politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The latest PB/Polling Matters Podcast – Reflections on Oldh

Excellent news re Cyclefree too.

I imagine a few of local faithful are wondering why they worked so hard for someone keen to dump them 6 months later.

Tissue_Price said:

Plato_Says said:

I wonder what her local Party thinks of this newbie http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12032792/Tory-MP-who-branded-George-Osborne-too-smooth-would-prefer-to-be-independent.html

I'm all for independent mindedness, this seems a bit rich.

DESELECT THE WITCH

Plato_Says said:

Have you seen Lighthouse Stevensons on BBC4? Good docu on engineering challeges and dynasty.

JosiasJessop said:

For anyone not bored by it, here's the New Civil Engineer's take on the Firth Bridge problems:
http://www.nce.co.uk/news/structures/forth-bridge-defective-member-previously-deemed-not-highly-stressed/8692911.article

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.

Do you get the impression I like engineering ?

(*) And you too, dear reader, can read it here:
https://archive.org/details/stevensonbell1824stev

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html

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.

JosiasJessop said:

Dair said:

JosiasJessop said:

Dair said:

Sandpit said:

Dair said:

TGOHF said:

SNP can't even keep the bridges open

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-35001277

Yeah they should be spending money on replacing this aging relic.

Of course that would take years, it's a shame they lack the foresight to predict problems and start something back in, say, 2011, to replace it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensferry_Crossing

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelwall_Viaduct

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.

http://www.transportscotland.gov.uk/road/forth-replacement-crossing/forth-replacement-crossing-study-2007

Wouldn't a tunnel need to be very, very steep given the geology? Or very long and expensive to even out the gradient.

As an aside, something I found whilst looking for this: there was once a tunnel under the Forth:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/scotland-blog/2014/apr/30/scotland-firthofforth-coal

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!

Plato_Says said:

I wonder what her local Party thinks of this newbie http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/12032792/Tory-MP-who-branded-George-Osborne-too-smooth-would-prefer-to-be-independent.html

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.

Pong said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html

It is a bit of a problem, having $40bn.

What do you actually spend it on?

$40bn ON PAPER....

Although I am a lot more confident in Facebook for the short / mid term, than Twitter and alike.

logical_song said:

chestnut said:

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.

By elections are a big opportunity for the challenger party to get a big swing, here's some examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_by-election_records.

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.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Pong said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html

It is a bit of a problem, having $40bn.

What do you actually spend it on?

$40bn ON PAPER....

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 ...

Pong said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html

It is a bit of a problem, having $40bn.

What do you actually spend it on?

I spend the first £30 of last night's winnings backing Khan at 1.99 on Betfair.

Just £39,999,999,970 to go.

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.

JosiasJessop said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Pong said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html

It is a bit of a problem, having $40bn.

What do you actually spend it on?

$40bn ON PAPER....

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?

kle4 said:

JosiasJessop said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Pong said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html

It is a bit of a problem, having $40bn.

What do you actually spend it on?

$40bn ON PAPER....

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.

Tissue_Price said:

kle4 said:

JosiasJessop said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Pong said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html

It is a bit of a problem, having $40bn.

What do you actually spend it on?

$40bn ON PAPER....

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 was a period (in the early 2000s, iirc) when they gave by far the best results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Google nailed simplicity, accuracy and speed in a way noone else did back in the late '90's/early 2000's

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.

Cyclefree said:

Hello all,

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.

Dair said:

bigjohnowls said:

Pulpstar said:

rottenborough said:

bigjohnowls said:

Toby Young ‏@toadmeister Nov 30
Just stuck £25 on Lady C to win #ImACeleb at 25/1

Toby Young @toadmeister Nov 29

Just placed a bet on UKIP to win in Oldham West. 11/4. Wish I had got on earlier!!

Good betting week for Toby!!

Ha. What are his tips for GOP and POTUS? It's high time we all started focusing on the next big betting event.

SPOTY

Andy McMurray bigger shoe in than Labour in Oldham West

The value is in Tyson Fury.

He seems to be the latest target of the SJW illiberal liberals, for having an incorrect opinion.
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

kle4 said:

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.

Tissue_Price said:

kle4 said:

JosiasJessop said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Pong said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html

It is a bit of a problem, having $40bn.

What do you actually spend it on?

$40bn ON PAPER....

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 was a period (in the early 2000s, iirc) when they gave by far the best results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

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.

Lovely December day here in Sussex

dr_spyn said:

Comrade Grintz Twitter Account is suspended.

He will have enjoyed taking the BBC for a ride.

Shame. It was just getting going.

Sandpit said:

Dair said:

bigjohnowls said:

Pulpstar said:

rottenborough said:

bigjohnowls said:

Toby Young ‏@toadmeister Nov 30
Just stuck £25 on Lady C to win #ImACeleb at 25/1

Toby Young @toadmeister Nov 29

Just placed a bet on UKIP to win in Oldham West. 11/4. Wish I had got on earlier!!

Good betting week for Toby!!

Ha. What are his tips for GOP and POTUS? It's high time we all started focusing on the next big betting event.

SPOTY

Andy McMurray bigger shoe in than Labour in Oldham West

The value is in Tyson Fury.

He seems to be the latest target of the SJW illiberal liberals, for having an incorrect opinion.
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

Well, it's at least a personality of some kind, which a few past winners were missing.

MikeSmithson said:

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?

kle4 said:

Sandpit said:

Dair said:

bigjohnowls said:

Pulpstar said:

rottenborough said:

bigjohnowls said:

Toby Young ‏@toadmeister Nov 30
Just stuck £25 on Lady C to win #ImACeleb at 25/1

Toby Young @toadmeister Nov 29

Just placed a bet on UKIP to win in Oldham West. 11/4. Wish I had got on earlier!!

Good betting week for Toby!!

Ha. What are his tips for GOP and POTUS? It's high time we all started focusing on the next big betting event.

SPOTY

Andy McMurray bigger shoe in than Labour in Oldham West

The value is in Tyson Fury.

He seems to be the latest target of the SJW illiberal liberals, for having an incorrect opinion.
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

Well, it's at least a personality of some kind, which a few past winners were missing.

As part of a minority group, what about his cultural sensitivities?

Tissue_Price said:

There was a period (in the early 2000s, iirc) when they gave by far the best results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

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.

MikeSmithson said:

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!)

glw said:

Tissue_Price said:

There was a period (in the early 2000s, iirc) when they gave by far the best results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

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...

MikeSmithson said:

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

Happy Days @Cyclefree !

Pulpstar said:

kle4 said:

Sandpit said:

Dair said:

bigjohnowls said:

Pulpstar said:

rottenborough said:

bigjohnowls said:

Toby Young ‏@toadmeister Nov 30
Just stuck £25 on Lady C to win #ImACeleb at 25/1

Toby Young @toadmeister Nov 29

Just placed a bet on UKIP to win in Oldham West. 11/4. Wish I had got on earlier!!

Good betting week for Toby!!

Ha. What are his tips for GOP and POTUS? It's high time we all started focusing on the next big betting event.

SPOTY

Andy McMurray bigger shoe in than Labour in Oldham West

The value is in Tyson Fury.

He seems to be the latest target of the SJW illiberal liberals, for having an incorrect opinion.
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

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.

Re Oldham

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

DecrepitJohnL said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Richard_Nabavi said:

kle4 said:

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).

See my post below :-)

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

Tissue_Price said:

There was a period (in the early 2000s, iirc) when they gave by far the best results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

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...

.... and Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers a lot of major websites and makes a lot of money for Amazon.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-q3-revenue-up-78-percent-to-2-08-billion/

Ms Cyclefree,

I thought your contributions on Wednesday were spot on and am glad to hear your news.

Stay well.

AlastairMeeks said:

Here's a good (though long) article on why twitter will probably fail eventually:

https://www.baekdal.com/opinion/not-even-twitter-understands-twitter/

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.

logical_song said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

Tissue_Price said:

There was a period (in the early 2000s, iirc) when they gave by far the best results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

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...

.... and Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers a lot of major websites and makes a lot of money for Amazon.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-q3-revenue-up-78-percent-to-2-08-billion/

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.

Sandpit said:

AlastairMeeks said:

Here's a good (though long) article on why twitter will probably fail eventually:

https://www.baekdal.com/opinion/not-even-twitter-understands-twitter/

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.

kle4 said:

JosiasJessop said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Pong said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html

It is a bit of a problem, having $40bn.

What do you actually spend it on?

$40bn ON PAPER....

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.

Think different.

Sandpit said:

logical_song said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

Tissue_Price said:

There was a period (in the early 2000s, iirc) when they gave by far the best results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

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...

.... and Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers a lot of major websites and makes a lot of money for Amazon.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-q3-revenue-up-78-percent-to-2-08-billion/

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.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

AlastairMeeks said:

Here's a good (though long) article on why twitter will probably fail eventually:

https://www.baekdal.com/opinion/not-even-twitter-understands-twitter/

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.

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

AlastairMeeks said:

Here's a good (though long) article on why twitter will probably fail eventually:

https://www.baekdal.com/opinion/not-even-twitter-understands-twitter/

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.

FrancisUrquhart said:

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".

HYUFD said:

SouthamObserver said:

Sandpit said:

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.

kle4 said:

Sandpit said:

Dair said:

bigjohnowls said:

Pulpstar said:

rottenborough said:

bigjohnowls said:

Toby Young ‏@toadmeister Nov 30
Just stuck £25 on Lady C to win #ImACeleb at 25/1

Toby Young @toadmeister Nov 29

Just placed a bet on UKIP to win in Oldham West. 11/4. Wish I had got on earlier!!

Good betting week for Toby!!

Ha. What are his tips for GOP and POTUS? It's high time we all started focusing on the next big betting event.

SPOTY

Andy McMurray bigger shoe in than Labour in Oldham West

The value is in Tyson Fury.

He seems to be the latest target of the SJW illiberal liberals, for having an incorrect opinion.
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

Well, it's at least a personality of some kind, which a few past winners were missing.

Yes, but he is a boxer for goodness sake!
Glad to see there is some constancy in this ever changing world.

isam said:

Whoever would have thought when UKIP got 3% in OW&R 5 years ago that not winning a by election there in 2015 would have meant it was all up for them?

Yes but their BNP mates also got over 7% in 2010