They should just switch to showing nothing but ads in the first page of results and be done with it. I'm sure they will find a way to justify how this is "good for the users", but for me, with my widescreen laptop, the 4th ad will ruin usability even further.
How so? I don't see how Google could stop DuckDuckGo.
It's not really relevant either, the two companies aren't really the same types of businesses. DDG is a very niche, and I doubt it would scale to the size of Google. Likewise Google have to make some compromises, that DDG will not, to finance it self.
Google is one of DDGs backends, and the highest quality one at that. DDG does not have its own crawlers or index. Nor could it: those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to run and maintain.
[Edit: apparently this is not true. DDG does not use Google, though it does use Bing and some other broad and narrow coverage search engines]
Looks like my information is either out of date or was incorrect all along. Bing seems to be the primary source. They seem to also have a crawler now, though it's not clear how much it really covers. Very cool. Slow and steady wins the race.
I posted this elsewhere, but I didn't get an answer. Since you work you work for DDG, you might know.
How long would duckduckgo have to grow at its current rate to become an actual blip on Google's radar? On the one hand, you're small. On the other hand, keep up a fast growth rate long enough and you get bigger faster than people's intuitions' expect.
> Nor could it: those things cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year to run and maintain.
I vehemently disagree. The early web crawlers and indexes did not cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run. Granted, there is significantly less web results than there are today, but the cost you're referring too is the entirety of google's servers. That price tag also includes the cost to host the web traffic of being the number 1 website in the world. You're talking a price tag which is indicative of a final product.
A new search engine would not have those costs initially, and if managed properly from the very beginning, would be able to scale and cover their bills, remaining profitable up until reaching (and hypothetically) replacing google.
Microsoft spends over $1B/yr on maintaining and improving Bing. So yeah, search does cost a fortune if you want to do it reasonably well without relying on others for results. Not only do you have to crawl the web (with different frequencies depending on predicted frequency of content update, etc), you then have to rebuild the index continuously, with reasonable latency. To do all of that, you have to have indexing infrastructure, which in turns requires storage infrastructure, high performanc data processing infrastructure (Hadoop ain't gonna do it, ask Yahoo as to why), which in turn requires high performance networking (or your mapreduce-like workloads will collapse under their own weight), your own datacenter, and your own army of machine learning researchers, systems engineers, hardware engineers, networking engineers, devops, quality engineers (people who improve your scoring function), human eval, etc, etc, etc. If anything, $1B/yr seems to be quite low.
> Microsoft spends over $1B/yr on maintaining and improving Bing. So yeah, search does cost a fortune
I doubt that figure, but even if it is true, you're still talking about a final product (not a new start up). It's a figure that includes things like marketing and insane web traffic. These are things that a new search engine would not have initially.
I'm not saying running a search engine is cheap. It's not. But the implication is that it's like the pharmaceutical industry where you need billions just to get in the game. It's not like that at all. In fact, there have been a few search engines which have tried to get in the game. Search engines like Cuil (anyone remember them?). They may have failed but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And it certainly doesn't take hundreds of millions of dollars to get started.
Insane web traffic doesn't actually cost you much. Au contraire, my friend, it brings in the dough. What costs you money is the long tail, those deep, obscure searches which you have to answer to be perceived a worthwhile competitor to e.g. Google. To answer the long tail yourself you must have it in the index, which makes for a _very_ big index. And then you also have to figure out how to get the relevant results out of there in a hundred milliseconds (or 50ms if you're Google, and you have instant search), and update all that goodness to keep it fresh, so that it doesn't take three months for new pages to appear. If you think this wouldn't cost much to a startup, you don't know much about search.
And you don't need to doubt that figure, Microsoft discloses it in its financial results.
Prediction: within 2 years Apple will have iPhone 7s, on which no one can bypass the encryption no matter what. All they'd have to do is put secure enclave software into ROM burned at the factory, and make it self-destruct if it's tampered with. "Sorry officer, not even we can bypass exponential back-off on this CPU."
I'd rather they worked on improving IDE support for Clang and LLVM when it comes to "unmanaged" languages, as well as moved some of those compiler and optimization engineers to improving LLVM. LLVM still lags a bit behind GCC when it comes to performance of the machine code it generates, so I'm sure improvements there would be quite welcome, and I'm also sure Microsoft has the expertise to make it happen. For extra brownie points, help the community implement a portable debugger that doesn't suck, because thus far all attempts at this have failed miserably.
Microsoft C++ compiler is a source of aggravation at best. Their unmanaged language tooling has been neglected for nearly a decade while FOSS community (led by none other than Apple) plowed ahead and delivered the work of art that is Clang/LLVM, and a profusion of languages like Rust and Swift that run on top of that infrastructure.
This desktop client appears to load the inbox interface and gmail interface in a iframe and has extra related functionality on the side . So it isn't just an email client. Looking at it I don't see how it is much Of a desktop client unless they added offline functionality .
For me, the main dealbreaker of Windows 10 Mail is lack support for email aliases. One can forward multiple accounts to a single gmail account and select the "From" address when composing messages.
Yep, but on another note if you don't need all of the features of thunder bird and you are looking for something self hosted check out http://www.rainloop.net/
Well, it's more complicated than that though, economic considerations-wise. You can treat Hepatitis C now (and it's the rare case where the drug actually cures something like this with high probability), or you can treat liver disease in a terminally ill patient later. It's up for debate what's more expensive. That's one of the reasons why they can charge so much. The second reason is, they're just dicks.
Probably depends on the cost of medication to begin with. My HBP medication is like 25 cents a pill even without insurance. I figure it can't really go much lower than that given that all those folks at the pharmacy need to be paid. Now if something is $25 a pill, there's definitely more room for negotiation.
To be honest, what do you expect to have happened after roughly 100 years of neglect and disinterest by We The People who are supposed to be doing the electing and the watching? All technology seems to have given us is the ability to be even more polarized and entrenched about the way things "ought to be" and, thus, dig in our heels unless we get exactly that.
You need to read "People's History of the US" by Howard Zinn. There never was a democracy here. The only times when people had the actual power was during the many armed insurrections, most of which were simply suppressed by force, but some of which did achieve at least some of their ends.
"We the people" is not any one individual. As an individual you are 1 in ~324M. So your say counts extremely little.
You have the opportunity to make an impact. But it requires an extraordinary amount of work to make your voice heard over the other ~324M people. As it should.
Oh I'm well aware of that. I'm also very aware that:
0. There's no direct vote on laws. This alone makes the US not a democracy, but a republic at best.
1. There's no direct vote for president and vice president.
2. Elected representatives or the president do not care one iota about their constituents between the elections. If you think they do, explain things like TPP
3. Two party system merely creates the illusion of choice. Both parties are right wing, with democrats being slightly more centrist.
The word 'democracy', when used without clarification, is rarely intended to mean a direct democracy with 100% majority rule. Instead, it almost always is shorthand for a republic with representative government.
Which, nevertheless, means that people aren't really ruling, and therefore it's not what one could legitimately call "people's rule". Their elected "representatives" (which, let me remind you, don't give a shit about their constituents between elections) write laws. The president, elected by the electoral college people elect (who also doesn't give a shit about the constituents) signs the laws and commands the army which will suppress any challenge to the authority of the federal government with violence if need be. And courts (in which judges aren't elected at all and don't have to give a shit about anybody), interpret the laws.
Why do we need so many middlemen? Is this _really_ a democracy? Or is it a mere visibility of "rule of the people" designed to keep the working class, well, working, for the benefit of the ruling class?
You are asking if this is a 'direct democracy'. No, it isn't a direct democracy even though the term 'democracy' is almost always used without clarification.
For some reason you are arguing as if a direct democracy would somehow magically address the problems you outline for a representative democracy.
But in all but the smallest organizations, a direct democracy is simply unworkable and so your complaints don't really move the discussion forward. Do you want to go to the ballot box once a week to vote on every decision currently made by your representatives at the local, state, and federal level? Do you think that is more workable than a representative mechanism?
You don't have to split, though. You can put all your code in the header file. Your compile times will suck mightily, but you can do it, if managing headers is such a burden.
