS requires you to switch to another bloody app.
1) if you are reading this, absolutely delighted at your news.
2) if you are reading this, what on earth are you reading this for? Get back out in the garden!
Once again we see people actively voting against or restraining themselves to vote for UKIP. Given the low turn out there were clearly Labour abstentions but they chose to ignore UKIP as an alternative.
UKIP has lost its way, cosily talking to itself; it has turned from an anti EU campaigning organisation (as set up by Wheeler) into a blatantly anti immigrant anti colour party and intolerant of all sorts of other things as well.
Funny really to think that it has been taken over by entryists.
Comfortingly this was nothing like a tory target seat (as witness the GE result) and Farage making it a referendum on Corbyn has done the tories a favour. One day Farage will take a note of all the referendums on him.
Glad to see there is some constancy in this ever changing world.