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The Actuator - January 24th

Had a great time in Austin last week despite the ice storm. It's been a while since I've had to scrape ice from a windshield with my bare hands. I'm glad that my New England survival training skills are still intact.

As always, here are some links from the Intertubz that I hope will hold your interest. Enjoy!

Google Memory Loss

Just in case you were worried about the loss of net neutrality leading to censorship, here's a little piece to remind you that censorship comes in many forms. Google doesn't care about helping you find data, they only care about getting the right ads delivered to your browser.

Google Cloud is Adding 5 New Data Centers, Rolling Out 3 New Subsea Cables

Am I the only one that read the title and thought "Google has a cloud"? OK, I *know* they have a cloud, and I like seeing that they are investing in expanding their reach. But this article makes it clear that Google is far behind AWS and Azure, and that it is not likely we are going to see anyone make the necessary investment to compete with those three (no, not even Oracle).

Internal documents reveal that Whole Foods is leaving some shelves empty on purpose

I guess this is what happens when someone that runs a bookstore thinks they can run a grocery store, too.

Jason's Deli: Hackers Dine Out on 2 Million Payment Cards

Because it's been a while since I reminded you that everything is awful, and that corned beef and swiss cost you more than you thought.

Intel Confirms Fresh Spectre, Meltdown Patch Problems

Everything Is Awful

Throne AI is the Kaggle of Sports Predictions

OK, maybe it's just me, but I think this idea is fantastic. It reminds me of how my interest in Fantasy Football 20+ years ago paved the way for me to take a deep interest in data, databases, web development, and applications. The gamification of predictive models is brilliant, because right now there is someone out there, starting out with machine learning, and will use this as a starting point for their career. And I think that's awesome.

Social media is making you miserable. Here's how to delete your accounts.

Here's a list to help remove yourself from the major social media websites. In case, you know, you've thought about doing that once or twice already.

Dear Austin Hotel: I appreciate the effort with the sand last week, but this isn't how you spread sand, and beach sand isn't as helpful as you might think:

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Comments

petergwilson

Whole Foods. What genius thought that up. Even a half-wit would see that that is just wrong. I guess they'll get promoted.

rschroeder

Google can't make as much money serving up obscure Internet sites? Well, what's a person to do? Go back to Lycos and Alta Vista? They're possibly as guilty as Google at this.

I REALLY do want to be able to treat Google as my go-to search solution, and to be able to TRUST that if the topic for which I'm searching is out there somewhere, Google will bring me to it.

Amazingly, I don't care if Google makes a bundle on that index. They certainly seem to be making up for it with too much advertising on popular indexed sites.

When you mentioned "Net Neutrality" in this topic, I was immediately reminded of an experience we had yesterday, where the time to access a number of Internet sites was ridiculously long, while other Internet sites were nicely fast to load. I thought "Oh boy, here it starts already! Someone's slowing down access to Facebook while leaving MSNBC working fast."

It actually turned out to be a hardware problem at an ISP through which some traffic was routed, but not all. NetPath to the rescue! It was easy to see the huge jump in latency between two specific hops, which hadn't been there previously. And even though I held the smoking gun's info in my hand, the ISP took hours to verify it and reroute traffic until they could replace the faulty 10 Gig GBIC. Sigh.

rschroeder

Google Cloud facility and resource growth may benefit their bottom line, and will likely facilitate increased dependence on the cloud.

If you were an individual, or organization, or nation who does not have pleasant plans for "the free world", what better way to impact it than targeting these kinds of resources.

We really ought not be so concerned with "more and faster", and instead be thinking "less and slower" simply to have a better future life, one that's less vulnerable to others' intentions that don't align with our own optimistic outcome hopes.

rschroeder

I can understand the original intent behind the Whole Foods policy in question. But life is seldom as simple and clear-cut as one might wish.

Flexibility and accommodation are likely required to ensure the local franchise stays in business.

I've seen those empty shelves, and my personal response was disgust and disappointment. "Why can't they do a better job of planning purchases to ensure inventory is there when it's needed? Why don't they place a similar-but-alternate product in the empty place? Who's responsible for the empty shelves, and why aren't they being held accountable? Why do other local grocery stores have full shelves--how do they correctly anticipate inventory needs and Whole Foods can't?"

Of course, it's not apples to apples, is it? Whole Foods uses different suppliers, has different requirements for food sources with regards to GMO's, "free range" items, etc. So that puts WF at a slight disadvantage when compared to a nearby national chain grocery.

But no matter whether there are satisfactory explanations or poor excuses, consumers are accustomed to seeing fully stocked shelves. Yes, they're quite the spoiled group of people, when you consider the situation in other stores in other countries . . .

Here's a shot of the shelves in a Venezuelan grocery. Be happy with a few empty bins in Whole Foods:

rschroeder

Hackers stole credit cards by the millions from Jason's Deli? I guess that makes Jason's Deli as popular as Yahoo!

rschroeder

Spectre & Meltdown need a new "Jann Effect" directed at remediation instead of just discovery.

Oh, and a time machine might not be bad to have, either.

rschroeder

Kaggle / Throne AI--plenty geeky, but are not my cup of tea.

It's a game. Some team or person will win, everyone else will lose. The ball will go down to one end of the field, then back to the other. And it will begin over next season, and so on, ad infinitum.

I don't see the thrill in "lather, rinse, repeat".

However, if we were rooting for something significant, maybe eliminating measles in the world, or cleaning up the damages caused to water tables by fracking, or removing all the land mines placed in Southeast Asia, then we'd have something to cheer about.

When teachers get the salaries and fan base of professional basketball players, when there are fans traveling to see researching working on preventing cancer, and having their own favorite research teams and star doctors, when there are huge rewards going to folks who make life easier for someone in wheel chairs, or to people who can solve the disease and clean water issues in Africa . . .

THEN I'm all into sports that help others. Until then, I look at the amount of money spent on televising sports, on building ridiculously large stadia for spectacles, for getting absolutely nothing but a little adrenaline and a lot of frustration (OK, I admit it--I'm a Vikings fan, and have been since the 1960's), instead of following professional "sports" on Television, I'll pass my time teaching a kid to fish.

rschroeder

Remove all Social Media access? Not a bad idea at all!

On the other hand, approaching it intelligently can reap rewards. I regularly contribute to social media (like Thwack), and I reap the rewards of making new friends and saving a lot of money on purchases.

The trick is avoiding the useless advertising while selecting groups or friends who are thoughtful and considerate. Avoiding people whose only updates are about what their cat did today--that helps a lot.

vinay.by

Good article

tinmann0715

I could stand to see a reduction in our choices of cooking oil from 47 to 5 or so. :-) I remember going to grocery stores with my mom in the 70's and waiting outside with my .25$ comic books that compelled me to help her with loading and unloading the groceries (Remember leaving the grocery cart at the curb and having the car park out front?)

Grocery megastores are off the charts these days. I counted 20 different brands of bottled water at my Wegmans. Seriously? Why are they stocking 20 different brands?

rschroeder

Regarding the bottled water ridiculousness, Nestle is one of many that told its board "We want people to start believing that tap water is poison. That way they'll all turn to us for bottled water and we'll all become millionaires!"

And it happened. PEOPLE BUY BOTTLED TAP WATER AND THINK IT'S BETTER THAN THEIR OWN TAP WATER!

Of course, if they have private wells and live in an area where fracking has been used to retrieve fossil fuels, it's very possible their tap water IS poison. But that's not what Nestle meant.

The Film - BOTTLED LIFE – The Truth about Nestlé's Business with Water (Documentary)

Jfrazier

I don't think Austin deals with ice that much so the kind hearted folks decided to put some sand out (probably all they had) as a token gesture of good faith and to CYA for insurance purposes.

jm_sysadmin

I can't say I like empty shelves, but I think this is a groundwork change for more to come. I also didn't like it when I walked in and saw apples in 3 spots. My guts says that if you run out of banana's that's a really bad thing in Amazon's eyes.

And I think they are preparing the store for more changes, if you want to move to the no cashier model that just open in Seattle for the public, then you don't want to have the store layout constantly changing. When viewed alone, the choices may be odd, but I bet looking back in 5 years you will see what they were trying to do. It may not be good, it might fail, but I bet it makes more sense.

sqlrockstar

I'm certain that they are trying new things in an effort to make things better...but...if the end result is people can't get food, they may want to rethink how they deploy and test their changes. It's one thing for a book store to not have books, it's another if people can't buy food.

sqlrockstar

I like that idea. Taking it a bit slower, by focusing on things such as privacy and security.

sqlrockstar

Agreed, the amount of specialty stores, and specialty items seems a bit much to me, too.

sqlrockstar

Yep. My point was to talk about creating something that engages others to participate in technology. The idea of creating a site to have people build and test models about disease cures is quite interesting, too. And if it helps some kid out there grow to become a better medical researcher, that's even better.

sqlrockstar

What about my bacon updates?

sqlrockstar

I am certain that is the case, yes.

jm_sysadmin

I agree having the correct food is the issue. Filling the shelf with other stuff or not is just a symptom.

Jfrazier

the bacon seeds haven't matured yet...

gfsutherland

sqlrockstar well done as always....

Social media... I have learned to check it twice a day... wish friends Happy Birthday... and say congrats for life events. - personally. The rest of the stuff I see isn't worth the time.

Google... never forget that their aim is to make money.... The number of ads you are exposed to will result in some follow through.. Old lesson learned from the roadside signs of the 40's-50's

Spectre/Meltdown - can we be at all surprised? Smile, dial and patch.

The sand layout in Austin is awesome... As a New Englander it makes me shake my head...

byrona

Part of me has to wonder if Google is becoming a less relevant company? I realize they are still huge and won't be going away anytime in the near future but they no longer really seem to have the edge on anything as far as actual technical capabilities are concerned and I am not sure they are providing anything useful to the end-user that they can't get a better version of somewhere else? I am open to the idea I might be totally wrong or off-base with this and I would be interested to hear the opinions of others on this?

james2153

I agree with your synthesis, but I think Google has doubled their efforts away from the end-user and given a large percentage of their attention to the profitability of their big-data warehouse.

Jfrazier

^^^^ this. it is all about making money these days.