Posts by ratfox 3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
I disagree with most of the article, but most of all I disagree with the notion that Oracle has lost money over this.
It should be clear to anybody that their precious language is vastly more used now than it ever has been before. The vast majority of smartphones run Java, and a good part of all this IoT crap runs a lite version of Android.
Before Android, the idea of running Java on small devices had become so old a joke that it wasn't even funny any more. Android has made it a reality, by improving on the utter crap that Sun was peddling.
It is my view, and that of my panel, that purpose for the transfer of 1.6 million identifiable patient records to Google DeepMind was for the testing of the Streams application, and not for the provision of direct care to patients
...I may have misunderstood, but I thought the data was used to train an AI model, not test an existing application? Without the data, there would have been no application.
It would be nice to think that at some point, most of your cost are energy, and you don't need to spend much on developers anymore. However, I would bet that companies which make that choice soon find themselves ran over by the competition.
As a data point, it seems that Google uses about 5 millions MWh per year, which should cost on the order of 200 million dollars per year. Google has 50'000 employees, which are certainly more expensive than that.
I'm surprised that this could stand. Though the judge likened it to turning over the key to a security box, it is much more like revealing the combination of a safe, which has historically been considered protected by the fifth amendment.
The distinction between a physical key and a combination might well seem a bit absurd, but that's how it has been up to now. I wonder what the supreme court would say.
Google has been against net neutrality from the start and we have never seen Google not get their way with Washington. Obama was also against it.
I'm confused. According to the accusations, it's precisely these net neutrality rules (currently being killed) that were written by and for Google, thanks to their cosy relationship with Obama who was giving orders to the FCC. And now you're telling me it's Google who wants to kills these rules?
One of the main reasons Google is grabbing up students away from Apple is that their offer is way cheaper. You can argue that software quality/convenience also plays a role, and Microsoft might be able to compete with Google on that; but if the price is $999 per laptop, they might just as well pack up and go home.
"No, we're not going to respect the privacy of your citizens. So? What are you going to do about it?"
Really, the only thing that the EU can do is to declare it illegal to store EU user data out of the EU. I'm not sure it would be very useful, and I'm not sure the users themselves care a lot; but it's completely silly to pretend that the US are going to respect the privacy of EU citizens, when they basically don't even respect that of US citizens.
That, or they drop the charade, and they admit that they are unable to guarantee the privacy of their citizens.
It's taken decades to create standards allowing all systems to interoperate, and now the biggest limiting factor is that each company wants to create a walled garden.
I envision a future where the world will be divided not into countries, but into customers of different mega-corporations, who won't be able to interact with each other for the obstacles separating them.
I do have to wonder why the MS case didn't set a precedent for this?
IIRC, the judge said that Google routinely backs up emails and changes the position of backups between data centers, for network balancing and the like. So they just have to "rebalance" the backups so that they are situated in the US, and then it's fair game.
To be fair, Uber drivers do require English knowledge less often than normal Taxicabs, since the app is telling them where to go. Technically, they only need for a normal ride to confirm the name of the passenger. And maybe inform the passenger they've arrived.
Of course, there's still plenty of potential situations where they would need to communicate with the customer, so I can't sat I disagree. Also, fuck Uber.
The intelligence community continues to argue it is difficult to tell the nationality of someone making a call or sending an email without a huge amount of effort or without violating their privacy.
To be honest, I believe that. It seems silly to think that the NSA would have at its fingertips the nationality of every freaking email account, greatest intelligence community or not.
So since they don't know, they just listen to whatever they want; problem solved.
If you need to hire someone to turn a failing organization around, you hire someone who has done it at least once before.
...And in 2045 died the last human who knew how to turn around a failing organization. There was no one left in the world who had ever done it before, therefore no one who was able to do it.
That said, you could have made quite a bit of cash if you'd bought Yahoo stock when Marissa Meyer was hired!
@WatAWorld: the essential difference is that it's not Google's OS running on Android phones. Android is open source, and Samsung and others write their own version adapted to their own phones.
In comparison, Windows machines don't have a different OS depending whether it's sold by Dell or Lenovo. And of course only Apple sells iPhones.
Oh I see. You only ever read The Register, and they rarely link to videos of moving cars. Let me help you find more information:
The Register 
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