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Newspaper journalist complains about Internet. Who would have thought?
by dejb 18y ago
Newspaper journalist complains about Internet. Who would have thought?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- febeling 18y agoI was happy to see that other commenters where very little impressed with this article either, with the one above probably most to the point. People don't see yet how instable these monopolies really are in the age of the internet. Once Google would really corrupt it's core product, search, someone could just go, download the clones of Googles software over at the apache foundation and upload it into a little EC2 cloud at Amazon. There is not even this network effect which allows Ebay to run successfully despite looking quite dated nowadays, because people feel they have to stick with them because eveybody else does.
- swolchok 18y agoDo you really think that the OSS world is on par with Google's army of (paid, full-time) engineers, and that EC2 is as efficient as (or, conceivably, even in the same ballpark as) Google's datacenter infrastructure? (Amazon's private infrastructure might be run as well, although they have very different concerns -- compare GFS (http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html) with Dynamo (http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dyn...), for example.)
- anamax 18y ago> that EC2 is as efficient as (or, conceivably, even in the same ballpark as) Google's datacenter infrastructure Google's users don't care how efficiently it runs its datacenters.
- swolchok 18y agoI don't know about that, mightn't inefficient datacenters cost more per query, leading to worse servers, leading to higher latency, which users care about?
- anamax 18y agoYes, users care about latency, but less efficiency doesn't necessarily lead to higher latency. (I have no idea what "worse servers" means.) As long as Google can afford to provide decent anwers with acceptable latency, it will have users. I think that efficiency is like programming effort, algorithms, and programming languages in that users don't care. They only care about results and the costs that affect them.
- tomsaffell 18y agoGuardian journalist complains about someone making money. Who would have thought? FYI for non UK readers: "Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the middle-ground liberal to left-wing end of the political spectrum" (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/The+Guardian http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/The+Guardian). UK print media has ~10 national newspapers, which are politically segmented (and income segmented). Hence editorial articles benefit from being fairly political, since they address a readership that is both homogeneous in its political views, and different to the national average in its political views. Tribalism..
- swolchok 18y agoThis and its parent are ad hominem attacks (DH1 -- see http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) -- it may be in the writer's interest to complain about the Internet, but that does not mean that the writer's points are incorrect.
- russell 18y ago"..ad hominem attacks", are you kidding? They are questioning the writer's objectivity, as do it. The writer's points/ conclusions are incorrect. The solution is not to constrain or eliminate Google, it's for the Guardian and the other content providers to adapt to be relevant.
- kragen 18y agoQuestioning the writer's objectivity rather than rebutting their points is an ad hominem attack. I'm not kidding. If you think the writer's points and conclusions are incorrect (I do) you should write a rebuttal, rather than pointing out that the writer isn't disinterested. Interested parties can still make valid arguments!
- benmathes 18y agoThe ad-hominem fallacy fallacy: http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html A critique is not ad-hominem if the target is a character trait relevant to the speaker's point.